I decide to purchase a new Airport Extreme Wireless N/Gigabit ethernet router to increase the speed of my home network and increase my mac-ness. It’s expensive ($179 retail), but on the surface it has great specs (N, Gigabit, USB for hard drives and printers). However, it’s far from perfect.

I have a number of hardwired devices in my home network (PS3, 2 DirecTV HD boxes, a WinXP homebrew “media server”, and my Macbook Pro most of the time). I had purchased a couple of Netgear gigabit switches in anticipation of going full 1000Mbps at some point. I was also using an old G4 400Mhz Gigabit Mac tower solely as a print and file server. The Airport Extreme would allow me to complete the 1000Mbps network, handle the print and file server duties, and add wireless N for the Macbook Pro as a bonus.

After some stupid moves on my part that delayed getting the network up and running with the Airport Extreme, I got my Actiontec GT701 DSL modem/router configured for PPPOE and set up the Airport to log in to my DSL provider, allocate DHCP addresses, and create a wireless network. The problem is that EVERYTIME you click “update” to make a configuration change – even as minor as changing the status light from always on to “flash on activity” requires a reboot that takes FOREVER. With my old Linksys router, it had to be something major to require a reboot.

The other thing that really bugs me is that everytime you load the Airport Utility, it starts out wanting to run a setup wizard. You have to choose “manual setup” first before proceeding.

That’s not the end of it. The first time I attached a USB hard drive to the Airport, I could see and browse without any problems. However, after several update/reboots, neither that drive or another I tried would show up anywhere other than in the Airport Utility. I was ready to throw in the towel before deciding to reformat one of the drives as Apple OS Extended to see if that made a difference and it did. I then reformatted my Time Machine drive and attached it as well and it worked to. It took all night to do the initial backup (I should have done that before attaching to the Airport), but it’s working.

So in spite of the initial issues I’ve had, I’ve achieved everything I wanted and then some with the Airport Extreme. I would even consider attaching the external drive I use for iPhoto and iTunes to the Airport except that I don’t think Time Machine would back it up if I did.

I’ve not developed any web apps for the iPhone (beyond installing the very cool wptouch iphone-friendly WordPress theme for this blog). However, I do appreciate the continuing value of web apps for the iPhone. I just came across a very cool OS X app that acts as an iPhone simulator for web apps called iPhoney.

iPhoney simply runs Safari in the form of an iPhone, and allows you to choose between Webkit, iPhone, and custom user agents.

Here are the full “iPhacts” from the iPhoney home page:

• Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
• Open any website that works with Safari (use Safari 3 beta for the most accurate experience).
• Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation.
• Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
• Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.
• Zoom out to see how your current pages might look while zoomed out on iPhone.
• Turn off plug-ins (including Flash, but note that they all turn off (including QuickTime).
• Automatic updates with Sparkle, so you’ll always know if there’s a new version.
• And of course, open source code so you can contribute to iPhoney’s rapid development.

via Macworld
Despite constant claims that the Mac is immune to computer cooties, some folks remain unconvinced. Do or do you not need antivirus/security software? Here’s my take.
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