Macintosh

I just got a threat from Apple’s legal department for an item I posted at MacMegasite:

It has come to our attention that you are posting Apple Computer, Inc.
(“Apple”) confidential and proprietary material on your website.

Specifically, you have posted unpublished Apple screen shots from Mac OS X,
v. 10.3 (Panther seed 7B21) at:

http://www.macmegasite.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=974

You should be aware that by displaying the Material, you may be
unlawfully disclosing Apple’s trade secrets and are infringing Apple’s
copyrights in violation of federal law. Apple believes that the person who
disclosed the Material to you violated a non-disclosure agreement with
Apple. Consequently, Apple has never authorized the Material to be
disclosed or published, and your continued display could result in you
and/or your company being held liable for violating Apple’s intellectual
property rights.

Therefore, we request that you cease and desist from displaying the Material
on all web sites and servers under your control, including any hyperlinks to
other locations where the Material may be available. We further request
that you destroy all copies of the Material in your possession.

Apple reserves its rights to contact your Internet Service Provider.

The foregoing is not intended to be a complete statement of the facts, and
shall not constitute a waiver of any of Appleís rights or remedies, all of
which are expressly reserved. Please confirm in writing that you have
removed the Material from your web site.

I deleted the article.

I feel like I’m back in 2000, running CodeWarrior in Classic and working on a Mac OS 9 project.

For the last week or so, I’ve been having a problem with my D-Link DI-624 losing wireless connectivity, both with my Powerbook & my Dell laptop (using a D-Link 802.11b card).

It got so bad that I just disconnected it and I’m now using my G4 minitower as a software base station.

My G4 is now more or less back to its pre-crash state. I booted 9 for the first time in over 6 months. I almost forgot what a big pain it is.

I had to restart several times to untangle extension conflicts. I also found that my Logitech wireless keyboard & mouse isn’t compatible & no drivers exist.

It looks like the 80G drive in my G4 minitower failed. After running DiskWarrior several times and attempting to rebuild the partition table with pdisk today, I still wasn’t able to recover it. When I run Disk Utility in Panther, it says S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics indicate the drive is failing, plus it also makes clicking noises when I reboot.

Luckily, I have everything from that machine archived, since I haven’t used it actively since I got my PowerBook. I installed Panther on the secondary drive in that machine.

Tomorrow I plan to remove that drive and either leave only the secondary drive or replace that drive with a 45G which is now in an external firewire case.

Last night after many reboots while trying to copy Panther CDs and install Panther on my external drive, the 74G primary drive in my G4 minitower got damaged. Disk Utility isn’t able to repair it and fsck reports a bad super block.

I finally bought & downloaded DiskWarrior 3.0 from Alsoft. I’m now running it to repair that drive.

Today I went to the Boca Raton Apple Store. I was surprised at how small it is – it’s smaller than MacCenter of Fort Lauderdale, which is a lot closer to me.

I bought a SmartDisk 60G FireWire drive to run Panther on my PowerBook. It’s a nice, fast, convenient drive, but unfortunately it’s very loud.

Earlier today I had a meeting with co-workers via iChat AV. It started out great, although the video was choppy at times. After a while, the audio quality deteriorated so badly we ended up continuing by phone.

I find that iChat AV is very flaky. Yesterday someone was able to establish a video chat with me, but today the same person wasn’t able to. We had to try several times before we could establish the connection for our meeting today. After the connection dropped with a ‘no packets received’ error, neither of us was able to re-connect.

I’ve tried various settings in my D-Link DI-624 router, but nothing seems to have any effect. I have iChat set up as a special application with a trigger port range of 5190-5193 opening UDP ports 5060,16384-16403, since I would like to use iChat AV from any machine and I don’t use a static IP address for my PowerBook. I also made sure those port ranges are explicitly allowed in the firewall settings.

I did get to see the beautiful view of Vancouver from the office. Our meeting was cut short by a big fire a few blocks away that everyone was watching from the window.

I noticed that if I try to copy a file I don’t have permissions for in the finder, instead of refusing to copy, it will ask for an admin password and let me copy it.