No Middle Name

My iPhone refused to connect to my home wireless network. It is set up to use WPA, and my Mac OS X iBook, a Windows XP laptop and even my old Windows Mobile phone could all join the network happily. Not so my shiny new iPhone. It complained. I eventually tracked this down to my WPA password either being too long (18 characters), or that it had a non-alphanumeric character in it (single quote). I changed it to a 9-letter password (all alphabetic characters), and all is well.

My minions and I made this, it may even work:

Komodo Edit is a nice, free, IDE for Python (as well as a lot of other languages). It does syntax highlighting and code completion. To get code completion to work in Mac OS X for the Google App Engine SDK, you have to know where the appengine python libs are. They are hidden away inside /Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app, so not normally accessible via the Finder's browse boxes. What I did was to symlink to the libraries inside my user directory and point Komodo there. Like this (in Terminal): cd <your user home directory> ln -s /Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine google_appengine Now you should be able to go to Komodo's preferences, select Languages, then Python, then Additional Python Import Directories and add your symlinked google_appengine directory. Hey presto - code completion. UPDATE: Newer versions of the app engine launcher create a symlink to the SDK in /usr/loc...

Yes, my notes for day 2 are two days late. Blame James Squire and his damnably tasty range of ales. Day 2 started with a nice, greasy hotel fry-up, setting me up nicely for the day. First up was the keynote from Robert Martin , talking about clean code. See the slides : a very interesting and, most important for me, useful talk. A brief digest: you don't need comments, don't comment out code, and don't write code you're not proud of - do it the right way the first time. Otherwise the code just rots. Jim Webber gave a great presentation about how essentially cool the http protocol is , how bad soap is and how rpc sucks balls as a model for web services. Again, a useful and practical talk. Next up was Gregor Hohpe from Google, this time showing off a couple of Google projects : the mashup editor, which looked awesome; the gdata apis; and the app engine. Lunch (butter chicken and rice, yum). Robert Martin popped up again , this time talking about functions and how to ma...

There's a search widget as well, but I can't remember the url for that right now.

I'm in Sydney for JAOO 2008 , gettin' my geek on. Work booked and paid for it all, with the only drawback being having to get up at 3:30am to get in a taxi to the airport for a 6:15 flight. Yes, we live on the other side of Melbourne to the airport. Conesquently, I'm in my hotel room getting ready for bed when the rest of the geeks are at the social do at a nearby bar. I'm trying to stay awake long enough to phone home and say goodnight to the kids. I attended five talks today. The first was the keynote by Erik Meijer, about Functional Programming ( slides here ). At least, I think that was what he was on about. He meandered a lot, and said some strange stuff, very little of which made sense. Some of it was about Haskell though. Which he thinks is good or something. I then skipped the next slot, there was nothing much that interested me so I went shopping for presents for the kids and my wife, so that I may be allowed back in when I get home. I popped back for Rod Smit...

Previously on File Sharing Farces, I had upgraded to Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, royally buggering my networked hard drive that used Samba for file sharing. I tried a workaround by installing MacFUSE and setting up an FTP file system. This worked ok, except it would keep dropping out and iTunes didn't play nicely with it (complaining that the original music files could not be found, and it wouldn't let me sync my ipod or add new music). After a bit of intense googling I found this forum thread about the many different guises my LanServer NAS goes under (Hotway LanDrive, NAS900, etc). On the last page ( 27 ), there was a link to a firmware upgrade from one of the other manufacturers that use the same chipset. This claimed to support Mac OS 10.5. I gave it a go, fully expecting it to turn my NAS into an expensive shiny aluminium brick. It seems to have worked perfectly, I can now browse the shares in Finder. My next task is to get it automounting and serving music. Hoorah!

Previously on "Gareth's Geek Hour": our hero had battled with the NetInfo Manager in Mac OS 10.3 and succeeded in getting his ibook to automount a smb share on a networked storage device. Music streamed off the little box over the network, and there was much rejoicing. Disaster struck when subversion refused to work over a samba share. Our intrepid idiot hero decided an upgrade to Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) was in order, believing it to have the solution to all life's problems... Leopard is pretty, has some great new features, and seems a little snappier than Panther on my aging ibook. One problem: it has kicked my little automounted samba shares right in their wrinkled little happy sacks. They just don't work. They seemed to have been migrated from the NetInfo database into the local directory (/var/db/dslocal), because it would still try to automount them. Except it would lock up completely and need to be turned off with the power button whenever I connected to them....

I had problems setting up a networked hard drive that would talk to my Mac OS X laptop. I could copy about 50Mb of data and then the whole wireless network would crash and nothing would work at all. The fix turned out to be this obscure setting . Now everything seems to be working...

I used to use AOL as my OpenID provider, since I already had an AIM account and that made things easy. However, delegating the authentication via this blog (one of the cooler things about OpenID) was a bit hit-and-miss. On some sites it would work, others would complain about errors. I managed to work out that this was due to some sites supporting OpenID 2.x, others OpenID 1.x. The AOL OpenID servers only support 1.x. To get 2.x to work you need an XRDS file, which AOL doesn't provide at the moment. You can write your own , but on a blogger website you've got nowhere to put it. So, instead I've signed up for a myOpenID account. Then it's just a matter of adding the following to the html of this blog: <link href='http://www.myopenid.com/server' rel='openid.server'/> <link href='http://nomiddlename.myopenid.com' rel='openid.delegate'/> <meta content='http://nomiddlename.myopenid.com/xrds' http-equiv='X-XR...

I bought an ibook just before they started bundling bluetooth, but after they started bundling airport extreme. On Friday, my new i-mate jasjam (also called a HTC Hermes / TyTN ) was delivered. It comes with Active Sync, which only works on PCs. It comes with a USB cable, but all I could do with that was charge the battery on a Mac. It has Wi-Fi and joined my home network easily, but it won't sync over wireless. A bit of googling later, and I found out that you can share files, and get it to work as a modem with a mac - but only via bluetooth. Grr - no good for me unless I shell out for a dongle. There's also Missing Sync , an Active Sync replacement for Mac OS X, but it costs money and requires OS 10.4 (I've got 10.3 - so that would be an extra $200 on top). I thought of using FTP to transfer files, but Windows Mobile doesn't come with a FTP client. You can buy them, but I'm a skinflint. Ah-ha, I thought, Windows Mobile probably supports SMB (the windows standard ...