First day of the conference proper - and an eclectic mix of excellent sessions.

A lot of stuff wasn’t directly relevant to the day job, but as always with these events it’s fantastic to just get the time & space to think about the issues, and to be pointed in some new directions. What wasn’t relevant today may well become the future.

Plus, of course, the ability to simply meet and hang out with a bunch of like-minded geeks is priceless.

I’m at the NSConference this week, which is a UK-based get together of Mac and iPhone developers.

Today was workshop day, and I attended an excellent iPhone session given by Bill Dudney - great work Bill.

Hopefully this conference will become an annual event, so if you didn’t make it along this year but are interested in attending in the future, make sure that you let Scotty and Tim (the organisers) know!

Come home. Drink two generous vodka & cokes whilst washing up & chatting to Caroline. Decide to “fix” one or two minor issues with the hackintosh.

Use Kext Helper to attempt to re-install some kernel extensions that I suspected hadn’t been installed properly. Reboot said hackintosh.

Experience the “no smoking” / grey boot screen. Experience extreme fear/rage/wish-that-one-had-got-time-machine-working-on-the-eee.

Spend rest of night figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it.

In the end I had to bootstrap off the install cd I used for the original install, then boot into an iDebeb install image I had on a DVD, then use the terminal to copy back an original Extensions folder taken from my MacBookPro. Arse!

On the plus side, I think I now have a better understanding of what’s going on under the hood. On the minus side, it’s 3.38 in the morning, and I’m now back to where I started.

I’m using the original WiFi card in my eee, which does not have native out-of-the-box support from OS X.

Luckily, some third-party “drivers” are available from RALink, makers of the card.

The word drivers was in quotes in that last sentence because although this software allows use of the WiFi card, it doesn’t really supply a Mac OS X driver in the strictest sense of the word. A real driver would just invisibly do its job, allowing you to connect to wireless networks with the normal user interface - you wouldn’t really know that it was there.

The RALink software, in contrast, is rather painful, and a real eyesore. It consists of a custom application which you have to launch when you log in, and which opens a single window which you can’t resize or close.

This window has a tabbed interface with a great deal of random clutter on it that almost nobody will ever care about. The layout is a real dog’s dinner, and looks like it was probably created by a programmer who isn’t used to design visual UI of any kind, let alone for a Mac.

In amongst this is a list of the visible networks in range, and a (confusing) interface allowing you to join one. By default the software does not remember the password for a network, forcing you to re-enter it each time. However, there is a mechanism on a different tab which allows you to save “profiles”, which do save your password to a particular network. You can have multiple profiles, but only one is active at a given time, and you have to choose manually.

All in all, this software is a bit of a mess, but I suppose we should be grateful that it exists and that it has been made freely available. Personally I’d like to see RALink release it as open source - at the very least that would allow someone who knows what they are doing to clean up the UI.

In the meantime, I may upgrade my wireless card, just to get rid of this software. Which is a bit of a shame, since the built in card seems to actually work perfectly well.

After a few weeks playing with my eee 901 hackintosh, there’s no denying it, this machine is quite slow, and I seem to spend quite a bit of time watching the dreaded spinning rainbow. I’m running Leopard, and I’ve read various reports suggesting that Tiger is snappier, so I suppose that might be an option if you are prepared to go back to an earlier system (which I’m not).

In some cases the lack of performance seems slightly strange, and I wonder if there’s something a bit wrong at a driver or kernel level. Looking at Activity Monitor, the machine doesn’t often seem to be under major strain. I have two megs of ram, and have set virtual memory up to use the smaller, faster SSD partition, and it doesn’t look like there’s much paging going on. The SSD speed itself may be an issue, and I am planning to upgrade to a larger, faster drive at some point, so it will be interesting to see how that works.

Having said all this, it’s worth emphasizing that the machine is more than useable. A little bit of patience is required when starting or switching applications, and occasionally when a random stall occurs, but for the most part everything is fine - it’s not as if it struggles to keep up with my typing or anything like that.