Camden Paul Gillespie
“from the winding valley”

14 Janvier/January 2005 :: 5:57 AM
3565 gm/7 lbs 14oz
51.5 cm/20 1/4 in

Camden and Pauline are both fantastic. Labor lasted about 20 hours.

If you would like to visit, please call ahead. While we can’t wait to show him off, we need to limit his stimulation and give Pauline time to recover.

For the fully formatted annoucement, click here.

Recently I was compiling a new kernel and I noticed Raid-6 in the Raid section and wondered, “so what is raid-6 anyway?” Actually, history may recall a slightly more R-rated exclamation, but that was the gist. I was quite amused to find this in the help file.
WARNING: RAID-6 is currently highly experimental. If you
use it, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it won’t
destroy your data, eat your disk drives, insult your mother,
or re-appoint George W. Bush.
Gotta love these Linux kernel comments and help messages.

In short, yes it is possible, and not very difficult.

While it is very easy to setup WDS with the Airport Express (AX) if you are using an Apple Airport Extreme base station as your primary base station, it is not as easy when using a third party base station like Linksys or Buffalo.

While Buffalo supports WDS out of the box, Linksys needs a firmware upgrade to one of the latest non-official varieties. There is a good thread in the Apple Discussion forums here. This thread applies to the Linksys WRT54G.

The basic idea from the thread above is that for the AX to act as a relay station in WDS, the settings must be exactly the same and you cannot use WPA authentication. That means that you will not be creating a new wireless network in your location, rather your existing SSID will just gain a wider coverage area.

Settings – in the WDS section of the Buffalo, I entered both the Airport and the LAN MAC addresses. If you are using the MAC filter, you should enter the MAC addresses in that section too.

Then on the AX, in the Identity section you can label the AX whatever you want, but on the ‘Airport Network’ section, you want to ‘Create a Wireless Network’ and then enter the SSID of your WBR-G54, set the same channel, and then the security settings should also be the same. You may need a ‘$’ before the password in some cases. See the Apple Discussions thread linked above for more information on this.

On the WDS tab, set the Buffalo Wireless MAC address. This is also the ‘Main Airport ID’ and the setting should be ‘relay base station’ and you should check the box to ‘Allow wireless clients on this base station.’

You will also want to change the settings on the ‘Music’ tab to suit your tastes.

That’s about it. Good luck.

After some cajoling by a colleague I broke down and got an iSight. It’s very nice and the experience on the Mac is flawless. My gripe? No Windows microphone drivers. The camera works under XP with generic 1394 camera drivers, but the microphone is unrecognized. Supposedly Apple has released the specs but I can’t find them on Apple Developers site.

So c’mon Apple, it’s a couple microphone drivers. I know iSight sales are pretty flat. I’m sure you have some Windows drivers in-house somewhere, so how about releasing ’em. You’ll sell alot more iSights.

Or, you windows device driver hackers, how about figuring something out. I’d be willing to pay up to $20 for microphone drivers so I could use the iSight with XP.

I really hoped that this Macintosh font crap was behind us with the advent of OS X. To be sure, OS 9 could be brought to its knees by a corrupt font, trashing all your work in the process, but OS X? C’mon! Who has heard of fonts giving Unix any grief? I have read the occasional reports of some people having trouble when deleting Helvetica or replacing it with another Helvetica and this was somewhat understandable. So today when things got wacky, bad fonts came to mind.

I performed a fresh install of 10.3 onto a eMac. Wiped the drive. On first reboot installed 10.3.4 combo updater. On second reboot, I installed all the remaining updates. Next, firewired the old iMac and copied all the old OS 9 files over. Then decided to fire up Safari to install Acrobat Reader … Safari crashed on start. So I rebuilt permissions … nope. Reinstalled 10.3.4 … nope. Hmmm, fonts. Opened Font Book, something like 116 fonts. Where the hell did all these fonts come from. So disabled them all, then enabled the set that Apple says are needed, and fired up Safari … it started. Then in groups I started to re-enable fonts. In the end, these were the culprits … Classical Ornaments SWA, Elemento SWA, ITC Zapf Dingbats SWA, More Wingbats SWM, Symbol Set SWA. If anyone knows what App installs these bastards, please let me know. If anyone else is having trouble with Apple Apps, look for these fonts.

And Apple, for the love of Pete, FIX THIS. It’s 2004 fer crissakes! How about a little message like “Oh, I can’t load a font “Blah Blah”. Please disable or repair this font.” This would be much better than the huge crash report that looks like something far more serious.

Yes, i haven’t posted in a while, but this is worth posting.

I found a browser-based tool that will take an image and convert to the stupid windows icon format that is required for the favicon.ico files for browser bookmarks. This is good since I am on day 25 of my 30 day IconForge trial.