Anatiferous blog | Move every zig.

Howdy! This is my (William Reading's) webpage. At the moment, I only have this blog script and my gallery up, but I hope to get more stuff on this page at some point, or so I thought when I created this site years ago. Updates and shiny new copy to eventually go here. If you'd like to contact me to point out that I've done something to break XHTML/CSS standards or heaven forbid--look at my Vita--drop me a line at my e-mail address bill +spam @ [ELEPHANT] aggienerds.org. Simply remove "+spam", the spaces and the pachyderm along with its brackets and that address will reach me. I'm also available on Jabber/GChat/AIM/MSN with the same address above.

I recently became a user of Sprint’s new EV-DO service, which I think is great with the exception of a few things. One of my major issues was that they use ByteMobile’s Optimization Services Node by default and don’t provide a Mac OS X client.

Now granted, they don’t even support Mac OS X, so I can hardly expect them to provide a client for disabling the image compression. On the other hand, I want to use Mac OS X and don’t like my images getting compressed. So I did what any red-blooded Mac OS X developer (well, or college student avoiding studying) would do and put on my reverse engineering cap.

After running ethereal on windows to get some idea what’s passing over the wire, I discovered two things:

1. The way Sprint deals with ByteMobile in their connection client is slightly wrong in that it assumes that if ByteMobile isn’t on, then nothing needs happen for the compression to be off. Since it defaults to on, this behavior is wrong. (I’ve got a support ticket in their queue with my name on it to report this problem)
2. I don’t have to actually reverse engineer their protocol because all I need to do is replay the magic disable packets from the client

A few hours later, out came ByteMe Optimizer. I’m not sure if it’s quite perfect yet, but it suits my ends pretty well. If you use Vodaphone, China Mobile, T-Mobile, Cingular, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Sprint, or a mobile provider that for whatever reason seems to mangle your images (hint: bmi.js may be lurking in your downloaded html), give ByteMe Optimizer a try!

If you’re you’re compiling dante on Mac OS X, remember to include -lresolv in your LDFLAGS to avoid link errors.

A while back, I picked up a copy of Microsoft Streets and Trips with a GPS because that’s the easiest way to get a GPS locally since a store carrying it (Best Buy) is within walking distance of campus. As luck would have it, this GPS is a remarked Pharos GPS-360, which uses a Prolific pl2303 usb to serial converter. This means that the GPS is compatible with the v1.08 driver for Mac OS X. If you happen to have one of these things, just google for a copy of that driver and use this Info.plist in the driver’s extensions folder. Also delete the kextcache file before rebooting.

Update: Someone wrote in asking where to find the driver. It’s available on the prolific web site and a http://tech.prolific.com.tw/visitor/fcabdl.asp?fid=33667101 as long as it stays up. By the way, if you have the money available, I wholeheartedly recommend the GPS-360 bluetooth adapter. It doesn’t require any additional drivers to work with Mac OS X and you can position it anywhere in the vehicle.

Update 2: New link here: http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=31

All in all, it wasn’t too bad, at least compared to getting the broken install of Rhapsody to install on x86. A couple of things to note though: It doesn’t appear to work when just Mac OS 9 is installed–I had to install Jaguar first to get it to work properly. I found that bit out through trial and error by installing OS 9 first, then Puma, then Jaguar. Second, there is an issue with the video card where it just goes off–I’m not sure if it’s just the small bit of memory or what, but I should be getting some new cards for it next week.

That said, it’s pretty cool that it still works on such an old system with such little work. Here are some screenshots of different bits of it:

Well, looks like I got fton ported over to Mac OS X now. It really wasn’t that hard of a port, but I was caught up by some termios flags since I’m pretty unfamiliar with this in general (It works now thanks to akunokuroneko figuring out what the problem was after I isolated the broken line of code). The next step here is to get rulib ported over so that I can start borrowing little bits of code from grusched on the path to building a Cocoa app that can talk to the watch. I’m also looking forward to doing some work with the new iSync API’s that are in Mac OS X tiger.

Following WWDC, I’m trying to learn Cocoa better, so I went on Amazon and searched for “Cocoa". I was amused by the results:

I suppose Apple does want people to Think Different, right?

So now I’m registered at WWDC 2004 and waiting for breakfast before the tutorials. Yesterday wasn’t too bad, though it did take a fair amount of time to get into hostel, and the accomodations aren’t too bad–I ended up with 5 Irishmen, one of which was afraid that he’d fall out of the open window while he was sleeping next to it. Apparently today they’re supposed to have some sort of group activities and we’re going to learn a bunch of Cocoa stuff. Keynote’s tomorrow, so I’ll have to work a little bit to get up front if that’s possible. Thankfully I can get up quite early here (accidentally got up at 6am localtime because I forgot to set back its clock a couple of hours), so I’ll probably be able to get here early, if not as one of the first.