At
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport
There is a very neat airport command line program. Starting it with –help will show you the possible options.
I like specially the -I option to show me the actual strenght of the signal etc in numbers. Not some bars. It also
seems to accurate more precisly what is going on. I wrote a quick perl wrapper to give me the outputs I care about
as a one line:
#!/usr/bin/perl
#airport usually is in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources
use strict;
my $sleep = $ARGV[0] || 3;
my %trans = (
"commQuality" , "cQ",
"rawQuality" , "rQ",
"avgSignalLevel" , "sL" ,
"avgNoiseLevel" , "nL" ,
"lastTxRate" , "lR" ,
"maxRate" , "mR" ,
"Security" , "sec:"
);
while (1){
#print "x\n";
foreach my $o (`airport -I`){
#print "y $o\n";
$o =~ /\s*([^\:]+): (.*)/;
my $k = $1;
my $v = $2;
if ($trans{$k}){
print "$trans{$k} $v ";
}
#print "$k -> $v\n";
}
print "\n";
sleep ($sleep);
}
The other helpful option is the -s one: It scans all base stations it can find and displays them. Much better than the gui menu.
Moving this program in the bin folder would be a nice move by apple. Giving it a man page would even be better. But the way it is is certainly much better than nothing.
Friend of mine started to work out of a place that has a SBC DSL connection. He could not send mail with Mail.app and his .mac mail account any longer. Chaning the mail port from 25 to 587 did change that. Things worked fine after that.
With OS 10.4.11, but also before I have sometimes the funky behaviour that google appears to down: Both in Safari and fireofx the whole internet works normal, but when I do a google search both browsers show me google being down. Which is a blatant lie. In the terminal doing a
sudo killall lookupd
fixes the issues. It seems to happen when google can not be reached for reasons like an intermittend connection and and lookupd seems to give up on that name.
Since it worked so great for Bush in 2000 Nader is trying the same for McCain in 08.
A new problem that is looking for solutions: Computers are worth replacing while they are still work fine.
Interesting is the theme that the OS is often the reason to kick it to the curb: It is outdated (OS9), just got slower and slower (windows used to do that, does it still? Luckily I have no idea) or it just filled with malware (That WOULD be a windows feature). The hardware might do some good. I am always surprised how little harddrives have been. “Back in the day”.
? Saas ? Never had heard of it. Till Today. And then it showed up everywhere. SaaS seems to be a fancy acronym for Software as a Service. Turns out that’s what I am doing with Interdubs. Maybe if I would hang out in the Silicon Valley more or spend more time with VC types I would know this kind of language. But actually, I rather not. I just like to go ahead and write software. No need to call it fancy names. I rather check if people can use it for what they would like to do. Chances are they don’t know -or care- about SaaS either. They just have work to do.
When getting an error like ‘Unexpected signal: 10’ when launching vmware on OS X it could be that you ran a 3rd Memory Manager like iFreeMem. Quitting it did not fix the issue. I had to reboot, and then vmware was happy again. It might even be that running iFreeMem first and then VMware would work. My solution is just not to use ‘iFreeMem’ any longer. It feels snake-oilish anyway: why should a 15 dollar application do a better job in managing my memory than the OS itself? It’s one of these things that the OS should be really good at. It’s not about having ‘green’ in your pie chart.
The other day I rented a car since mine was in the shop. The rate was reasonable. Actually a Chevy whatever it’s called is pretty quiet for what it is. National was just accross the street from the shop that my car was in. They really wanted my phone number. I should have known why: They called twice wanted to know how the service was. Thanks for caring. Service had been good, until they started to ask about it. Same with GoDaddy. Their SSL certificates cost 40 while others want 150. It’s still a rip off since it is just a simple script and a tiny little bit of administration to weed out the evil people. Of course they called. And then called again. At 7am. Made me feel real good about filling out the form where you indicate when you like to get called.
And then on the other side of the spectrum there is AT&T. Or actually what appears to be a rather obscure business division of theirs. I picked AT&t as a vendor for my 800 number, thinking that they would be a bit more expensive but easy to deal with. The 800 number is just a little aspect of what I am doing, so why waste much time on it. So I thought. The division provides the service. But is otherwise basically unreachable. They don’t even have a phone number. Nor can I reach them via the internet: Their web forms stopped working. And there is no way that feedback would get to them. Amazing.