-
Half baked PPP implementation
I love that Mac OS X is built on a UNIX core as I can use a command line to do stuff and write shell scripts. However, in some cases, Apple has wrapped a pretty interface on top of some UNIX stuff and made a mess as such as with the case with Mac OS X server; I wrote about this awhile back. This is also the case with PPP. System Preferences (and under Tiger, Internet Connect) hides the underlying PPP implementation. For most people, this works OK, but the biggest problem is that if you enter your username and password (for providers that require it), unplug the modem and plug it into a different USB port, that information is no longer associated with that modem. This is because PPP tracks the modem based on UNIX /dev port, i.e. /dev/usbmodem1d11. Each USB port is uniquely identified and if you plug in a hub, it changes the /dev port as well. So this can be quite problematic and each time you plug in the device into a different port, you'll get a different entry in Network Preferences. What a mess. To make matters worse, the PPP implementation uses the keychain sometimes and then sometimes picks the wrong entry in the keychain if there are 2 entries with the same account name.
-
Being self-employed and working from home
Note: this is a long narrative that I've probably written before, but it helps me to get stuff off my mind by writing.
-
Does anyone at Apple actually care about us developers?
I fired up ReceiptWallet beta on a Tiger machine today to check out a problem and it didn't launch. Huh, I looked at the crash log and it said there was a problem with a symbol not found using the dynamic linker (I'm not sure why my testers on Tiger didn't find this as it clearly doesn't work). So, I look at my code and I have:
-
Another set of bugs in Leopard
A number of weeks ago, I fought with Leopard to be able to use a magnetic stripe reader in one of my apps. The Apple sample code worked on Tiger, but broke on Leopard. OK, I reported that as a bug. Next, I looked at some new USB code in Leopard and that failed as well. After opening an Apple DTS incident, buying a magnetic stripe reader for them, and going round and round, they acknowledged the first bug and the second bug which was a workaround to the first one. DTS did send me code that finally did work.