Still going after all these years.
Greg has finally made the move to Mac OS X. He asks for software recommendations. I would start with NetNewsWire Lite. If you like the new Sherlock keeping you from going to a ton of different web sites, you’ll love NetNewsWire bringing all the blogs you read daily to you. Including this one.
After that? Well, I might get an app writing to the Blogger API one of these days. After all, we’ve finished painting the house now!
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Rumor has it that Apple will be opening a store in Bellevue, a few miles south of me–and a few miles west of Microsoft. That should be interesting–if it comes through.
As the source article says, there’s a sense that Apple will be doing the area a huge favor by opening a fairly high profile store in the middle of a real economic slump in the area. I hope they’ll take advantage of the presence of some pretty big Mac people in the area, such as Glenn, Brent, and even Adam Engst, to make some compelling Mac content available in the store’s theatre area.
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I must be losing my touch. I got our LaserJet 2100M working with our new SMC Barricade router after entirely too much time spent working on the problem. Why wasn’t it working? I had configured the SMC for MAC authentication, on top of the other built-in protections, and hadn’t input the MAC address for the LaserJet’s print server. I figured that since I was connecting the LaserJet via a wired connection it wouldn’t matter, but apparently the SMC’s MAC authentication is good for both wired and wireless clients.
No matter. It’s working, and now we have both our printers accessible via wireless. I’m going to bed to nurse this cold.
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Over a year ago I figured out how to connect our Laserjet to our wireless network. A few minutes ago I installed our new SMC base station, which comes with a built in print server—with a parallel port (what is it with all the obsolete hardware interfaces that won’t die?).
I took the opportunity to try hooking up our color HP DeskJet 842c to the print server, which can provide an LPR-style IP interface to the connected printer. I installed the printer as an LPR printer using Print Center and printed a test document from TextEdit. The first page had a PostScript job header, and it went on from there. Apparently the Print Center printer only could do PostScript—and the DeskJet doesn’t speak PostScript.
I was about to give up when I decided to try CUPS. As I wrote in August, Apple includes CUPS but doesn’t configure it by default—but you can enable it. You can also use it to provide more options than Print Center gives you for configuring the printer. Specifically, you can tell Print Center that an LPR queue is a DeskJet:
You should now be able to print through your SMC wireless router to a DeskJet. So much for SMC’s claim that “the printer server is only compatible with x86 based Computers”.
Now if I could just get the LaserJet back online. It isn’t working and I can’t telnet to it again…
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Apple’s current home page brings back Think Different to salute Jimmy Carter. I hope they keep this one around. It’s a great tribute to someone who has done a lot of good works since leaving office.
Update (29 December 2004): Here’s the archived version of Apple’s tribute to Jimmy Carter (at Archive.org).
With my wireless dead, it took me a day to find out that iSync had finally been released (in beta). Pluses: great interface, reasonable speed syncing to my iPod and my .Mac account. Minuses: didn’t detect my iPod automatically when plugged in (there’s a “Scan for devices” button); my sync’d address book doesn’t show up in Webmail at my .Mac account; it wasn’t smart enough to figure out that I had manually exported a .ics file from iCal to my iPod and created duplicate entries.
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Apple hasn’t adjusted its price points downwards on its wireless networking gear to compensate for the general industry trend. This is ironic, because Apple was a prime mover in making WiFi more popular and therefore driving prices down. The net effect is that I&8217;m wondering whether I should look elsewhere for a replacement wireless router.
I started trying to find a comparison matrix of the different models on the market through Google. Fortunately for me, the 802.11b/WiFi blog has already done the legwork to compare the feature sets, though their comparison chart needs to be updated to cover Microsoft’s entry into the market. Adam suggests the SMC model with print server in the discussion group (registration required). It looks like one of a couple of good entries.
The good news: Doc got his base station back (the one that was lost a month ago at Linux World).
The bad news: my original graphite base station has bitten the dust. It continuously flashes amber and red lights (before now it would intermittently cycle into red and then back to normal functioning). It’s outside the range of known bad serial numbers, which means we’ll have to pay for a new one. Maybe I’ll have to put off that new DVD player for a month or two.
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Brent announces the release of NetNewsWire Lite v. 1.0. Congratulations on a great app, Brent. I’m weaning myself slowly from Radio’s aggregator to NetNewsWire’s. Can’t wait for the Pro version.
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Sybase has released its core database product, Adaptive Server Enterprise, for Mac OS X Server. I suppose most of you knew that. But I didn’t know until just now that you could download its developer toolset for free.
I spent most of my professional developer years working with Sybase products–both database and the PowerBuilder developer tools, even before they were bought by Sybase–but this is only the second time I’ve had Sybase products on a Mac. The first was a beta release of PowerBuilder 6 for Macintosh, a product that never made it all the way to final production. That today, six years later, Sybase has ported its core product to the Mac platform says a lot both about where the Mac platform is today (i.e., UNIX) and where Sybase is (i.e. with rapidly vanishing market share).
Still there’s something pretty cool about looking at the 52-page Quick Install Guide and seeing the same information I saw about version 12 for half a dozen other UNIX systems…
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“Morbus Iff” has already taken my idea about using iCal as a website front end and written a Movable Type hack to export blog entries to an ICS format. The nice thing is he already figured out how to do some things that were tripping me up, like including links.
The bad thing is, Morbus seems like a real creep. I don’t normally say that about people I only know from their weblog posts, but scrolling down that’s the only word that applies to some of the obsessive nasty thoughts he/she has posted.
Check out the iCal Weblog maintained by Ole Saalmann.
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Brent points to the as-yet undocumented CoreFoundation XMLRPC header files and writes a sample app.
What does this mean? It’s now a lot simpler–in fact, it’s baked into the OS–for both Carbon and Cocoa programmers to make XML-RPC (and, one assumes, SOAP) calls. Before you could do this easily in AppleScript, leading to funny applications being released that were mostly Cocoa except for one AppleScript routine that was invoked by sending a Cocoa message to a hidden button…
Maybe I’ll play with this a little next week. First I have to live up to a promise I made to get OmniOutliner2OPML to actually produce parseable OPML files. Boy, for a hack written in one morning, that’s expecting a lot. 🙂
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CUPS: MacNN has a tutorial on enabling CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) in Jaguar. After reading the tutorial, I would guess it wasn’t implemented by default because the UI sounds sketchy (printer configuration through a web interface on port 631 rather than through Print Center, for instance). The interesting thing is that it can support printing via SMB (Windows printers), though you have to do some terminal-jockey things to make that option available.
Prebinding: I always wondered why people claimed you had to update prebinding so frequently–and why there were about ten tools on VersionTracker to provide a GUI to a relatively simple command. Bill Bumgarner says that you never need to update prebinding yourself in 10.2, and that most people weren’t getting anything from doing it in 10.1.
Radio madness: I continue to have intermittent access to
Radio through its Desktop web interface. Right after starting Radio, everything works fine, but after a bit I start to get “connection was refused.” Next step is to play with the firewall settings and see how things go.
Manila Envelope (and other SOAP based AppleScripts): I was pretty freaked when Manila Envelope failed to work for me the first time I tried it. I’ve since gotten it to work reliably. However, iTunes2Manila appears to have an issue–haven’t figured out what the problem is. If you’re having problems with any of my scripts under Jaguar (or for any other reason), contact me.
I was all fired up to write how I couldn’t connect to my Radio desktop news aggregator under Mac OS X 10.2. Which was true on Friday, but no longer true today for some reason. Maybe Manila Envelope will work today too?