Out of nostalgia I tried to get the emulator running again – but without leaving OS X, of course. Thanks to Parallels Desktop this should be easy, I thought. Just create a new virtual machine, install FreeDOS and copy the emulator on it.

The first hurdle was to know which memory driver to load. FreeDOS offers three choices: EMM386, EMM386+EMS and HIMEM XMS. I tried all of them, with 4 MB memory and more. The emulator would never run, but report different errors: Runtime errors, Fatal application error 04 or Unhandled Exception 0D at 00E7:1539 Error Code: 0000. I wasn’t really surprised, as the emulator never worked for me in the “DOS” boxes of any Windows version, because the emulator fiddles with the 640k limit of DOS in incompatible ways.

Before giving up I thought I’d try another road. Tony Chung had success running s3aemul with the bochs emulator under Linux. Bochs itself should be portable, but there is no OS X binary yet of the latest release. So I chose the Windows build and installed it in my XP virtual machine. This time I got lucky and the emulator worked when starting FreeDOS with HIMEM XMS option.

The whole setup reminds me of Babushka Dolls:

• Outermost level: OS X
• 1st emulation: XP running in Parallels Desktop
• 2nd emulation: FreeDOS running in Bochs for Windows
• Innermost level: SIBO (Psions operating system) running in s3aemul

I’m quite happy with my alien operating system running along my other applications on my Mac. The biggest gripe is the keyboard.

• Parallels maps the Windows Alt key to the Mac alt/option key. Ok, Alt to alt seems quite logical, but my fingers don’t care what is written on the key – they remember by position. And the Windows Alt key sits right to the left of the space key!
• Though it’s handy to be able to tab out of Windows with Cmd-Tab, I can’t really tab back in. When I change the focus to Windows using Cmd-Tab, I have to press Cmd-I before my key presses are sent to Windows again (I know that I can use the mouse, but the keyboard is so much faster). I like when things are logical and symmetrical because that is what makes life easier.
• The support for AltGr (I have a Swiss German keyboard and need AltGr for all the programmers best friends: []{}|\@#) is weak, almost nonexistent. A couple of weeks back Parallels mapped the Enter key of Apple Laptops (the one to the right of the right Cmd key) as AltGr – without telling anyone. I don’t remember where I first found about this life saver, probably macosxhints, but surely not the Parallels help.
• As of the newest build (1970), Enter as AltGr has silently vanished again. And only hidden in the forum pages are instructions how to get back the AltGr behaviour involving the Terminal. This is not the Mac way to configure things! (Basically you have to create the file /Library/Parallels/.keyboard_config containing one word: numenterisaltgr and no LF following it).
• I dream of having the same keyboard layout inside and outside Parallels Desktop (e.g. using the option key to compose all these special characters in Windows), and perhaps even having a combined list of OS X and Windows applications when switching with Cmd-Tab.

One week per year I want to connect my Powerbook to the internet using GPRS. In principle this is easy: choose the right modem script in the Network Preferences and fill in the provider details.

Modem Script

Unfortunately, the Modem Scripts that come with OS X are rather old. I tried the newest one (for a T39), but failed. I asked the Swisscom hotline for help, but they told me that they don’t support Apple Computers and directed me to the commercial solution from Novamedia.de (”Mobile High Speed” for €87).

Next time my Powerbook was connected I found the Modem Script site of Ross Barkman with all the Scripts I wanted and the important piece of information, that you need to enter the APN in the phone number field.

Provider Details

I had two options: a Swisscom Mobile SIM card and an Orangeclick SIM card. Once I knew where to enter the APN, the configuration was easy, but navigating the provider sites to find the Details is not. This is what I found (and what worked):

• Swisscom Mobile GPRS Configuration (PDF): APN is gprs.swisscom.ch, leave user name and password empty.
• Orangeclick GPRS Configuration (the link works only when logged in): APN is click, leave user name and password empty. You need to buy the Express option for GPRS with Orangeclick!

According to the iSync Device List, the Motorola C350 is supported by iSync. But my phone was not found.

There are small differences between the supported model and mine. Using USB Prober^[1] my device announces itself as:

    Device VendorID/ProductID:   0x22B8/0x5802   (Motorola PCS)

whereas iSync expects^[2] a ProductID of 0x3802 for the C350.

Instead of editing the iSync plist file I created an iSync Plugin as Rui Carmo described in his detailed iSync Plugins Howto.

Download

From http://pesche.schlau.ch/isync/motorola-c350a.html or through this direct link.

Installation

Copy the MotorolaC350a.phoneplugin folder into one of these folders:

• /Library/PhonePlugins (makes the plugin available for all users)
• ~/Library/PhonePlugins

Then plug the phone with the data cable, restart iSync and Add Device… and the phone should be found immediately.

Update 2006-02-04

There are now at least two sites providing iSync Phone Plugins (which I haven’t tested):

• Steffen Zimmermanns DIY iSync Phone Plugin, featuring my “Script” (the Property List file) for the Motorola C350.
• Nova Media has a Free iSync Plugins page.

^[1] Installed as part of the Apple Developer Tools in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/USB Prober

^[2] This file has a rather long path:

/Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns/PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/MetaClasses.plist

Using the newest Development version of Quicksilver, you can now navigate the menu of the current application without a mouse, just by using Quicksilver. Unfortunately, the configuration of Quicksilver is not for the faint of heart, but Rui Carmo has nice instructions in The Tao of Mac.

I have chosen Alt-§ as hotkey for menu navigation. See an example for choosing a menu entry typing Alt-§ G R U (CD-Titel gruppieren = Join CD Tracks in iTunes):

I wanted to give dia a go and tried to install from Darwinports with sudo port install dia. I had a small problem during the install: after a couple of dependencies had been compiled, it aborted with this message:

--->  Installing glib2 2.8.4_0
--->  Activating glib2 2.8.4_0
--->  Cleaning glib2
--->  Configuring atk
Error: Target com.apple.configure returned: configure failure:
[... a couple of lines omitted ...]
checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
checking for GLIB - version >= 2.5.7...
*** 'pkg-config --modversion glib-2.0' returned 2.6.3, but GLIB (2.8.4)
*** was found! [... rest omitted ...]

According to a post in the darwinports list, the problem should have been solved long ago. I just re-installed the recent DarwinPorts-1.2-10.4.dmg release over an older installation and trusted this Installation to be current. Why should this problem still bite me?

Most probable answer: because I installed the Mono Framework (Version 1.1.10), but not the Darwinports version. The Mono Framework comes with its own pkg-config (and a bunch of other tools that are installed in /usr/bin).

Matt Johnston found out how to enable the hibernate mode (a.k.a. the Safe Sleep introduced with the new HiRes Powerbooks) for older Macs.

I tried it on my 867 MHz 12″ Powerbook and it works. Finally changing batteries doesn’t require to shutdown and restart anymore — or so I thought.

After some hours testing I reverted the hack. I observed two problems:

• The fan wouldn’t start anymore and the Powerbook got pretty hot
• The clock stopped when sleeping

Nice work, Matt, but in my case:

There is a big showstopper for maintaining german content (or in any other language that uses more than the 7 bit ASCII character set): Rekall (on the Mac) doesn’t handle Unicode correctly. Here’s a short sample: to the left the expected display (from phpMyAdmin), to the right the screen shot from Rekall:

What if I entered the umlaut in Rekall? Then phpMyAdmin shows the content as if it wouldn’t know how to display UTF-8 codes:

What happens is that the transformation takes place twice:

• The UTF-8 transformation of ‘ä’ (0xE4) is ‘ä’ (0xC3 0xA4) as shown in the second phpMyAdmin screen shot.
• The UTF-8 transformation of ‘ä’ is 0xC3 0x83 0xC2 0xA4, which is what is stored in the database, as a hexdump shows.

I have seen the same strange glyphs for umlauts in another Mac port of a multi platform program: Perforce P4V in Version 2005.1 has the same problem:

Because Rekall and P4V both are based on the Qt library, I think it’s actually a bug in the Mac port of Qt; I have never used Rekall on other platforms, but I know that the Windows port of the same version of P4V shows the umlaut as expected:

• MySQL binaries (I’m using 4.1.14-max)
• MySQL source code
• Rekall-2.3.4 and Qt-3.3.4-mini binaries from ATG
• MacPython 2.4.1
• Apple Developer Tools (from your Tiger Install Disk)

The short road installing just the binaries lead to an error:

dlcompat: Library not loaded:
/usr/local/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.14.dylib

The reason is that the original MySQL binaries are built with the --disable-shared flag and contain only the static libraries instead of the dynamic ones.

I had to build the dynamic libraries (actually it’s only one library: libmysqlclient) myself from source, then Rekall started to work with MySQL:

$ tar xzf mysql-4.1.14.tar.gz
$ cd mysql-4.1.14
$ ./configure --enable-shared --without-server
$ make
$ cd libmysql
$ sudo make install

Update: There are a few pages out there that deal with this issue in some ways. See for yourself if you need more information:

• Lenz Grimmer (on the MySQL Internals list) explains how to build the shared libraries.
• pamalite, developing his own application, solved the problem linking the static library.
• Note: there is no need to replace a running installation when compiling from source. All you need is libmysqlclient.dylib.

Many years after most users I have jumped on the iCal train too. I’ve dumped my very old Palm and started using iCal as my main calendar.

But iCal itself is not good enough:

• it doesn’t know how to calculate Easter. For this I have subscribed (free!) to project24, which is very nice for Swiss holidays (for German and Austrian ones too).
• it doesn’t show the week number. project24 comes to the rescue again.
• I want to print/export real lists, not just empty boxes with a date. Some calenders have less than one event per week and I wanted a list with all events. All iCal does is filling pages with empty days and once in a while a day with an event.
  Clay Spinuzzi mentions the Ruby iCal module, which did the trick for me.

What I haven’t got working yet: iSync limits the calendar period that is copied to my mobile to 8 weeks and I haven’t found any hidden plist entry or any other hack to fix that.