The Stick is known as iCON210 from Qualcom (or sometimes Option) and is HSDPA capable. But you want to use it – especially without using the shitty provided Software.

1. When the stick is inserted for the first time it acts as a storage device containing the (ugly and almost useless) software as well as the kext (driver) installer. Install both.
2. Eject the virtual “Disc”
3. Deactivate the PIN for the stick using the iCON software. Then throw it away.
4. When you open the network preferences, you see three new devices. Select macusb_modem (and give it a nice name like UMTS-Modem).
5. In the settings make sure you set the following options:
   • Dial *98# (at least that is what my network, O2 Germany requires, YMMV). Username/Password depend on your operator. For O2 Germany they can be left blank.
   • In the “Advanced…” Options “Modem” tab select Vendor: “Generic”, Model: GPRS (GSM/3G) and set the APN to the APN for your plan. For Prepaid O2 it is pinternet.interkom.de (yes, interkom.de) Be careful your data plan depends on the APN, so selecting the wrong APN can cost you money. CID can be set to 1.
   • In the “PPP” tab select “Configuration” from the dropdown and and uncheck “Send PPP echo packets” as well as “Use TCP Header compression”
   • Click “Apply” to save the configuration.

Before plugging in the USB dongle again you should make sure the driver is loaded by running sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/MACUSBDriver.kext/ in a Terminal window.

Before connecting you need to eject the virtual “Disc”.

Now you are good to go. And you do not need the rotten iCON210 software.

Update for Snow Leopard: Unfortunately the iCON210 driver does not work correctly with Snow Leopard. I recommend a Huawei E160 HDSPA stick which works well with Snow Leopard (at least with a 32 Bit kernel). It can be bought on eBay for about 40 €

The people following me on twitter already know I had problems with Ruby on a FreeBSD 6.3 system yesterday.

It seems that the default ruby 1.8 from the ports system has a big problem with recursion. The recursion level cant go nearly as deep as it can on other operating systems.

And if the limit is reached the ruby process crashes with a signal 4 (a SIGILL) instead of raising a SystemStackError as it is supposed to be.

So if you see your ruby processes (and this includes your mongrels) die without any reason on FreeBSD 6 you know what is wrong.

just do sudo gem install curb -- --with-opt-dir=/usr/local/

Just to remind myself, 'cause I always forget [code lang="shell-unix-generic"] sudo ipconfig set en1 DHCP [/code]

Only good karma for Apple today. First a definitive shiping date for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: October 26th. Juheee!

Second they announced an iPhone SDK for February '08 cool

Third the iPhone will ship without SIM-lock in France, which means a way to get not-SIM-locked iPhones. wow

For details you can look at the Apple Hot News or take a look at the great fscklog (German).

Expect cries of victory to begin shortly!

If you are a programmer you know Unit Tests are a good thing. The Perl developers know that, too, so they have a unit test suite for a lot of their apps. But...

Unfortunately, one of the places the test links to is File::Spec::rootdir().

As a result, when the test FAILS it will recursively delete the root directory.

Autsch! So be careful with tests ;-) More here.

Apparently it's a known problem if you use IMAP and Mail.app with GPGMail. From the GPGMail Mailing list:

I use the latest version of GPGMail with Apple Mail 2.1.1 on 10.4.8 Intel. I have noticed that if I use GPGMail with the options "Authenticate messages automatically" and "Decrypt messages automatically" Mail behaves strange at marking messages on an IMAP- account read/unread. About every second mail that I have read but left in it's folder appears as unread after a short time and after opening another IMAP-folder.

Then don't do that. :-)

Seriously, it's a know bug. The work around is to make sure that the "Only if unread" checkboxes are left NOT checked.

This has annoyed the hell out of me ever since I reinstalled Tiger onto my MacBook Pro after my disk died and got replaced in September. Nice to know there is a workaround.

Can you see a pattern?

Bonus question: Identify all programs!

While setting up my new Mac mini as a home server I digged around deep in the OS X man pages, where I found this gem.

Form hdid(8) I give you instructions on how to do a ram disk in MacOS X:

hdid -nomount ram://

will attach a ram disk that can be mounted and used after
being formatted with a newfs utility or Disk Utility.app.  
A sector is 512 bytes.

A small shell script to create and mount a ram disk:

[code lang="shell-unix-generic"]

!/bin/sh

NUMSECTORS=128000 # 64MB Totoal mydev=hdid -nomount ram://$NUMSECTORS newfs_hfs $mydev mkdir /tmp/mymount mount -t hfs $mydev /tmp/mymount [/code]

soup.io is a cool service that lets you collect all your activities in the brave new web world on a single page. An aggregator for the "Web 2.0" if you whish.

It is very slick to use and quite usefull, especially if you move a round the web a lot and have plenty of RSS feeds.

You can integrate

• Any ordinary RSS-Feed
• del.icio.us
• digg
• tumblr
• many more

into your soup. A very useful tool for putting everything from the web jungle back together and adding content. I wish they only would allow me to update the imports on a regular basis :-(

Cool things I noticed after playing with it for five minutes:

The signup process is quite cool. Don't look for a sign up ling. Just use it. You will get an account on the way. Very cool!

• The endless scrolling on the front page is way cool! Just scroll to the bottom and see what I mean.

A short warning: It is still beta. One time I saw a strange JavaScript alert message pop up, wich can only be caused by some sort os XSS vulnerability.

My personal soup can be found here.