Relatively Ignorant Blog

The iPhone is famous for its on-screen keyboard, a world away from the limited keyboard of a classic mobile phone like the Nokia N95.

I’m still getting used to the iPhone’s virtual QWERTY and my accuracy is improving, especially learning which part of my thumbs touch the keyboard.

iPhone also has decent typography. It displays a wide range of characters and many can be entered using the virtual keyboard.

While the N95 can display ‘curly’ quotes, they are ugly (see below). There is also no way to enter them using the phone. I care about such things.

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I’m loving my iPhone so far. It partners very well with my Mac (naturally).

But I’m amazed that it has no native to-do list as part of the Calendar app. iCal on the Mac does and I assumed that the iPhone would follow suit.

I’m trialling Appigo To Do Lite (free) and find it good so far.

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Last Saturday I finally got an iPhone. I had been thinking about it for a while but decided to wait until the 3rd generation was released before making the jump.

I had lived with a Nokia N95 for a couple of years and was disappointed with it as a mobile application platform. I found it slow to do many things and the keyboard too limited to be practical.

I wanted to blog about it from the phone itself but couldn’t get blogging software to work. So I’ll try that for/from the iPhone, starting now.

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Some time after its purchase by Future Publishing, cyclingnews.com has remodelled the site.

So I needed to update my Greasemonkey script, which I hadn’t done for a couple of years. I have updated it to work with the new page structure but mostly have made the team highlighting much better. By using borders I can use three colours for each team.

I’ve lost my password at UserScripts so I have put the script here.

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Yesterday I picked up a second-hand NetGear PS110 parallel print server from an eBay seller. When I got it home I couldn’t find it on our network because its previous owners had configured it with an IP address I didn’t know.

This print server (along with the PS101 and PS113) doesn’t have a physical reset button to return it to factory settings. There are plenty of forum posts on the Net complaining of this and asking for a fix.

Its documentation advises installing the Windows setup program to program the device. This program uses NetBEUI to find and control the print server and can change its TCP/IP settings. I didn’t want to try that because none of our Windows (Vista) machines uses NetBEUI. (The device was released in 1999. Also, I use a Mac.)

I found this solution:

1. Find the print server’s IP address. Potentially the tricky part. I connected it directly to my MacBook Pro and used Wireshark to watch traffic on that interface. The print server advertised itself as an address that luckily is within our home subnet. Otherwise I would have needed to temporarily reconfigure the Mac’s Ethernet interface so I could reach it.
2. Connect to the print server using FTP. These print servers have a simple FTP server that provides a ‘back door’ for configuration. This is described in the reference manual, which is supplied as PDF on the CD and available in a number of places on the Net (including NetGear’s support site). You must connect with a command-line FTP client, not a GUI one. Each device has a default name printed on a sticker underneath it (‘PS’ followed by six hex digits): enter that name with a blank password to gain entry.
3. Reset to factory configuration. The FTP server has some files you can get, and some pseudo files that are ‘got’ to perform actions on the device. They include these:
   • CONFIG is a text file that contains current configuration. Its syntax is described in the manual. You can edit it, then put it back on the server as a new configuration (I didn’t do that).
   • PSINF is a read-only text file with a summary of the configuration.
   • The pseudo-file RESET is described as resetting the device but it appears to only reboot it.
   • The pseudo-file DEFAULTC is the one to reset to default configuration. Use the FTP command get DEFAULTC. The default configuration includes clearing device name and password, and setting it to use DHCP.
4. Restart the print server. Turn it off and then on again is the best way. It will get a new address from your DHCP server. Assuming you have control of that server you can get the print server’s new address. The manual recommends setting the IP address in the print server but I prefer to reserve an address for the PS110 in the DHCP server.
5. Use the web interface to configure the print server. Browse to http://new_IP_address/ and log in with the default name (as for FTP) and no password. I set the following on the System Configuration page:
   • a new name (not the default one).
   • a new password
   • disabled Appletalk, IPX/SPX and NetBEUI

   I checked the DHCP client was enabled and left everything else the same. You can turn off the DHCP client there and set a static IP address.

After that you have a working server that you can use from Windows, Mac, Linux etc.

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I was not at all surprised to read that Sensis is finally giving up on trying to be useful. I guess the web search is OK but White Pages and Yellow Pages searching is hopeless and the Whereis maps are crap.

Perhaps the Google tentacles are reaching too far. But when its products are so much better than the local competition, the locals don’t stand much of a chance.

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Some recent REST-related traffic in the blogosphere (both pro- and anti-) has discussed the ‘challenge’ of there being only a handful of REST verbs. The discussions revolve around how to map those verbs and the resources they act upon to a wide range of application functions. So we have Stefan (Tilkov?) writing: “I force my application semantics to adhere to the common HTTP semantics …”

Ugh! This smells like assembly-language programming. Application code isn’t written with CPU instructions and registers in mind; compilers and runtimes were long ago designed to take care of that.

We are at a primitive point in the development of applications to run on this networked computer. We need automatic compilation of high-level languages into ‘REST Assembly Language’ so we can write distributed applications much nearer to their problem domains.

Talk about RISC! This distributed computer has a tiny instruction set but limitless locations into which limitless pieces of information are organised.

Writing good compilers will be very challenging, but if the REST vision is to be fulfilled, very worthwhile.

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My MacBook Pro has recently started shutting down unexpectedly. I did some web searches and found that a number of people had been having the same problem.

I suspected power supply and battery problems but last night found out the real culprit – the poor thing’s been cooking! Fan monitors showed zero RPM for the CPU fan(s).

Oh dear. The Apple Hardware Test reported hardware failure 4SNS/1/40000000: 'TC0P', so it’ll have to go to the Mac doctor soon.

In the interim, I have nursed the MacBook Pro a bit by putting it on an upturned baking tray as a heatsink and having the ceiling fan in the office on full blast.

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Today I took a call on my N95 and was able to create an appointment in its calendar while still on the call.

The process was simple. I just put the phone on loudspeaker and kept talking while making the appointment in the calendar application.

That’s exactly the way you want a device like this to work.

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