Notice I explicitly say Microsoft software. I don’t necessarily hate Microsoft as a corporation, I’m by no means their biggest fan, but I have no reason to hate them. Indeed, hate is such a strong word that I use it very, very sparingly. But I do hate their software. It’s a boring subject, so I’m not going to bang on about the evils of the Microsoft and laud the wonder that is Apple. It’s a pointless no-win argument - some people like Microsoft, some people like Apple. You choose, and you do what you want.
But here is a good example why I hate Microsoft software, and why I am ever so pleased that I made the switch to Apple.
Quick hint: if you’re having trouble getting wireless backups on Time Machine and an Airport Extreme working, then try this - I had the same problem and fixed it for me. Plug the USB drive in to your Mac and using disk utility, veryify and repair the disk not the actual partition. Alternatively, remove all existing partitions from your drive, and then recreate the necessary partitions for your backup scenario. It seems that if you only verify / repair the partitions then the Airport Extreme won’t necessarily mount the drive properly (meaning you can’t use it as an Airdisk, and you can’t use it with Time Machine.)
No guarantee this will work for you and also note: wireless backups create sparsebundles (as opposed to real actual files) so it’s more of a headache to restore from a backup. But wireless backups are far less of a headache than having to periodically plug my Macbook Pro in to the drive, so for me, it’s worth it.
Oops, sorry. For starters I should be more clear. Cable & Wireless Guernsey are, of course, known as SureCW. Or Sure. I’m not sure. Whatever.
I suppose I should admire their motives, but they cost me money, and, more importantly my time and sanity. About 6 months ago, they announced they were upgrading their ADSL service from 1mb to 2mb. For free. Hurrah! we all thought - free upgrade to the service. But, sadly, there’s no such thing as a free broadband speed increase, and it has, quite frankly, been fraught with problems for me. The main problem is a result of them uprating to ADSL2, which, I’m led to believe is a lot more fussy about quality of service - specifically, noise on the line (SNR) which only gets worse, the further you are from the local exchange. And considering where I live in Guernsey, it’s about as far from the exchange as you can get. So what happened? Very mysteriously, up until the day they upgraded us, everything was working fine. The days and weeks after the upgrade and I had consistent problems, mostly manifest in a complete loss of service. My ADSL wireless router was still up and running, but something, somewhere was clearly not happy. A hard reboot of the router seemed to solve the problem, but the lock ups were seemingly random and, for a perfectionist arse like me, regular reboots were entirely unsatisfactory.
Now, I’m no stranger to a bit of networking - I know my DHCP server from my DNS server - and I tried literally everything I could to resolve things. Cable and Wireless, sorry, Sure, assured us (nice) that no change of hardware was required - if it worked before, it would work after - but the first thing was to check for firmware upgrades for the router. And I found some. But this didn’t solve it. Hours of talking to their “tech support” got us no further - even a change in profile - which allegedly makes the line less susceptible to noise by downrating the speed, did nothing. All the normal things - replacing ADSL filters, unplugging every bit of telephony equipment on the line, did nothing. Of course, there were times when I thought I’d pegged it, I’d announce triumphantly to the other users of the network that it was working and boom! dead.
And so, the only remaining solution? Spend money. I’m now the proud owner of a Netgear D834 wired router and an Airport Extreme. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind spending money on new toys and as I slowly but surely migrate all of my computing toys over to the ways of the Apple, the addition of the Extreme, to go with my two Airport Expresses, is no bad thing. (Really, it isn’t. It makes much sense.) And ultimately, seeing as my problems are now solved (he says, holding his breath, because it’s not unlikely that things will break shortly after submitting this), it seems pretty easy to pinpoint the problems on the DLINK router that I was using previously.
But my point is quite simple - Sure can’t offer a free upgrade and expect users to upgrade their hardware to work with it. It seems a ridiculous thing to be whinging about, it really does, because for someone like me especially, the alleged increase in speed is welcome, but, this has literally cost me no end of time and money in rectifiying it. And what’s more, I’m technically minded and enjoy tinkering with stuff like this to get things working. I know of a handful, which in reality is therefore far more people, who now have simply got in to the routine of restarting their router when things go Pete Tong. ADSL is supposed to be an “always on” service and has been for a good 7-10 years, and in this day and age (God, how old do I sound) restarting your router any more than a few times a year is unacceptable.
I’m told by “people in the know” that a lot of the problems are caused by Sure not investing well enough in decent switching and routing equipment. (And are now, allegedly in the process of sorting things out.) So full marks to Sure in the first instance in wanting to upgrade the service to ADSL2, but zero marks (negative marks if I could) for doing such a piss-poor job in the implementation.
(Don’t even get me started on the pricing.)
You may find you get the following problem when trying to stream music to multiple speakers. Streaming to either local computer OR your airport express works, but when you try to stream both, you get an error message that looks like this:
“An error occurred while connecting to the remote speaker ’speaker_name’. An unknown error occurred (-3256).”
This is most likely caused by a firewall issue. If you’re running Tiger, then there’s a fix here. If, however, you’re running Leopard, then it’s a little different:
1. Open System Preferences
2. Click Security
3. Click Firewall
4. Either:
a. “Allow all incoming connections” - but I don’t recommend this, so
b. “Set access for specific services and applications”. Click the + symbol, then find iTunes in your Applications folder. Then set its permission to Allow incoming connections.
You should now be able to stream to multiple sets of speakers. Whilst you’re playing about in the firewall settings, click Advanced and enable the stealth mode, which seems to be off by default. You should also check that logging is enabled, as it’s possible that the change to your firewall settings will interfere with other applications you have installed.
If you already own a D-Link G604T wireless router, then you can upgrade it to the G624T model, simply by flashing the firmware. The 624 firmware has many more configurable options, including much improved support for ADSL2+. Here’s what to do.
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A recent post on HackADay on what to do with an old laptop got me thinking. I have an old laptop (a Sony VAIO FX804) which was pretty much sat on a shelf doing nothing and turning it into a digital picture frame to display some of my photos seemed like a good use for it. I’m by no means an electronics whiz, but this seemed like something I was capable. The steps involved are pretty straightforward - get the laptop set up to function as you would like (some sort of slideshow, configured to either run off a hard drive or via an Internet connection) and nothing much else. Then dismantle the laptop so that the screen is frontmost and then somehow jig the rest of the machine behind it, perhaps in some sort of softbox. I’m good at dismantling stuff, although perhaps not so great at undismantling stuff, but what the heck - I had nothing to lose.
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I really like WordPress and I’ve been using it for many years from the pre v1 days, I believe. It has certainly grown massively since there, and now boasts the most impressive feature-set of all the online diary platforms. But, as with most software systems, as popularity increases, so does its vulnerability to attacks from unsavoury hacker types. It’s a widely covered phenomenon in the Windows vs Mac debate - Mac OSX is largely more secure because there are far fewer malicious attacks out there - for the simple reason that Windows is a more valuable target since there are many more users of it. (OK, this ignores the fact that the UNIX platform is natively more secure - but there is more to be gained in attacking Windows systems.) The increasing use of WordPress has resulted in an increasing number of security exploits. The WordPress folks are normally quick to close, patch and fix these holes, but I’ve always found the upgrade process, in spite of the infamous 5 step install / upgrade, to be a little arduous - backup existing install, deactivate plugins, download latest source, unzip, upload new source remembering not to overwrite your wp-content folder which contains plugins and themes, perform upgrade, reactivate plugins and cross your fingers. My experience has generally been fine - there has been only a few occasions when it’s gone titsup. But nevertheless, it’s a time-consuming process, especially the having to upload wp-content stuff separately. And there was a point recently, leading up to the 2.5 release, and then shortly after, where there was a spate of releases. When you’re managing 5 separate installs of the WordPress software, it invariably becomes a half-to-full day chore, rather than a quick update.
Well fortunately, there now’s something you can do about it. As of 2.5, all plugins have the ability to check for and update themselves requiring little more than your FTP credentials. And the WordPress automatic update plugin will keep your WordPress install bang up-to-date as well. I’ve tried it on a 2.5 install, as well as a 2.3.3 install, and, moreorless, the experience has been great. The “step by step” upgrade got a bit confused when trying to reactivate some of my plugins, but using the fully automatic mode worked like a dream. The plugin is certainly a bit rough around the edges - the templating and presentation is as disorganised and ungainly as CPanel, not to mention many many typos and grammatical errors, but if you’re not bothered about that, then there is now no reason to not keep your WP fully up-to-date.
Bootnote: I actually started this post about 2 weeks ago, before the automatic upgrade plugin had been released. So fortunately it was saved from being an all-out “WP stop releasing so many updates you bastards” to a “here’s a handy plugin that will keep your WP life more pleasurable.” Hurrah for that.