Tue - June 19, 2007

Info for Dave Winer

Dave -

First make sure both networks are setup and available on your server. It should look something like this:








Next make sure you enable Bonjour for the AFP server:




This is from Apple docs <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=ServerAdmin/10.4/en/c3fs2.html> 

Server Admin 10.4 Help

Configuring AFP Service General Settings

You use the General pane of AFP service settings to enable automatic startup, enable browsing with Network Service Location or AppleTalk, and create a login greeting for your users.

1. Open Server Admin and select AFP in the Computers & Services list.

2. Click Settings, then click General.

3. To advertise the AFP share point using both Network Service Location (NSL) and Bonjour, select "Enable Bonjour registration."

4. This option lets clients browse for the share point using the Mac OS X "Connect to Server" command or the Mac OS 9 Network Browser.


Another things to check is that you are actually sharing a volume. You do this from the Workgroup Manager:






And also, here's a rough diagram of the network I work with at home:



Any WiFi enabled machine can easily switch between the two networks (portables and iMacs).

Hope this helps

Posted at 04:15 PM    

Sat - March 31, 2007

Apple TV

We got a new toy last week. A new Apple TV. It has taken its place atop the TiVo.

It was trivial to hook up. I used an HDMI to DVI cable along with a standard audio cable to connect it to our TV. Then, rather than use it's built-in WiFi, I plugged it into an ethernet hub so it would share the ethernet connection our Series 2 TiVo already uses. That's it. Soon it was syncing with my Macintosh, pulling down music, video and photographs.



So far I've been viewing video podcasts (Rocketboom, National Geographic Shorts, and Hot Air are three good ones). I also enjoyed viewing our photo collection on the TV. I've ripped a couple of DVDs we own which works just fine too. And finally, one of these days, I might even buy a movie from the iTunes store.

Oh, I also have ambitions to move our old camcorder videos on to it as well so we can easily watch them whenever.

Posted at 07:14 PM    

Mon - February 26, 2007

Ethernet home wiring work

When our house was built, we had it wired for telephone, cable television, and ethernet connections in almost every room. That's proven to be very useful, although in hindsight the couple of rooms that we're completely wired should have been.

One room that is completely wired is our family room. There is a handy Rj-45 ethernet jack right next to our entertainment armoire. When we got our Series 2 TiVo I plugged it in (it gets it's directory information over the internet) but it didn't work.

Later, I picked up a ethernet cable tester and it dutifully reported that one of the pairs of wires in the cable didn't have connectivity. This meant that either (1) the cable running through the walls had a break in it (2) the jack in the family room was broken (3) the connector down in the basement was broken. I was really hoping it wasn't the wiring, since I'd have to figure out how to pull cables through the wall.

Pulling cables sounded rather daunting. On the other hand, I had never attached connectors to ethernet cables either. I have done wiring projects before (I even wired up a few homemade/homedesigned computers back in college) so I set out to learn how to make ethernet cables.

The first step was to pick up some tools (most home improvement projects are ultimately just excuses to buy new tools). Attaching male connectors to ethernet cables requires a "crimping tool" and attaching receptacles requires a punch down tool. So I picked up the tool bundle shown below at CompUSA.



I sacrificed a couple of old ethernet cables and rebuilt them to get the hang of things, then tackled the problem cable running to the family room. The first step was to replaced the male connector down in the basement. The tester showed no improvement. Then I rewired the existing receptacle in the family room, still no improvement. My last hope before facing pulling wires was to replace the receptacle with a new one and wire it to the cable.

And that worked!

Now the TiVo is connected to the wired network in the house (before I was getting by using an old USB to WiFi (802.11b) adapter). More importantly, it's all set to use the fast wired network when we get an Apple TV when that comes out.

Posted at 09:28 AM    

Sun - February 4, 2007

Cable Modem Upgrade

Ever since Insight/Roadrunner upgraded our cable modem speed a few months ago, I've been having a problem downloading large files from work. In normal internet use there wasn't any problem, but for the work I do I need to download a very large file every now and then.

The file is over 6 GB in size and takes a few hours to download over the VPN connection to work. The trouble was that after about an hour of downloading the file, the cable mode would just lock up - hard. It needed to be physically reset to start working again.

I sent Roadrunner tech support some information about the problem. After a little back and forth where I explain that no, it wasn't really my fault that the downloads always failed, they decided I needed a new cable modem.

Our original Roadrunner cable modem service came a Surfboard 3100 cable modem. Apparently, while that modem could handle normal use at the higher speeds, it just couldn't handle sustained full speed traffic. Insight traded the old 3100 for a shiny new Surfboard 5101.

The SB 5101 fixed the problem. I was able to download the giant disk image without any problems. The new modem is slightly faster too. We're getting closer to the rated 5 Mbps speed than before (roughly 10% faster - about 4.6 Mbps vs about 4.1 Mbps) - a welcome side benefit.

Posted at 10:47 AM    

Mon - January 1, 2007

New Mac Pro uses a lot less power

For the last couple of years I've been toiling away on a PowerMac G5 as my main work computer. It was a sweet machine in its day, with its dual 2.5 GHz G5 processors and 2.5 GB of RAM, it was a pleasure to work with.

But as time passed, what was a fast and shiny computer became a dated and relatively slow and clunky computer.

Last month I upgraded to new Mac Pro . It's a sweet machine with its two dual core Xeon processors (four CPUs) and is a pleasure to work with.

Besides the speed advantages the new machine has (and they are welcome!), it turns out the new Mac Pro uses a lot less electricity than the old G5. LOTS LESS. Almost 25% less when it's working hard.

I recently purchased a handy device, the Kill A Watt, that measures the power use of any electrical device. You just plug in the device and the Kill A Watt displays the watts the device is using (among other options). I used it to make my measurements here.

It turns out the PowerMac G5 uses about 190 watts when it's just sitting around idling, while the Mac Pro Xeon uses about 170 watts. When working (building software using all processors), the MacPro G5 uses up to 320 watts, while the Mac Pro Xeon tops out at around 240 watts.

This generates a lot less heat in my office and the fans run a lot less. A nice improvement.

Posted at 04:14 PM    

Wed - October 18, 2006

Internet Speed Improvement

Here at the Peirce household in Lewis Center, we have both Insight/Roadrunner cable modem and Verizon DSL for internet access (redundancy is important when you work on the internet all day). Since adding DSL to the mix last year, both services have been roughly the same speed. That changed today. According to a note posted by Michael Willner, CEO of Insight, they are increasing speeds across their system.

Insight/Roadrunner bumped up its speed from 3.0Mbps/384Kbps to 5.0/512. Here's the result of a before and after speed test:

Posted at 10:59 AM    

Wed - October 11, 2006

Google Code Search

Google introduced a new custom search service, Code Search, that looks through source code that is available around the internet. It's an excellent resource for programmers looking for exiting examples of how to do things. It even supports restricting the search to a specific language like Objective-C, the language I work in on a daily basis at Apple.

Of course, I vainly searched for my own name and it returned (only!) three hits.

The first and second hits were for code in Sun's Java 2D SDK: A demo program that scrolls through the names of all the folks who helped develop Java 2D.

The third hit goes way back to April 1985. It's for an old VMS program, XMAC, that was used to transfer data between Macintoshes and Vax/VMS machines over serial connections. An old friend of mine, Kris Kreutzman, wrote XMAC and I posted this update for him on the old usenet group "net.sources.mac" along with some contact information. The posting was from one of my earliest email addresses: From: peirce@lll-crg.ARPA (Michael Peirce)

Posted at 09:10 AM    

Mon - October 2, 2006

Levelator

I listen to a fairly large number of interesting podcasts. One problem is that the interestingness and the listening quality of the podcast are completely independent variables. That is, some of of my favorite podcasts are kind of painful to listen to because the volume levels vary all over the place - sometimes too loud, sometimes to quiet.

A company called Gigavox (producers of the excellent IT Conversations podcasts) has produced a new tool, Levelator, that fixes this. It's free and very simple to use.

It looks at an entire sound file and applies a number of corrections to the audio to make it sounds way way better. The image below shows the before and the after wave forms of an Olentangy Board of Education Meeting that suffers from uneven levels (the main problem is that different people sit closer or further from the microphones). You can see how much more regular the second waveform is from this.



This will go a long way to improve the sound quality of lots of podcasts. A welcome improvement.

Posted at 04:14 PM    

Tue - May 16, 2006

The new MacBooks are out

Apple has completed the transition to Intel based laptops today by rolling the iBook's replacement: the new MacBook. I'm partial to the new black one:



They have lots of new goodies like a built-in video camera, wider screen (13" @ 1280 x 800), magsafe power adapter, DVI digital video interface, even a sudden motion sensor to helps the machine save your data if you ever drop it.

And it still has all the standard goodness: built in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microphone, stereo speakers, scrolling trackpad, "up to 6 hours" battery life, USB, Firewire, Gigabit ethernet, CD/DVD read/write, and up to 2 GB of RAM. Oh yes, the entire iLife suite is included (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand) as well as Mac OS X (and it can run Windows XP too if you really want too).

Below shows the entire line of Intel based laptops:

Posted at 02:54 PM    

Tue - April 11, 2006

Public WiFi at home

Here at the Peirce household we have both a wired and an unwired network. When the house was built we had the builder run cat-5 cable to almost every room. This has made connecting our many computers (and other devices) into a home network nice and easy.

When wireless ethernet (WiFi) came along we embraced that as well.

Of course there is the issue of security. The wired network has physical security - it's not very likely that someone can hook into the wired network inside our home. If they can, we have other problems.

With WiFi the security issue is a little different since the signal reaches outside the walls of our home. The neighbors can pickup our WiFi signals as we can theirs. And though unlikely, anyone driving by can access the signals as well.

Recently we reconfigured things with security in mind. We wanted to offer visitors to the house trouble free WiFI access, but also wanted to lock down our "inside" network. We settled on having two WiFi networks: one secured with WPA and the other open to the world.

The secured network uses WPA with a strong password that is just for our private use. It takes a little effort to set up our Macs (and "other" computers) to access this network. But once it's configured, it's easy to use.

For visitors - yes, we do get a few folks dropping by with WiFi enabled computers - we didn't want to force them to reconfigure their computers to get internet access. So we setup a second open WiFi network. It has full internet access, but it sits outside of our home network.

Glenn Fleishman, who writes the excellent WiFi Net News, just wrote an article for MacWorld explaining how to set things up very much like we have (his option #3, using two WiFi gateways). There are a few differences, but he does a nice job of explaining how (and why) folks should set things up this way.

Posted at 09:36 AM