Macking 104

Nightmares and Headaches
I am so glad to be seeing OS9 starting to wither away. For the last 15 years I have made my living fixing and supporting Macs, going all the way back to System 6.
Apple claims that 40% of their installed base has migrated to OSX, including many who are still in version 10.1.x, which means that 60% are still running 9 or earlier, generating lots of work for me.
Recently I had a client's Remote Access and Open Transport go bad. This not only knocked him off the Internet, it even prevented him from opening Eudora and reading his already-downloaded mail. It took a hair-pulling session of removing and replacing extensions and libraries to get it going again, and in the end I never did find out which of several files was causing the problem; I wound up just getting things working again and removing everything that he had no use for, including whatever was causing the failure. This was one of the few times I have seen Eudora fail to work, and it was an older version, too, 4.3. There is a first time for everything, even this.
Most of my business on OSX Macs involves setup and training. I get comparatively fewer calls to debug problems that involve the system, and very rarely do I have to do a complete reinstall.
In a previous issue I said that Panther was not stable enough to recommend it to everyone. Now I believe it's time and you can go ahead, especially if you are using a previous version of OSX. Apple has issued a number of updates; the current version of 10.3 is 10.3.2. There are numerous updates and fixes available through Software Update, although the Mac implementation of Java is still a bit problematic, causing people who try to open some odd web sites to have problems.
Older Macs must stay with 9 or earlier, but if you have a Blue&White G3 tower or newer model, and at least 256 megs RAM, cough up the $129 for the upgrade and also be sure to upgrade your most important applications as well. You want to spend as little time running Classic applications as possible.

Multiple Screens on iBook
You can get a neat hack that will enable your recent G3 or G4 iBook to support multiple monitors (instead of merely mirroring the internal screen on an external monitor as Apple intended). A little AppleScript called Screen Spanning Doctor is all it takes. This removes one of the significant differences between the iBook and the 12" PowerBook. The iBook has enough video RAM to support 1280x1024 pixels on an external display, at millions of colors, in addition to the normal 1024x768 pixels of the internal screen. Screen Spanning Doctor is in version 0.3.2 and is free with a donation requested so the author can keep working on upgrades.

Wireless and Wired Networking
Gone for good (almost) are the days when one had a single computer standing alone on a desk in your home office. "Home computer" is beginning to sound as quaint as "family car." Now there is usually one computer for each person in the house, plus one or two obsolete units in a closet. Hardcore geeks like me will have several active and a couple of backup computers. I slimmed down last year, making my 12" G4 PowerBook my primary; before that I had a G4 desktop and a G3 iBook which I used to remotely control my desktop wirelessly via the Timbuktu application. Sold 'em both when I got the laptop.
I have two floors in my house; three if you count the basement. Upstairs is my workhorse LaserWriter Pro 630 printer, my workstation area with 17" monitor and stand for my Powerbook for when I actually need to work at a desk. There is an external HD for backups, external keyboard and mouse, speakers and scanner. Upstairs is where the DSL modem comes in and connects to a router. An Ethernet cable snakes out the window, down to the dining room window, then along the ceiling and into a hub sitting on my stereo center. There I have all the AV equipment and also my old beige G3 with an SGI display. The hub feeds data from the DSL modem to that and to an AirPort Base Station, which radiates WPA (Wireless Protected Access) packets all over the house. The laptop sits on the coffee table, the kitchen table, the front porch or wherever I happen to be that I need online access.
Also plugged into the AirPort base station is an Epson C-80 printer. The base station has a USB port for that purpose and the printer can be accessed by my PowerBook from anywhere in the house.
Also coming out of the upstairs router is a cable to my neighbor's house so we can share bandwidth. We could do it wirelessly because he also has an AirPort-equipped PowerBook, but the range of the AirPort, even with an antenna, does not quite make it all the way. An Ethernet cable from a router can be up to 300 feet long, I believe.
Not done yet. On another table upstairs is an old 6360, which exists solely to drive an obsolete SCSI printer that uses ribbon technology and can print on card stock. It gets an Ethernet slot too, as does the Mac Color Classic, an ancient little 16 MHz 68030 unit with a 9" screen like the original Plus and Classic, except in color. This runs System 7 and contains ancient applications that cannot run on newer Macs, for those clients with WriteNow or MacWrite documents that they need converted to something they can read now.
It too is on the network, but since it lacks an Ethernet port, I have an Asanté EtherTalk box that converts to AppleTalk and connects to the printer port. I can share files between all of the Macs, and print to the LaserWriter. Only the PowerBook can print to the Epson because OSX is required on any other networked Mac to use it and only the PB is running OSX.
Whew.
The whole point of the above is to demonstrate what anyone can do in their home. Bulk Ethernet cable can be bought at Fry's, along with a crimper so you can make your own custom-length cables. A thousand feet of cable and the tools will cost less than ten 50' ready-made cables. Smaller retail outlets usually don't have all the various lengths you might need; the shortest ones I have in my network are three feet and the longest about 100 feet. It is always better to have cables the correct length than to have one that is way too long coiled up in a knot under the table.

Coming Soon
At Macworld, Keyspan announced an ethernet USB Server. From the press release:
"Keyspan announces its revolutionary USB Server that connects USB devices to a Mac or PC via a wired or wireless Ethernet-based LAN. The USB Server will ship in late Q1 2004 with an MSRP of $129.
Much like a USB print server, the USB Server enables attached USB devices to be used and shared by client PCs on a LAN. In addition to printers, the USB Server supports other USB devices such as hard drives, scanners, and more.
The USB Device Server provides 4 ports for connecting to USB devices at Full Speed USB (12 Mbps). It connects to 10/100 Ethernet networks via an RJ45 connector and supports static IP, DHCP, and Apple's Rendezvous address assignment. Client PCs must be running Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Mac OS X 10.2.8 or higher.
"This USB Server makes it possible to use and share USB printers, scanners, and hard drives across a LAN," noted Mike Ridenhour, president of Keyspan. "Yet, its most innovative use may be to enable Wi-Fi-based laptops to connect to remote USB devices."
This is a great idea, and makes your network even more useful. Another reason to switch to OSX, folks.

Letters
John M writes, "Hi Michael... After reading your January 2004 Macking article where you mentioned the need to Repair Permissions in OSX I thought I would suggest the shareware noted below...
From Atomic Bird, Macaroni ($8 shareware) is an OSX system Preference Pane item that automatically does daily, weekly and monthly Unix maintenance including Repair Permissions. The main window shows the last date/time Macaroni ran, and if you want to see what it did in more detail there's a View History button.

OCR for OSX
People have inquired "Does anyone make OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software for OSX? None of the ones I use have updated." Yes, there is. ReadIRIS Pro does exactly what you need. IRIS is a European software company and their OCR products are #1 in the world. Should be worth a look.

Good News for SGI Display Fans
In 1999, SGI marketed a TFT display, 1600x1024, the only one on the market besides Apple's original cinema display. It was slightly cheaper, but became the darling of the ad agencies, who used it in photo shoots whenever there was a need for a super-cool computer monitor. It cost $3700. Apple's Cinema Display had the same pixel count but was physically larger and cost $4 grand.
Radius contracted with SGI to market one of them in the same blue and white plastic as the original G3 tower that was the first new-generation Mac, incorporating Firewire and USB.
Unfortunately the whole project was a serious money-loser for SGI who finally pulled the plug and orphaned the monitor, and the company that made the video cards (Number Nine, hereafter referred to as Plan Nine) went out of business immediately afterwards. The cards for the blue & white units were made by Formac of Germany.
I got one of these displays for my beige G3 (a black one, with a Plan Nine card) and was very happy with it. I migrated it to my Sawtooth G4 tower and it still worked until I went to OSX. Compatibility went away and I could no longer see the UNIX startup screen and there were redraw problems. SGI washed their hands of the thing and it fell to a low of $450 on eBay.
Now there is great news. A company called UltraFlex Incorporated, started by some of the engineers on the original SGI project, has taken on the job of supporting, repairing and rebuilding the existing stock of displays. They have a graphics card that will support all modern OSes, including 10.x, Linux, Unix and even Microsoft. You can buy refurbished displays for under a thousand dollars, and the new cards are $255. This is competition for the Apple 20" display, which costs $1299 for a similar pixel count but will work with any Mac from the beige G3 forward. This almost makes me wish I had not moved my own system to the PowerBook exclusively and still ran a tower. My own SGI is currently serving as a display for my aging beige G3, which is running OS9 and sitting on my stereo rack as an MP3 jukebox. Talk about overkill. Still, I'm glad to know that if I decide to upgrade it to a G4 Tower and run OSX on it too I can still use my SGI.
I just wish there were a was a way to install it in a Cube with a 120-gig HD running Panther. Now THERE is an MP3 jukebox!

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)