Oops, a BIG oops.
Last month I wrote about Fax STF, MacCommCenter and mis-identified who offered what with their modems. Supra ships Faxcilitate, a variation on Fax STF, and it is a good program. It is US Robotics that is guilty of including MacComm Center, which is barely worth the energy it takes to delete it.
I also got this message from "Erik W.":
Read June Bits where you talked bout GV modems. Not sure if you'd want to recommend people buy Supra. A head of the Supra Mac group, Tim Thomas, is a member of the Corvallis MUG. A couple months ago he mentioned that he was fired for speaking up for Mac.
I wrote to Tim and here is his response.
During a closed employee meeting in February Bill Schroeder, Pres & CEO of Diamond, said in response to a question about 'our' future plans for the Mac, that the Mac was a distraction to the future plans of Diamond. A day or two later, I sent the following to Chris McVeigh (sp?) at MacSense. He published it pretty much as I wrote it, and I was fired for my troubles.I suspect that Supra will always have a Macintosh package, since a modem is a modem whether you want to use it for a Mac or a PC. They'll find some software to bundle with it, but the original developer of Faxcilitate is also gone, so they'll have to find something else sometime down the road.
Diamond probably won't be interested in developing any video products for the Mac, but that's just as well. Most of their cards are pretty bad. Anyway, here's the article that did me in:
Diamond Multimedia (Supra) to ignore Mac market
Supra has long offered modem packages tailored for the Macintosh, and will continue to sell a variety of existing 33.6K Mac products. A new 56K Macintosh modem package is expected to reach the market, but popular Macintosh software such as FaxNetwork has been dropped.
Diamond Multimedia produced the Javelin Video 3000, a series of high-performance PCI-based video cards for the Macintosh. Though the cards were lauded by such magazines as MacUser, they received a lukewarm reaction from consumers. The card has been discontinued.
The Diamond/Supra web site is at http://www.diamondmm.com/.Well, Erik, I probably won't be recommending Supra any more. Global Village has just released a 56K modem; I would love to hear from anyone who has one.
Sony Camera gotchas
Much as I like the Sony camera, I must mention that the software they ship is the barest minimum to do the job, and it is very particular in the way it connects to your Mac.
First of all, it requires one of your serial ports. If you don't have a modem, you have no problem, but if you have both a modem and an AppleTalk printer like most of us, then there is a specific sequence of events you must follow to download images from the camera.
First, go to the chooser and turn off AppleTalk. (Not necessary if you have Ethernet to your printer and the printer port is not used.)
Then unplug the LocalTalk/PhoneNet box and plug in the camera cable. The Mac does NOT need to be shut down for this.
With the camera off, plug the other end of the cable into it.
Then turn the camera to Play, after having set the communication rate to the fastest setting. (You DID read the manual, right?)
Then, and only then, open the Camera Utility application and Open the link to the camera. It makes the connection by scanning the serial ports in succession three times, and if it does not see the camera you get an error message. There is no built-in help that will make it easy to debug problems connecting. If you get the sequence wrong, it will not work.
Some A-B port switches are not correctly wired and do not work with the camera cable, even if they work perfectly for your other serial devices. I do recommend you get one because it saves wear and tear on the cable, but make sure you can get your money back if it fails to work. Using them is the same process, except you can leave the camera cable plugged into the box all the time. Just make sure you turn off AppleTalk before switching to the camera port, and then launching the utility.
Searching Oregon Law on a Mac
Ron Ledbury writes,
Apple College Loan ProgramI just thought I'd send you a note to let you know about my Web site: www.teleport.com/~orivy/.
If you are off to college this fall, Apple has re-instituted their retail loan program. If you buy from a retail store (not an educational institution-linked outlet), you may qualify for a low-interest loan with low qualifying income requirements. To find out more, call 800-277-5356 or visit www.appleloan.com. You can be qualified in five minutes. The loan can also be used to buy software and other 3rd-party equipment as long as the total does not exceed 25% of the cost of the Apple-brand equipment. Range is from $1,000 to $10,000 and you can take up to four years to repay. The retailer has an advantage, too, because Apple does not charge the usual merchant fees that the credit card companies do. Smart move, Apple.
The Mail-Order House is Lying...
...and they are required to by law! It seems when a retailer takes your money for a product that is not yet released, they MUST give you a date when the product will ship, even when they have no idea.
For instance, Bungie Software, publishers of Marathon 2, have a policy that no release dates will be given to anyone under any circumstances. This leads the retailer, who must plan their catalogs well in advance, to be offering products that they do not have and don't know when they will get.
What they do is known as the "two-week rule." When you order, they will tell you that "it's out of stock; but we will get a shipment within two weeks." That way, if it does not ship by then, the customer will have waited and when they call back, they can say "The publisher pushed back the release date another week." The customer has only two choices: wait or cancel the order and buy somewhere else. But if the product has not shipped, then they will get the same answer from the next outlet, all an excuse for not having the product.
Moral: don't expect to get new software on the first day of release. Be patient.
Mac Client for IRC
If you want to participate in International Relay Chat (IRC), the best client software is called "ircle." From MacWay, Guy Kawasaki writes,
Connectix VirtualPC
The buzz on this new product is downright deafening. Reports coming in from beta testers say that this Wintel emulation program blows the pants off of SoftWindows. Pentium instructions are emulated perfectly, as is SoundBlaster. This means that you will be able to get those non-Mac CD-ROMs and install and use them with ease. Of course you will still be running Windows, subject to all the problems and headaches thereof (including all 6,000 of their viruses), but if you need it, it looks good. By next month this product should be available; pricing was not yet set because it was not decided if they would bundle Windows or make you buy it separately.Of course the faster your Mac, the faster VirtualPC will run. Don't expect much on an older PowerMac (or anything on a non-PowerMac), but any PCI machine over 100 MHz should be useable.
PPP for Open Transport problems
During an hour-long conversation with Ken Peterson (Peterson Techsystems in Tigard), I learned that PPP for Open Transport 1.0, which is installed with System 7.6, is riddled with obscure bugs that dramatically slow down file transfers and Web page downloads. It is quite subtle and everything appears to be okay, but the reality is that many servers wind up transmitting the same packet of data three times when one is all that is needed. So you appear to be getting good throughput on your 28.8 modem, but the actual data received is much less.
Ken explained the gory details in technical language I barely understood, but the bottom line is that FreePPP version 2.5v3 is a much better alternative. Now I had given up on the 2.x versions of FreePPP because so many people experienced crashing while using them, and installed version 1.0.5 on all client Macs using classic networking and versions of 7.5. (7.1 and before require MacPPP 2.0.1, an out-of-sequence version much older than 1.0.5. The numbers appear out of sequence because PPP, MacPPP and FreePPP are not the same thing; FreePPP is not an Apple product, but is developed by the Free PPP Group and programmed by Steve Dagley. I found it via AltaVista search, located on the Macworld page. MacPPP 2.0.1 is a copyrighted product of the University of Michigan.)
But Ken told me that the current version of FreePPP is quite stable and not subject to the bugs in earlier versions, and gives much better throughput than Apple's official release. So now I am going to disable my copy of PPP for OT 1.0 and install the newer version, to see if I also notice an improvement.
If you want to do this yourself, and you are also running PPP/OT, you need to open Extensions Manager and disable the following pieces of Open Transport that work with PPP/OT: OpenTpt Modem, OpenTpt Remote Access, and OpenTpt Serial Port Arbitrator. The Serial Port Arbitrator, sometimes implicated in obscure extension conflicts, is the extension that lets a modem's fax software step out of the way when PPP wants to make your Internet connection. Most of the time, the modem works just fine without it, and if you do not use the fax-receive capability of your modem you should disable all of the faxing extensions and control panels as well. Of course don't forget to disable the PPP control panel too!
Two known bugs in the previous version (FreePPP 2.5v2) are: Your Mac will freeze if you click the Stop button while it is trying to make a connection, and the first time you open the FreePPP Setup application after a Restart, the Connect button will be dimmed and you will need to click the "Allow Applications to Open Connection" box, launch your email program or web browser and let it force the connection open. After that, your Connect/Disconnect button should be enabled. The former bug is consistent and repeatable, the latter happens only on some setups.
It is normally not wise to leave the "Allow Applications to Open Connection" option set, because certain AppleEvents in other control panels and applications (After Dark, for instance) can send a false command to PPP and your Mac will initiate a connection to your IS provider even if you are not in the room. Not fun if your only phone line gets tied up and you are charged for hourly use! The fix is to get 2.5v3, which squashes these bugs.
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.)