Status-Q

It took me some time to work out how to connect to my T-Mobile (UK) GPRS network using my Mac and my Motorola V3 RAZR phone, so I’ve posted this in case somebody out there is Googling for similar things!

1. Go to Ross Barkman’s splendid page and download the ‘Scripts for Motorola GPRS phones’. Unstuff it and copy the scripts into /Library/Modem Scripts
2. Quit Internet Connect and System Preferences if they’re running. They need to restart to pick up the new modem scripts.
3. Look at the Readme that comes with the scripts. In particular, if you’ve used GPRS phone connections before you may be expecting to put *99# as the phone number. These scripts expect you to put the APN instead, which in my case is general.t-mobile.uk
4. You may need to configure the PPP connection, for example to turn off PPP Echo packets. This sort of control is not available through Internet Connect, so go to the Network section of System Preferences, select the Bluetooth section and click Configure. Here you can set the PPP options
5. You can also choose the Bluetooth Modem type. I used Motorola GPRS CID 1.
6. The account name for T-mobile in the UK is ‘user’ and the password is ‘pass’. Similar information for other networks is on Ross’s page.
7. Configurations made through System Prefs seem to update a default ‘Main Number’ configuration in Internet Connect when you click ‘Apply’. The interaction between these two is not entirely clear – I should stick to making changes in the System Prefs.

A very cool new utility included in Tiger is Grapher, which draws lovely graphs of equations in 2d or 3d, and does a whole lot more too.

This is z = 1-sin(x)+sin(2y), but there are some much more complicated and beautiful examples in the ‘Examples’ menu:

What you can’t see here is the fact that it’s rotating gently, and you can turn it in any direction you want using the mouse…

Worth investigating.

Bonjour, Bonjour!

Apple’s Rendezvous technology, largely an implementation of the Zeroconf standards, has been renamed to ‘Bonjour’ for trademark reasons.

Following yesterday’s not-entirely-smooth upgrade process, I now have my main machine running Tiger, and, apart from a few wrinkles, it’s great. (Here’s a very minor wrinkle for UK users: if you install the weather widget in Dashboard, it’ll cleverly select London as the location for the forecasts. Unfortunately, I think it’s selecting London, Ontario, or one of the other Londons; the forecast certainly isn’t right for us. Specify “London, United Kingdom” and it’s fine) Two and a half years ago, after installing Jaguar, I wrote that one of the good things about Apple software updates is that they generally make your machine faster, where Microsoft ones (in my now rather distant experience) tended to do the opposite. Well, the trend continues, and though there are some things that take more time in Tiger, in general the system seems noticeably snappier.

The following is an account of my experiences upgrading my Powerbook to the new “Tiger” version of Mac OS X – a long spiel which is probably of very little interest to anybody not likely to be doing the same thing… and probably not of much interest to them!

This turned out to be a very long post and only suitable for those with great stamina, so I’ve moved it into the Comments. Summary for the rest of you: Buy an external firewire drive if you don’t have one, do a complete bootable backup onto it before starting. Then reboot with a system CD and use Disk Utility to verify/repair your disk. Then do the install. Then reboot with the Tiger DVD and ‘Repair permissions’. That’s my recommendation, anyway, and you can read the rest if you want to know the reasoning.