Tips Tricks Samples

Having been a latecomer to the Apple world I am now going full on with all the kit. My new Airport Express arrived today and I have just spent 90 minutes getting the bugger to work. That’s two things which have not been easy to get going now. The problems stemmed from me already running a wireless network with WEP encryption. After much resetting, configuring and failing I found someone who had exactly the same problems as me here.

The solution for me was one of his early tries to add a $ in front of the WEP key when joining my existing network. I have yet to understand why this works or, indeed, why it is not mentioned in the Apple documentation that I can find. But it’s all working now and it is very cool indeed.

A fairly specific requirement I’ll grant you but thought I would document it all the same. This is the first thing I have come across for the PowerBook that is not straight forward, and the phone company don’t offer much help, so after much internet scouring here are a couple of links.

The latter link is excellent. First download the GPRS scripts and then follow the instructions exactly. For my specific combination (K700i, Powerbook 17″, OS X 10.3.5, Orange UK, Bluetooth) the script which worked was Sony Ericsson GPRS CID4. If it proves useful then tip Ross Barkman for his hard work, because noone else seems to have worked this stuff out (mobile phone networks included for some reason).

This is going to be old hat for anyone who is fully immersed in the Apple world. But here is my list of software which I have, so far, found useful:

One of our Domino servers was upgraded from 5.0.12 to 6.0.3, late I know but the environment only started the transition a couple of months ago. We came across our first server upgrade issue when a scheduled Java agent tried to run.

The agent manager was up and running fine but every time it tried to load a Java agent we got an error through the log file – java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: java/util/zip/Inflater. Not something I had seen before so a trip to notes.net later and we had a solution. This is really a placeholder for myself for future reference but it does raise an interesting issue (to me at least). I must have upgraded 10 or 15 servers over the last few months and not seen any problems at all, it’s exactly these sort of sporadic and non-repeatable problems which annoy me about computing. I realise that something must be different between this server and all of the other ones I work on, but how?

Not a biggie really, just exasperating.