The Roarty Blog

MacBook Pro and the wireless revisited

So I thought I had solved the mystery surrounding the MacBook Pro and connecting to the wireless network. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

If I boot into Vista and then reboot the machine into Mac OSX then it will connect to the wireless network; this was the scenario I had obviously chanced upon previously and which was subsequently incorrectly diagnosed as being due to switching Bluetooth off. The next time I went into Mac OSX directly, the MacBook Pro couldn't connect to the network!

So, it seems that the initial negotiation phase - the logging in, the retrieval of dhcp settings, etc etc - is not something that the MacBook Pro and my 3Com router can do. However, once Vista has done all the grunt work, Mac OSX can negotiate a 'continued connection.' Of course, irrespective of the operating system, the wireless card will have a specific MAC address which is obviously being treated differently once a connection has been made.......

So, I've bitten the bullet. I've ordered an AirPort Extreme Base Station which should solve all my problems. Here's hoping.

Compromised

My bank have just been in touch to question some rogue transactions on my current account: 'Mr Roarty, do you recall making twenty-four transactions for 14.99 to STB World?'

Needless to say, I don't recall them cos it wasn't me! Thankfully, the bank have caught the fraudulent interactions on my account; I keep a close eye on my account so I was quite surprised to hear about them - they hadn't shown up on my account as yet.

Now all I have to do is figure out where the card was compromised and never use it there again.

Technorati Claim

I’ve just added this blog to Technorati and I’ve updated BlogJet to see if it will Ping Technorati when I post…..

I am sure it will all work swimmingly.

Tags: Technorati, Ping, Blogs, The+Roarty+Blog

The curious story of the MacBook Pro and the Wireless Router

Timeline:

• Tuesday – arrival of MacBook Pro. Much ooo-ing and aw-ing.
• Tuesday night – MacBook Pro fails miserably to connect to my wireless network
• Wednesday morning – 1am. Give up.
• Wednesday morning – 6.30am. Let’s rebuild it, apparently there was a patch that made wireless sub-optimal
• Wednesday morning – 9am. Nope, it is knackered.
• Wednesday evening – Patch it again and see if it works. Turn on WEP, turn off WEP, turn on WPA, turn off WPA, switch off SID Broadcast, switch on SID Broadcast
• Wednesday evening – 8pm onwards. Install BootCamp so that I can install Vista. Vista goes on smoothly.
• Wednesday evening (continued) – See if Vista can connect to the wireless network. Yep. No problem at all!

And then I booted back into Mac OSX. Wireless still not working; it can see the network but it can’t negotiate with it. Then I noticed that Bluetooth was activated; I am not a big fan of Bluetooth being on by default and I noticed that it was on by default and my Mac was discoverable. Switched that off and, hey presto, the AirPort connected to the specified network.

So, it looks like their was some kinda collision between the Bluetooth and the wireless. I put Bluetooth back on after it connected to the router and everything seemed dandy.

There are a lot of people with a lot of problems with 3^rd party routers and the 802.11 N cards in most of the Intel Macs; maybe this will help you?

Need to see if the Mac can consistently connect before I jump for joy though!

Tags: Apple, Wireless+Router, Fault, Defect, PITA, AirPort, Vista, Mac+OSX, MacBook+Pro, 3Com

E:\VPC\TimeBombedBase\Base01.vhd

I downloaded the VPC of the Orcas Visual Studio Team Suite yesterday and thought I would start it up…… Bad idea; I got a nasty error about the Base Disk "E:\VPC\TimeBombedBase\Base01.vhd” not being present.

Now, this download was 5 or 6 gigs in size, unrared it takes up 12+ gigs! And, it turns out, I need to install the base disk that it is differenced from. A quick google on the path took me to only one post – Gill Cleeren’s post on this issue.

I don’t know if this is the right VHD needed for Beta 1 of Orcas but I am giving it a try.

Direct Link.

Tags: Google, Orcas, VPC

MacBook Pro

So, I’ve become the proud owner of a 17” Mac Book Pro. Very nice it is too.

Haven’t done much with it yet other than install Firefox and Skype. Downloaded BootCamp and I bought Parallels with it so I’ll report back on how I do with Vista and / or XP. I need some CDs and DVDs though to burn the ISOs onto.

Lovely piece of kit.

Tags: Apple, MacBook+Pro, Vista, XP, Windows, Skype, Firefox

the roarty blog

Somethings you learn over and over again without really getting them to stick – something stops them from being in short-term memory and into long-term memory….

My latest short-term to long-term transfer failure is:

When you register for a free trial of something and they ask you for a credit-card they will bill you without notice for something you still thought was free.

And so I am now the proud owner of a TypePad blog.

Let me be clear on this: I am not annoyed with TypePad. I gave them my details and they definitely told me when my free trial would be up. Ho hum. But, it does put me in a peculiar position. I had a blog – called the roarty blog – which evolved from being a website about my wedding. This served me well – it runs .NET, Sql Server, and on top of those Community Server.

However, I never quite got round to tidying up the Community Server install so that it only hosted my blog. That left me with a long Url, which could be hacked back and probably showed too much of the underlying surface of the application. However, it worked, and it worked well until I tried to upgrade it this week!

So, being all clever and smart, I sought out a cheaper hosting deal and came up with the cleverly titled The Roarty Wiki. However, not being so smart or clever, I chose the Url – http://www.theroartyblog.com/.

If truth be told, I planned to move my current content – on http://www.mcateer-roarty.info/ onto the new Url and decomission or downgrade the hosting package on mcateer-roarty. However, whilst investigating all the alternative options – using TypePad, for example, and wanting to be able to post using BlogJet or something similar – I signed up for TypePad…… and I installed ScrewTurn Wiki to see if I could get anything out of it.

And now I have three websites and no content!

So, in true Getting Things Done style, the next Action on the Websites Project has to be: Retrieve original content from mcateer-roarty. Once I’ve got that, I can decide what happens next!

Have a good weekend,
Ciaran

Tags: blog, TypePad, memory, Wiki, ScrewTurn+Wiki, Community+Server, BlogJet, Roarty, Getting+Things+Done

/linux

I’d read recently that Dell were going to offer systems pre-loaded with Linux and I thought that was interesting because I am interested in Linux but I ain’t really interested in building systems. If I could buy a system from Dell in which everything was guaranteed to work with a Linux distro then I might think about it.

So, I typed in www.dell.co.uk/linux cos I believe in Url hackability and I thought it would be the most obvious place to go. Bizarrely, that takes you to the Dell Outlet Store. Actually, it maybe isn’t that bizarre; the theory might be that you want the cheapest kit you can get for a Linux box…. maybe not. www.dell.com/linux takes you to the ‘Dell and Linux’ page where you are invited to ‘Choose the freedom of open source on Dell. Get more out of Linux.’

Ok, Dell thinks it has something you might be interested in but it doesn’t really have it available in the UK (yet?).

www.hp.com/linux takes you to the ‘Large Enterprise Business’ page; no desktop linux here. If I go to www.compaq.com/linux, however, I get a 404 page telling me that hp are ‘very sorry.’

www.apple.com/linux gives you, ‘The page you tried was not found. You may have used an outdated link or may have typed the address (URL) incorrectly.’

And, not surprisingly, www.microsoft.com/linux says ‘We’re sorry, but there is no Microsoft.com Web page that matches your entry.’

Any more?