Camino a Great Browser for Tiger
From Alejandro, following up on Another Browser for Tiger:
Charles,
Opera is indeed a great browser.
The new version, 10.60, is on the horizon - let's hope that it resolves
the issues you're having.
I actually tend to use Camino on my Tiger machines. Though it
is not as rich in features as OmniWeb or Opera, it
is light (particularly the optimised versions maintained at http://www.rpm-mozilla.org.uk) and
so runs excellently on older hardware. Also, it is likely to support
Tiger for a while yet: It supported Panther 'til just recently.
Cheers,
Alejandro
Hi Alejandro,
I love Opera, and the version 10.60 public alpha is
available for
download. I've been using it for several days, and it's the fastest
Opera build yet.
Notwithstanding its alpha status, I've encountered no
stability issues or bugginess, other than that it, like versions 10.52
and 10.53 before it, performs abominably on the Pismo in OS X 10.4. I've
found that Opera 10.51 is the last decent-behaving Opera build on that
rig, but 10.60 is excellent on the Intel Mac.
Opera's developers have done a major rewrite of the
Opera Framework, replacing Carbon with Cocoa, then gone back and
further removed as much Carbon code as they could, which perhaps helps
explain issues I've encountered running 10.52 and 10.53 on the PPC
machine, along with the fact that there is no Java support for Mac
OS X 10.4 at all in version 10.60. My advice: If you're still
running Tiger, stick with version 10.53 (the current Opera final) or
earlier builds if you find 10.53 crash and/or stall prone.
Charles
Editor's note: The number of excellent browsers is
another reason to love the Mac. You can try them all for free and
decide which one best fits your needs and work style. Here are Low End
Mac headquarters, Camino is the default browser on all of my Macs,
whether with OS X 10.4 or 10.5. Firefox takes the #2 spot, and I
rarely used Opera or Safari. Think (and work) different! dk
A Fast, Free Browser for Dialup Internet
From Mike:
Charles,
Read your article on going back to dialup Internet. I
have had a couple of slowdowns in the recent past, which it turns out
was tied to my cable modem. While waiting for a replacement, I used an
emergency dialup account, and like you, was supremely frustrated
waiting for my usual websites to load in. In desperation, I downloaded
a text-only browser that runs in a Terminal window, called
Lynx.
I downloaded it from Apple's website at this link. It took some time
to download, but it was worth it for emergencies.
It is text-only, using keyboard navigation, so no fancy web pages
graphics or videos. Just a terminal window and text, with the barest of
page formatting so you can see what you are looking at. But it did
allow me to read my news websites and Low End Mac during those dialup
days effectively, and any text in whatever website that I needed.
The big advantage here is that even on a slow dialup connection, it
runs beautifully since it is only pulling in text. Kind of reminded me
of the bygone days of "bulletin boards", which I am just old enough to
remember.
Anyway, just thought I'd share.
Mike
Hi Mike,
Thanks for sharing.
I used a little text browser called WannaBe on dialup for years and found
it a great speeder-upper. Unfortunately, it is a Classic app., so was a
goner for me when I updated to Leopard, although I can still use it in
Classic Mode on the Pismos in OS X 10.4.
The WannaBe text-based browser for the Classic Mac OS.
It's got a GUI interface, so is nicer to use than Lynx
- I'm not much of a command line artist.
I've found that Opera with either the Turbo
compression feature enabled or the images turned off - or both - speeds
things up considerably on dialup.
Charles
Rain and Internet Problems
From Adam:
Hi Charles,
Saw your column today about your Internet access problems with heavy
rain:
"I've been revisiting the alternate universe of dialup
Internet this week - and not liking it a bit. Well, except for the fact
that it works, which my wireless broadband has decided not to do
whenever it rains, or even when a heavy dew is down."
This isn't uncommon. Often it indicates a moisture problem with a
damp connection or wire with failing insulation, not a problem with the
wireless transmission. If the transmitter or receiver cabling has
gotten damp in your downpours, you could see those results.
Do you have cell phone data service in your area, as an alternative
to dialup?
Adam
Hi Adam,
The thing is, this issue just manifested suddenly last
week after nine months of non-problematical service through many heavy
rain events. The coincidence with the appearance of the new leaves on
the trees seems too close to dismiss.
Charles Moore lives in rural Nova Scotia.
The first questions both the support tech and the
service dispatcher asked me was whether there were trees in line
between the antenna and the wireless tower. I cut down a dozen or so
more trees yesterday, and so far reception has been great, but it's
dry.
Cell coverage is not so hot here. The nearest fringe
for GSM is about 30 miles away as the crow flies. We had only analog
cellphone service here until a couple of years ago, and you often had
to be on top of a hill to get it. I think there's digital service here
now from one provider, but I haven't researched it and am not sure
whether data is offered. I don't have a cell phone.
There's DSL available about nine miles away in two
directions, but we're outside its reach. The only alternative to
wireless and dialup I've heard of anyone using here is satellite, but
it costs about twice as much as the wireless service aside from the
hardware, setup, and licensing costs.
Charles
Hi Charles,
Maybe you should move? :)
There may be some new growth near the transmitter antenna, perhaps
that's blocking the signal at the source and with lots of moisture
scatters things even more. Did your ISP tech support note if anybody
else was experiencing problems?
A soaking rain for a few days in a row often causes problems in
wiring that normal rain and weather does not. My last job was in a old
building in downtown Boston served by decades-old copper phone wiring.
Our phone and T1 service often took hits when we had heavy rain for
multiple days and the underground cables got damp. Things finally got
fixed when Verizon was browbeaten into running new fiber to the
building to keep our business!
Adam
Hi Adam,
I know you being facetious, but we did experimentally
put the house up for sale three years ago, and lack of access to
broadband was one of the major reasons.
However, we had only a few nibbles at the price we
were asking, and even with the vicissitudes of dealing with broadband
problems and living 50 miles from the nearest town, it would be hard to
give up this lakeside property of 130 wooded acres half a mile from a
lovely ocean sand beach, in a quiet, virtually no-crime community.
As for significant new growth around the tower, it's
doubtful, since it was only built last year. The tech support folks
checked other customers in the area and found that a few were having
problems. The topography in this area is very hilly with varying
amounts of foliage, so immediate local reception is quite
idiosyncratic. There are homes less than two miles from here that can't
get the wireless signal at all.
Also, the local landline phone infrastructure is
ancient copper wiring with contemporaneous vintage switching equipment,
which is why dialup connections are limited to 26,400 bps on good days.
It's maddening, because a fiber optics line runs past us within sight
of my office window, and there's been a spur of fiber optic cable
coiled and hanging on a pole by the switching station since 2005, but
it's not supported by the antiquated switching hardware, and a Telco
service guy told me it would cost some C$200,000 to upgrade it. With
fewer than 25 homes within range, the business case isn't there.
Charles
Keynote Disables Screen Saver
From Steven, following up on OS X
10.5 Works on the Late 2009 Mac mini:
"I've noted several silly problems is Snow Leopard
that don't manifest in Leopard."
In our case, Snow Leopard would disable the screen saver when
Keynote was running. I guess that's a feature, but not when you're
running a digital sign and don't want people to see the desktop when
the slides loop.
Sent from my iPhone
Steven
Strange Keyboard Behavior
From Vic:
Hi Charles,
I have enjoyed reading very many of your columns.
I am puzzled by strange behavior with my machine and am hopeful that
your readers may point me in a direction to resolve a curious
issue.
Please excuse that it will take a number of words to explain
this:
I recently decided I could not take my G3 Pismo's inability to play
video. I love the Pismo, but the G3 processor doesn't work well for
lots of video on the Web.
So I returned to my G4 Titanium. I copied lots of files to the
Titanium, from the Pismo. I attempted to copy all the OS 9 files
from the Pismo. It mentioned some couldn't be copied because of
permissions. There was a problem with OS 9 hanging during
installation, I rebooted. OS 9 seemed to work.
Here's the strange behavior:
I first noticed in Google email, then in TextEdit, and in Mail. My
cursor jumps wildly over the page. I will be typing something, then the
'focus' of the cursor will jump elsewhere on the page.
! The text would write from right to left! Yes, right to left! To
left - this is what it looks like!
??gniyonna yreV :TFEL ot thgiR
When I type a word and touch the spacebar once, it becomes
two spaces. It is not consistent. The backspace delete key
may forward delete, perhaps not. When I type a space after a
word, there will then be two spaces. Typing a comma, followed by
a space becomes two commas. Same for single quote, question mark
followed by a space.
The spacebar somehow causes two spaces to appear, and the
cursor jumps around the page. This means a word I am typing can wind up
elsewhere on the page.
Lastly, sometimes a backspace/deletion will have odd effects.
It seems to me that there used to be a way of getting a computer to
write left to right as a joke, to consternate people sitting down at
your computer. I've never done it, but I am sure I've read it in one of
the books on operating systems, either OS 9 or OS X.
This is a sample of what I get:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,, and the
** When I touch the spacebar, another space is added.
Two spaces between each word.
What''s going on??
The second question mark happens when I touch the space bar..
The second space comes after I start typing the next word..
What??
When I type the space after a word,, a second space is inserted
after the one space.. When I type a space after a single quote, double
quote.
The worst is when typing and the words become right to left - very
disconcerting: I don't expect people to use a mirror to read my
email.
Any thoughts you or others may have would be greatly
appreciated. For now I've reverted to the Pismo, which works, but video
is lacking.
I'd like to return to the G4 Titanium, as I don't think I can find
an affordable G4 for the Pismo.
Sorry for so many words, but I'm trying to be clear.
Oh, and sometimes it won't send email.
Backspace gives the message:
"Are you sure you want to leave this page? Your
message has not been sent. Click OK to continue, or Cancel to stay on
this page"
Thanks in Advance.
Peace,
Vic
Later: Strange Behavior Resolved
Dear Charles,
I am breathing better. The problem has been solved.
I looked at my notes, realized the problem subsequent to my turning
off the machine when it locked up while installing OS 9.
Therefore, I copied OS 9 from my FireWire drive to the
Titanium: Now email works as it should, TextEdit works as it should,
and I had left out in my message that Pages would crash when I tried to
open it. Now Pages opens & I can use it.
Simple solution: Reinstall OS 9.
Strange Behavior, indeed.
God Bless Ya!
Peace,
Vic
Hi Vic,
I'm very happy to hear that you were able to sort this
one out, because it was a real head-scratcher, and I wouldn't have been
much help.
Ah, for the days when one could just drag a known-good
copy of Mac OS Classic from drive to drive, or for that matter, create
a quick, bootable System Folder by simply making a new folder, dragging
in a System File, an Appearance file, and a couple of others, naming it
System Folder, and you were good to go. Life was so much simpler
then.
Thanks for reading and for the kind words.
Charles
Hi Charles,
It is nice to hear from you, as I have enjoyed many, many columns of
helpful, interesting thoughts from you over time.
I thought I was out of the woods, but when I went to partition my
drive I found I didn't have OS X Disk Utility: Apparently when I
copied over OS 9 I excised some OS X files.
Knowing I will need OS X Disk Utility at a future (or sooner) date,
I reinstalled Tiger - it is sooo good to have System disks
handy. It's nice to have OS 9 (on a separate partition). Things are
well.
I am soo glad I backed up my data to a FireWire drive. Much
quicker - only one day into the night moving from the FireWire drive
back to the Titanium.
I love my Pismo, but I like to look at video, and haven't seen an
affordable G4 upgrade to the Pismo.
Life goes on,
Thanks for your great work in your columns,
God Bless Ya,
Vic
Hi Vic,
I make sure to keep my System Restore and OS installer
disks in a safe place. If you use any computer long enough, you're
going to end up having to reinstall the OS for one reason or
another.
I agree with you about video support and the Pismo -
the non-upgradable video card with its paltry 8 MB of VRAM is
probably that wonderful machine's biggest Achilles' heel. I just don't
bother on the Pismos. Video performance is fine on the MacBook with its
Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics and 4 GB of RAM.
With the horizon in sight for OS X 10.4 as a practical
Web OS (although Apple did upgrade Safari for Tiger to version
4.1 this week with some of the Safari 5 tweaks, which was more than I
had expected), it's getting hard to justify the cost of a G4 upgrade
for the old Pismo. Since you've got the TiBook, why not use it?
I'm also a fan of FireWire hard drives as the ideal
backup medium and alternate boot media if your Mac supports FireWire,
which unfortunately my MacBook does not. It will boot from an external
boot drive, but not with the grace and speed of a FireWire drive.
Good to Know I'm Not Alone
From anonymous by request:
Dear Mr. Moore,
During one of my occasional perusals of Low End Mac, I was surprised
to find a correspondence between you and another with regards to
beliefs. What surprised me even more was your not being ashamed to say
exactly what you believe and feel, in an age where Christianity is
quickly becoming a social taboo. I just wanted to tell you that your
writing on this subject was encouraging to me.
You see, I'm going into computer science . . . and I am also a
believer in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But I don't know whether
any of my classmates are also Christian. One has told me she is, but I
don't really know her that well. The rest I can only speculate about.
It's such an awkward thing to ask someone about these days. Worst of
all though, my own professor, while he's a good guy and a great
teacher, hates creationism and basically worships computers.
I, of course, find Christian fellowship in and serve at a local
church, and that's good . . . but I feel I want to see if there are any
groups of Christian Computer Scientists/Engineers that I could explore.
Do you know of any such organizations?
Hi Anonymous,
I'm delighted to hear that my musings were encouraging
to you.
I've been a newspaper op-ed commentator for a long
time, no stranger to controversy and debate, and people sometimes
vigorously disagreeing with me, so I'm comfortable stating my personal
perspectives publicly on almost any subject, although one tries to be
contextually and situationally appropriate in doing so. I appreciate
that it can be difficult in many circumstances nowadays to boldly
declare one's Christian faith, and this has been the case for probably
longer than we might first imagine in academic circles. Theodore Roszak
wrote in Where
the Wasteland Ends that (pardon the lengthy citation, but it
speaks to your dilemma):
"When I was in college (the middle fifties) I
learned the death of God like a data point in freshman survey
courses."
"Of the needs of the spirit one simply did not
speak; the very word was without negotiable meaning in educated
company. This, I rapidly learned, was the most intellectually
intolerable aspect of personality and accordingly the most repressed.
One might discourse in luscious detail about one's sex life in fact and
fantasy; but how gauche, how offensive to introduce anything even
vaguely religious into serious conversation."
"For many committed intellectuals and radical
activists - those who have spearheaded the struggle for social
democracy - [transcendence] has been imperiously crowded out by the
demands of conscience. In the moral conviction of these crusaders
without a god, a science-based humanism and the left-wing anti-clerical
legacy have combined to make religion an intolerable distraction from
social responsibility. And how the religious, who came to the cause so
late in the day, have learned to blush and cringe before the moral fire
of militant humanism!"
"This is unique - terrifyingly unique. Never
before have those who would speak for the transcendent ends of life had
so little cultural purchase. In times past the saints and sages have
had to suffer the hypocrisy of the world, and its neglect; but their
vision was never denied its validity or righteously eclipsed. They have
never had to apologise for their knowledge of God or hide it away like
a guilty secret."
St. Paul is inspirational on this: "For I am not
ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to
salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the
Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to
faith; as it is written, 'The just shall live by faith'." (Rom.
1:16-17).
The Association of Christians in
the Mathematical Sciences has a computer science subgroup of
computer scientists and mathematicians who teach computer science.
There are also quite a few Christian colleges and
universities with computer science programs. Here are a few links:
Charles
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