While the implementation is neat, and it’s good to see you trying out new ideas, I personally think what you are doing is HORRIBLE. The best feature of the iphone is to see the web as it is intended. This means full pages, all graphics, just as it appears on a regular computer… not a watered down WAP version. You’ve just taken all the work apple did and then you’re forcing a watered down ‘WAP’ version down the throats of people who spent money on an iPhone ( we could have gotten this watered down version from a windows mobile device.)
I understand this is a personal blog of yours, but trends get set very easily.. Before you know it, more people will be doing this, and then all the features of the iphone are wasted… sigh…
At the very least, put a link at the top to give users a choice on how they’d like to view your page….
just my .02

It’s sort of the same argument that people make against spoofing your browser’s user agent; by conforming to the lowest common denominator, you’re slowing the adoption of better standards. And as an oldschool Mac user, I’m well aware of the dangers of such an approach. But as I noted in the comments myself, if there was a way to auto-detect whether an iPhone user was connecting over EDGE versus WiFi, it would provide the best of both worlds; a lightweight page for EDGE surfing and a full-featured one for WiFi browsing.

If the iPhone really takes off, this will hopefully become something of a non-issue within one to two years, especially if other cell providers come up with browsing solutions as elegant (by comparison) as Safari for iPhone. WAP sites by and large suck, but the principle of minimizing a site’s load time and maximizing its layout efficiency works just as well for a “real” browser as for a mobile one. So even Mitch’s minimal tweaking has already benefited his regular users. There’s a lesson here somewhere.

(And yes, I bought one. More on that part later, of course.)

Anyway, I was telling the nice lady on the other end of the phone that it wouldn’t be a problem for us to replace the RAM in the G5; it’s a very simple process. After a few minutes spent prepping the order, she mentioned off-handedly that installing the memory would be a simple process and that we wouldn’t have any problems doing so.

Being the polite fellow that I am, I decided not to point out that a) I’d already suggested this myself, and b) while talking to her on the phone, I was simultaneously balancing the motherboard of a Mac SE on my lap swapping out four 256K 30-pin SIMMs for their 1M equivalents. I figured it probably wouldn’t impress her as much as it should (“what’s an SE?”).

(There is a reason why I was upgrading a computer old enough to vote, but it’s complicated. More to come, though.)

How cool is that! Good thing it’s not barrel-shaped.

Imagine my surprise when, approximately halfway through the instructions, I discover the funniest thing: I’m missing two of the brackets necessary to secure the slide-out rails at the rear of the server. [Expletive]!

So I’m trying to get some part numbers from a friend of mine, and hopefully I can order the parts cheap from Apple. In a way it’s a good thing, because it gives me a chance to also get the poor thing fixed up (one of its drive bays has been dysfunctional for over a year) and ready for its eventual trip to—ah, but I’m giving it away. Anyway, soon it will be happy once more. And I’ll have learned a valuable lesson about inspecting an item promptly upon arrival.

Until yesterday, that is. That’s when I found this thread in the Ars Technica Mac forum, linking to a set of scripts which allow user control of the fans in an Intel Mac. By bumping the speed of the fans up a few hundred RPM, the machine’s temperature drops significantly, in my case almost 30 degrees Celsius on average. The underside is now only lukewarm to the touch, and the noise from the fans is almost imperceptible in our living room. (At work, it’s impossible to hear.)

Although the author of the scripts takes great pains to point out that all of this is unsupported and may damage the machine and so on, I can’t really see much of a downside. As long as the fans aren’t over-revved (5000 RPM seems to be their rated maximum), they’re helping to lengthen the lifespan of the hard drive, the CPU, and maybe even the battery — items which all despise heat, as a rule. Replacing the fans is a heck of a lot cheaper and easier than replacing those other components, too.

I fully intend to keep running the scripts on the MBP. Although they’re a little annoying in that they require re-running after sleep or restarting, and also require admin access each time, the benefits are already well worth it for me.

Last week, my boss mentioned to me that nobody’s really been using the MBP recently, and they want to get a feel for how it would work as a primary Mac for somebody. He asked if I would mind taking the laptop as my primary computer, replacing the mirror-door Power Mac G4 I’ve had since starting. (It was a pretty short conversation, I can assure you.)

So, I’m now the proud “owner” of a 2.16 GHz 15″ MacBook Pro, complete with 2 GB of RAM and a 100 MB hard drive. Go, me!

Thing is, this couldn’t have happened at a better time. I’m afraid my beloved Pismo may be on its final legs. It’s been running very, very hot lately, even hotter than the MacBook Pro if you can believe it. I think this may be responsible for a sharp dropoff in system stability, not to mention the AirPort card going in and out randomly after 5-10 minutes of use. Tonight, I also discovered the main battery no longer seems to hold a charge.

So I’ve pretty much transferred my life over to the MBP now. It still belongs to work, of course, but I essentially have exclusive use of it, so I’m not too concerned. Besides, it’s an even better test of its utility. (It’s not like I plan to use it to download movies or anything.)

I’m going to hang on to the Pismo, of course, and possibly dedicate it as a media machine. I’ve also toyed with the idea of separating the screen assembly and putting it in the WRX, but that’s a future project.

I am going to miss my beloved BatBook. It’s slow, the screen is going dim, and its keyboard doesn’t light up, but it’s been a faithful friend for over six years. I hope its current problems aren’t terminal.

Get well soon!

I talked on Thursday morning (at 3:30!) about my adventures in operating system updating, which ended up leaving the computer in a less-than-functional state. So, I ended up performing a successful Archive & Install, and set about the task of cleaning up the files left over by the installation process. Here’s a small section of one of the things I did:

cd "/Previous Systems.localized/Previous System 1"
sudo rm -r /Applications mach_kernel mach.sym

Can you spot the error? I didn’t. And as a result, I’m now reinstalling the OS again.

(Hint: there shouldn’t be a slash in front of “Applications”)

Depressingly idiotic on my part, I know, but at least I didn’t wipe out any actual irreplacable data. Still, it’s worth repeating that rm is dangerous when used indiscriminately. Also, computing at early hours of the morning may not be the wisest choice.

I’ve been holding off on updating the iMac DV that serves as my gateway to the home network for some time, skipping over Mac OS X v10.4.6 until a few annoying bugs could be resolved. Apparently, 10.4.7 does the trick, so tonight I decided to throw it on the iMac. And sure enough, before it could finish installing, the power flickered just enough to trip the machine (it’s more sensitive than most of the others). [Expletive]!

I wandered out to the table where it sits, hoping it might just have been optimizing, the install itself actually complete. Nope.

Due to the nature of the 10.4.6 update, two restarts are actually required for the process to finish. The iMac hung after powering itself back on, so I manually powered it off and back on. This time, it got to the desktop, but About This Mac still shows the system version as 10.4.5. Uh-oh.

To make matters worse, opening Safari or Software Update only resulted in a crash of each, under both the non-admin account normally logged in, and the local administrator account I set up for maintenance. And, of course, my only 10.4 DVD is at work.

So, I’ve turned it off for now, and over the weekend, I suppose I’ll be performing an Archive and Install and hoping for the best. Grrrr.

I believe the moral of the story has something to do with uninterruptable power supplies and the people who (don’t) use them, but it’s too early in the morning for such thoughts…

Michael was a fixture in the server community, author of “Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration” and a regular poster to several admin lists from Apple. He spoke at several WWDCs and consulted on any number of network setups. His death is a tremendous loss to the Mac community as a whole, and a tragedy beyond words. John Welch has a brief appreciation on his site as well.