I have a Three 3G Dongle that I occasionally use when on the road. Now that I have a NetBook with Mac OS X I plan to use it even more. The problem with this Three 3G dongle (Huawei E156G) is the software that comes with it. It’s bloated, replicates standard Mac OS X behaviour, and worst of all it disables your WiFi when you’re on 3G (because God forbid that you share your already slow 3G with another).

So a while ago I figured out how to use the 3G dongle without using the Three Mobile Manager software, but instead using the Mac OS X network manager. I decided to write it up now because I noticed a few more people with the same issues. This tutorial is based on a Mac Mini and Dell Mini running Mac OS X 10.6.2 and 10.6.1.

Step 1: Install the Mobile Manager

We’re not going to use the Mobile Manager, but this is the easiest way to install the drivers for the dongle.

• Just stick in your dongle into your Mac and wait for the 3Connect disc to show up.
• Run the 3Connect Installer.app
• When the installer is done, ignore any “new network adapters found” for now.
• Instead go to your Applications folder, and trash the 3Connect folder

Your drivers have now been installed but your OS X doesn’t know what to do with the dongle yet.

Step 2: Setup your network preferences

• Go to the Network panel in your System Preferences
• You should have a HUAWEI Mobile device in the list on the left, if it is not unplug and plug in your dongle until it does
• Click Advanced, and in the modem pane set the details to:
  • Vendor: Generic
  • Model: GPRS (GSM/3G)
  • APN: Three.co.uk
  • CID: 1
• Under DNS set the following two DNS servers:
  • 4.2.2.4
  • 4.2.2.3
• Then (I’m not sure if this is essential) go to the PPP tab:
  • Uncheck Send PPP echo packets
  • Check Use verbose logging
• Click OK to save your changes
• Finally, set the telephone number to *99#
• Hit Apply

Now when you hit Connect you should be able to connect to the network. Tick the Show modem status in menu bar to have a handy little menu in the menu bar that allows you to see how long you’ve been connected and much more.

Caveats

There are some downsides to this method. The main one being that you loose the ability to check how much data you’ve sent/received this month. I guess you can use My3 for that instead. You also lose the ability to sent SMS messages, which is why it might be wise to leave the 3 Mobile Manager in your applications if you ever use that function.

Finally I have to note that this hasn’t been thoroughly tested. I used to run this same method under Leopard and it worked fine, it now works fine under Snow Leopard too, but any weird hardware or software upgrade might break it, I’m just not sure.

So yesterday my new laptop arrived. I decided to get a little Dell Mini 10 netbook as a companion to my new Mac Mini workstation. At the moment I’m at the point of selling it again though.

I found a good deal on eBay for a Dell Mini 10 with integrated wireless-n, bluetooth, 3G/HSDPA, TV-tuner, HD screen and a 6 cell battery. Additionally I liked the model because everyone seems to like the Dell Mini 10 for  turning them into hackintoshes. Yeah, that’s where I was wrong.

The Dell Mini 10 has a little brother called the Dell Mini 10v (where the v stands for value). This model rarely comes with all the extras and has a atom N series processor. It turns out that my machines Z-series atom is actually the reason why I can’t run Mac OS X on it. Doh!

Now I promised myself at the beginning of the year to invest some more time in Linux, so I saw this as a good moment to try it out. I started off with Ubuntu 9.10, which is the newest Ubuntu version. After install the wifi didn’t work, neither did the graphics driver, nor the brightness controls, nor the sleep/suspend, nor the wifi, etc. I spend a few hours getting the wifi and screen to work correctly, and a hack gave me hibernation support. But by then the audio started acting up even more so I decided to do the wise thing to switch to Ubuntu 9.04 (the current long-term-support release).

I chose for the Netbook Remix release because I already started to notice that having a UI that’s optimized for a small screen and a small keyboard might be a wise plan. I managed to get everything to work pretty quickly (except for the TV tuner software) but realized that even the netbook remix doesn’t really run that smoothly on my Z530 with 1GB of ram.

Now to be fair, I’m used to machines with 4GB of ram for the least 4 years, so this is quite a step back. But the screen tearing and slow response is just sometimes killing me. So I decided to look into upgrading the RAM in this machine. This is when I realized this machine doesn’t have any upgradable RAM!

So at the moment I’m really contemplating my options. I love the built-in 3G in this machine, and the 6 cell battery is interesting, but the keyboard is crap, the upgradability sucks, and it won’t run Mac OS X.

So, what IS the best netbook out there that can run Mac OS X? Should I stick with this machine for now or maybe go back to Mac? A Macbook Air is starting to look very tempting.

So I’m a big supporter of OpenID and oAuth, but sometimes I have to agree with big companies like Google in the fact that these technologies are really confusing to end users. The problem is that people don’t understand these technologies and while they shouldn’t it does allow for some people to take advantage of the less tech savvy amongst us.

Take Twitter for example, who fairly recently finally added oAuth to their product so that we now don’t have to give out our username and password to every funny little Twitter tool. Twitter’s implementation has no granularity in the oAuth authorisation which leads to people signing away full read/write permission to their account when they use their Twitter to log in to a game.

Yes, you read that right: developers use Twitter’s oAuth to let people authenticate themselves. It seems not everyone understand the difference between authentication and authorisation. This obviously leads to some developers abusing this new found power to do evil, much like the early Facebook App developers used the permissions they got from you to spam all your friends with invites to come and join that app you looked at once.

I agree that oAuth is a great technology, but inherently it’s going to get a bad name when companies like Twitter don’t implement it correctly. We could go and educate the user, but I think that’s an impossible undertaking that would better be avoided. oAuth (and actually OpenID similarly) faces a real problem when it comes to user experience that needs to be solved. I guess I’m not the first one talking about this but I’m wondering if there even is a solution.

I was talking to the Hodge today about web development and how I think nobody in his right mind should ever make a web app that’s not based on some kind of rapid development framework. We agreed on this, but it made me think: what if you’re 100% new to web development? Should you try making your own plain 100% hand-made PHP/Python/Ruby scripts because it shows you all the underlying technology? Or should you instead start off with a framework and just read up on the underlying details later?

Discussion in the comments.

I’ve been using Site5 for years now and I love them: they’re cheap, reliable and have great service.

But using a shared hosting service can sometimes be a pain. Yesterday I wanted to install Bugzilla on Site5 and couldn’t initially figure it out. The wiki and forums were not of much help and most of the Google search results pointed me in the wrong direction.

Eventually I did figure it out though with the help of some bloggers.

The trick is to start of with the instructions by kmcital in his blog post. He runs you through most of the steps which are pretty strait forward. Halfway though he advises you to mail the lunar pages support, but instead I just opened a ticket on the Site5 backpanel and requested the modules I needed. I got reply within minutes which proves that Site5 is awesome.

Then I followed the rest of the instructions and ended up with a big 403 Forbidden page. I did a quick Google search and discovered that this is easily solved by either setting the right ‘$webservergroup’ in your localconfig file, or alternatively by manually setting some access permissions correctly as described in this post.

I hope this helps some of you, as it sure would have helped me.

The new Facebook homepage that was released last week has messed up the opportunities for an app  to end up in a user’s (and subsequently the user friends’s) news feed. At Nudge we did a bit of research and discovered the new optimal way of distributing your application stories.

So what changed?

The mayor changes regarding Facebook feed stories can be easily summarized. Quoting from the Facebook developer Wiki:

• Full stories are no longer displayed on the home page or profile.
• You are no longer required to provide a title for short story templates
• One-line stories will only appear on the Profile in the “recent activity”  section. They will not appear in the stream.

In other words: full stories are a thing of the past, and any other stories won’t appear in the user’s normal stream. As a consequence of this, an app’s feed story won’t end up on the friends’ news feeds either. Also: flash in feed stories seems to be a definite thing of the past.

So what can we do about it?
(more…)

I had some spare time during Christmas and new Year, reason for me to use my spare time to learn something new. In this case it involves making my first Firefox Extension and using Git.

The project I decided to work in is something very simple. As a Facebook Application Developer I often run into the problem of needing to be able to view part of the source of the HTML response of Facebook. Reason for this is that Facebook embeds server errors on our servers as hidden comments in the HTML. This is handy for developers as they can then see what error their server generated.

The only problem though is that this response is hidden in the source. I therefore decided to make a small bookmarklet that extracts this data, and opens it in a new window. The bookmarklet can be found below:

Bookmarklet: Facebook HTML Uncomment

I also always wanted to make a Firefox extension, so I decided to make my bookmarklet into a Firefox Extension that detects the hidden Facebook HTML Comments and shows the user a small icon that they can they click to view the full server response. It was a bit hard, especially as Firefox extensions have their own flavor of Javascript, but it turned out to be fairly easy (less than a days work).

The result can be found here on the Firefox Add-Ons page but it’s currently still listed as experimental, so leave a comment or feedback to help me make this a public Add-On. For a tutorial on how to use the Add-On or the Bookmarket, see the video below:

Finally. I decided to add this entire project as Open Source on GitHub. I already had a GitHub account but no projects. I will probably be moving more projects over soon though, so be sure to follow the project for updates or follow me to see more of my projects show up in time.

Video

So a few days ago I blogged about how I was without broadband. It seemed then that NatWest and Orange couldn’t figure out how to do banking and I, the customer, was stuck in the middle. More than an hour of phone calls with both BT and Orange didn’t seem to lead to much besides my blood pressure rising higher and higher.

I was already looking for new broadband options at work when I got a call by Mr Britton from Orange. He had gotten my lengthy email that I had send to the CEO of Orange and had done some digging around. He gave me a lengthy apology explaining because I was right: they were indeed competent enough to do banking in the UK. He then offered me two options: apply for a different ISP to provide me my broadband, or let Orange reinstate me as a customer as quickly as they could.

Getting a different provider to hook us up again would probably have taken a few weeks as they don’t seem interested in giving you fast service in this country. So instead I decided to let Orange reconnect us, with the option to change provider afterwards if we wanted to. Two days later we’re reconnected completely, got our VOIP phone line reinstated (although with a different number) and we’re now pondering wether to still switch to O2 broadband or not.

It’s amazing how some of these service providers barely know at the front what the back is doing. The fact that I initially got connected to a service centre in India proves to me that Orange is unwilling to give their support team members any power to actually “do good if they deem it worthy”. Fortunately other companies do seem to understand that customer support is what actually makes their product.

Companies like Zappos (shoes) and Moo (business cards) live of their community and understand that keeping that community close to hart is what makes their company worth more than their competitors. I wonder when broadband providers and other service providers are going to understand that customer support should be a bigger part of the business plan than throttling data packages….