njr 3.0

Great: the day after I order an 802.11b access point for home, I find out everyone was recommending one that wasn't even included in the review I read. For once, I didn't do my homework (ask someone around my lab how many hours I spent picking out headphones…) and I got stuck with an inferior product. I bought the ZoomAir IG-4165 for $160 when I could have bought the more capable, easier-to-use SMC for $135. Oh well.

Update: seems both access points have the same internals, made by AMIT, so I just spent a bit too much money and missed out on two Ethernet ports. If the extremely similar administration Web page layouts and manuals were not a dead giveaway, there's an '@M!T' signature in the Zoom firmware right before the file listing that confirms it.

6:04 AM | Radio
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So I'm sharing a hotel room at MacHack with Robert Chin, an undergrad at the U of I who is a relatively recent Mac user. He has a weblog, of sorts. Robert was the main instigator behind 3DOSX. I don't know him very well, but that will probably change…

Listening to Radio Paradise finally playing B&S. No, I'm not off them yet. I'll have to drive to Michigan alone, again, because I couldn't get anyone else to come with me, and much B&S will be heard along the way. I'm really not going to enjoy giving back the iPod when I get back.

7:01 AM | Radio
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I haven't had OS X display a bizarre error message in a while, so it was about time for another. This one was precipitated by my trying to eject a FireWire hard drive in the Finder.

Amazingly, authenticating caused my disk to properly unmount. autodiskmount was already running as root, though.

root       132   0.0  0.1     2408    500  ??  Ss     0:01.78 /sbin/autodiskmount -va

4:54 AM | Radio
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Marco Scheurer: A tutorial on unit testing in Objective-C using the OCUnit framework. Been meaning to check this out for years, as I used to use unit testing a lot in Smalltalk.

2:19 AM | Radio
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Some tips that would have saved me half an hour of troubleshooting tonight…

If you are trying to start Mac OS X and it hangs with a black screen instead of the happy Mac, the OS X kernel may be panicking before BootX can initialize the video settings. If you start up in Open Firmware first (command-option-o-f), then type 'mac-boot', OF will initialize video first, and you should be able to read the panic message displayed on top of the happy Mac screen.

Don't forget to unplug external devices if you're having startup problems. Mine turned out to be an external FireWire drive which needed some repair because I had unplugged it from my TiBook without unmounting it first. The panic message included IOFireWireFamily, which was an obvious clue.

1:59 AM | Radio
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