Tonight from 8 pm to 9 pm (local Swedish time) will be the time for my first appearance on radio. Not just the web-radio version, but actual frequency modulated energy transmitted to peoples radios via.. air. The show in question is a local Swedish show appearing once a week on friday nights playing electronic music (sometimes referred to as synth). I’ll be playing music together with two friends: mDr and Diverge. So, if you’re a resident in Stockholm or the areas around it tune your radio to 95,3 MHz or point your media player to the digital web-version of the show (which will be working when we go on the air).

I’ve collected a few tracks which I think will be good energizers for a friday night, kind of as a preparation for the upcoming dance floors for the night. We’ll see how I manage to dish those tracks out for you. =)

Yes!

Since my switch from PC to Mac I’ve had to find a new instant messaging program which preferably has support for multiple protocols. The application of choice here seems to be Adium, which I’ve been using since I got my Mac. The main drawback compared compared to Miranda (which I’ve been using on my various PCs) is that it lacks support for IRC.

Until today, that is. Today I found out that the current beta of Adium has support for IRC, and it also supports SSL connections to the server you use (provided that the server supports it too, of course). Being the old school user of IRC that I am I immediately noticed that the layout of group chat windows in Adium didn’t quite fit my mental image of what IRC chat windows should look like. This is where Adiums styles come to the rescue!

The internets provided me with this excellent style: irc 2.0. It also has inverse color schemes for those of you who don’t like the black background.

My life as a happy Mac-user continues.

What else is better to do than to act on your wishes and make something of them? As a reaction to my previous post today I got in the car and drove around a bit. I ended up at Kungsängens Brygga where I got out in the freezing weather (-16 degrees Celsius) and took a few pictures.

A little while later I figured I’d take a few pictures of the car I’m currently driving (a loaner while my own is in the shop). A thumbnail and a link to the gallery if you click the thumbnail:

Enjoying a soft saturday. Woke up and thought it was sunday and that I had overslept (I need to get up on sunday morning to work a bit), but relaxed again and grabbed my laptop and started catching up on the blogs / feeds I subscribe to. Looking out the window I feel a need to get in the car and go out and take some pictures. Could be that going through the ‘Photography’ category in my feed reader has inspired me. Thinking about trying out the famous ‘one picture a day’ project, but I’m wondering how I’ll have the energy and will to take my camera with me each and every day since I’m already bringing my laptop with me everywhere I go. Need to work these things out first.

For quite some time it’s bothered me why changes I make to my mailbox while using IMAP as the access protocol to the server won’t be persisted immediately, but only upon closing the mail client. This is particularly annoying if you’ve organized a bunch of e-mails at home and then check your iPhone (or other client) just to see the old stuff still lying around.

Finally I found the setting which seems to cure this problem, at least if you’re using Thunderbird as your IMAP client. In your preferences dialog under the “General” tab click the button “Config Editor…“. Enter “expunge” In the search field and change the “mail.imap.expunge_after_delete” from “false” to “true“. To be specific this only seems to concern the deletion of e-mails, but it has worked for me when moving e-mails around from folders as well, so I’m happy!

Hope this works for you too, should you need it.

So, I’ve got my mail accounts hosted by an Exchange 2003 server and I’ve connected the borrowed iPhone I’m using to it – works perfectly. Now I’m looking to get the information from there into my Mac somehow. Apart from having my private mail accounts in an Exchange server I’ve also got my professional mail account in an Exchange server and I’m currently using Google Calendar as a merging platform for my calendars (mostly because I don’t want to have to look at two devices in order to determine if I’m available or not).

While trying to solve this I found this article yesterday which has helped me adding my Google Calendar to Thunderbird using two plugins. Since Thunderbird has come to version 3 nowadays I had to download the latest nightly builds of the plugins, they are available here. So now I’ve got my mail working in Thunderbird (although via IMAP) and I’ve also got my calendar with read&write access connected to Google Calendar. Now I just need to figure out how I’ll get the information exchange with my private Exchange account and Google Calendar up and running. For my professional Exchange account I’m using a software called SyncMyCal running within my virtual Windows 7 machine dedicated for work.

Another potential solution might be to have a look at CalDAV for Exchange, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. =)

While preparing my MacBook Pro which I bought for myself on my 30th birtday this Wednesday one of the things to get done was to get the 3G-modem to work. Having used the modem on my various Windows-machines before I knew that a OS X installer was lying around on the internal memory, so I just fired it up. Sadly it turned out that the Launch2Net installer failed, so I proceeded to uninstall it.

After awhile I found a newer version of Launch2Net which allegedly is Snow Leopard compatible (I need to learn that 10.x releases actually differ quite a lot internally from time to time), so I downloaded that one and installed it. Only problem now was that even though the manual claimed that the software would fire up automatically when the modem was inserted nothing happened! No matter how many times I uninstalled the software, rebooted or removed it with AppCleaner and then re-installed it. No go.

By now I started wondering if the rollback of the first installer hadn’t ended cleanly. Long story short, after learning that drivers aren’t what drivers are in Windows but are rather installed as kernel extensions I began looking for where these extensions are stored, the answer is: /System/Library/Extensions. Well, lo and behold – even after having uninstalled all visible traces of the software there were extensions left (named NMSonyEricsson[...]). After having manually deleted these extensions (which actually are folders containing binaries and other stuff) I rebooted and then installed the latest version of Launch2Net SonyEricsson Edition (the link is specifically for the modem I have (SonyEricsson MD400) which in my case happens to be 1.9.1.0 and then rebooted again.

Now it all works! The software fires up when I plug in the modem and it configures itself according to the network the SIM card belongs to and I’m able to connect. I’ve been listening to Spotify for the past 40 minutes now without a hitch – so I’m happy!

What I’m taking away from this is that I continue to not be surprised by the crappy quality a lot of cell network providers have to live with when distributing hardware for which someone else provides the software. Especially when we’re talking about a niche operating system like Mac OS X.

Yesterday was my 30th birthday and it passed without any deadly incidents – phew! What I do want to mention though is that I got a present from my girlfriend which really rocks, I must say!

The best way to explain what I got is to show you this youtube-video:

If all goes well I’ll be a squeeling little boy in that car and I have a feeling that it’s gonna rock my socks off! =)

Now that I’m in between assignments I thought I’d take the opportunity to install Windows 7 on my work laptop (a HP 8510w) in order to get better performance in my virtual machines. Several colleagues have already installed Windows 7 on their laptops of the same model, so I figured I’d take the plunge.

A colleague recommended that I should use a USB drive to install from as this would save me a lot of time and since I had read about the tool that Microsoft har released for this I figured that I would give it a go. Turns out that I had to download the tool from a CNET server because the tool has been pulled by Microsoft due to a license problem. Went ahead and prepared my 4 GB USB stick with the ISO and rebooted.

After having clicked the “Install Now” button all I get is a dialog telling me that I’m missing a CD/DVD device driver and tells me that I should browse for a location containing the drivers needed. That is misses a working driver is, in my view, utter bullshit. Why? Because when I browse for the drivers (which I don’t have by the way, because who needs drivers for a CD/DVD drive nowadays?) I can browse my hard drive (so it’s not a problem with not having a working hard drive to install to), a CD inserted into the CD drive, and the contents of the USB stick containing the Windows 7 installation.

Googleing the problem shows a bunch of people having this problem due to faulty burns of their DVDs, but this doesn’t apply to me since I’m using a USB stick to install (but I did re-prepare the USB stick three times just to be sure). The few people I’ve found that have had this problem haven’t had it with earlier versions of Windows 7 (betas and release candidates) and some of them seem to have cured the problem by changing the SATA configuration in their BIOSes (i.e. changing from SATA mode to IDE mode). One Microsoft site even suggests that the controller in the computer is not compatible with the AHCI driver provided by Microsoft. How the heck could it not be compatible when it’s been working without a problem in Windows Vista? Actually I thought about changing SATA settings in the BIOS, but I didn’t find any settings which solved this problem.

Tomorrow I’ll try to install from a DVD which is known to have worked for a bunch of my colleagues and see what happens then. But somehow I don’t really beleive in success. After having re-prepared the USB stick three times the corruption problem is most likely not what’s causing this, so it’s more likely that i’ve got a weird hardware revision of the laptop which screws this up.

Things like this want me to get a MacBook Pro and just forget about problems like these! Atleast there’s a greater chance to get Windows working virtually…

A couple of years ago we bought a Popcorn Hour A100 in order to be able to play our digitized movies and without having to have a dedicated computer for this task. Now that we’ve moved we found ourselves in a position where we couldn’t avoid having a network cable lying across the floor in our living room.

Having had that cable there for almost three months finally pushed us over the ledge and we decided that something had to be done. Either the cable would have to be nailed to the wall all the way around the room or we would have to find a wireless solution. Looking at the room and the length of cable it would require I decided to have a look at what’s possible to do with WLan. =)

By the way, some of you might claim that the problem could be solved with adapters transmitting the network through the electrical circuits, but that’s already been tested in our household and it didn’t work for full HD 1080p media (actually it didn’t even work with a DVD rip).

Having checked around for the theoretical maximum bandwidth required for HD media I realized that a G network (54 Mbps maximum, theoretical, throughput) wouldn’t cut it. Instead I figured that the new N standard might be enough. Looking around the internet I came across this Linksys ethernet bridge and decided that it looked interesting. But considering the increase in Apple computers we had already considered purchasing an Apple Airport Express in order to ensure that the wireless access point and the Apple computers would have the best possible circumstances to achieve the maximum throughput available. So, would it be a wise decision to use a Linksys wireless device in conjunction with a Apple Airport Express and still expect maximum throughput? No, probably not. True, the wireless-N draft has now become a standard but that doesn’t mean that all different N-devices from different vendors immediately will receive a firmware update and begin to cooperate flawlessly from day one. So, given that Apple states that the Airport Express unit can also work as a network extender it became apparent that going the Airport-route would be the most efficient one. Apart from that – the difference in cost between the Linksys ethernet bridge and the Apple Airport Express is a mere $27.

Said and done – two Apple Airport Express devices were purchased and installed the same day as they arrived. The installation using my Windows Vista laptop was pretty straight forward apart from one thing. Although the Airport utility successfully found the first Airport, double-clicking it just gave me an error message stating that an error had occurred while reading it’s configuration. The solution here is to select ‘Configure other’ from the ‘File’-menu. Enter the IP-address of the device (which can be seen in the applications main screen) and also provide the default password (which is ‘public’) and there you go. I’m quite impressed by the amount work Apple has put into making the setup process end up with a proper configuration. As an example I was warned about the fact that the Airport Express had detected that it was probably performing double NAT (since it had been connected to our existing NATed network). One click on an OK-button and problem solved. Brilliant!

The other Airport Express had to be configured in the same way, just that this one would be set to extend the wireless network instead of creating one. This results in the ability to connect wired devices to the ethernet port of that Airport Express and thus making them wireless.

In my test I managed to transmit 70 Mbps from our NAS (Netgear ReadyNas NV+) to my Vista Laptop using CIFS over the wireless link. Quite impressive if you ask me. In the creation of the wireless network I chose to use the 5 GHz band only and in combination with WPA2. I might choose to activate 2,4 GHz later on, but that might reduce performance, so we’ll see.

While testing the performance of the Popcorn Hour using a full high definition movie (1080p) I noticed stuttering only once during a scene with a lot of fire and explosions. Switching the Popcorn Hour from CIFS (SMB) to NFS in its communication with the NAS seems to have solved this problem as well. It is a well known fact that the CIFS implementation on the Popcorn Hour might not be up to scratch, so uing NFS will more than likely give better performance. Which it did. =)

So all in all – I can recommend building a wireless bridge using Apple Airport Express devices for your HD media streaming needs. Of course, depending on how your house / apartment is built you might not have the same success as we’ve had. As an example I wasn’t able to create the network from within our wardrobe and retain the performance I needed – the wall is simply too thick for the 5 GHz network to go through fully.