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Just works! I gambled and bought an open box DuelAdapter PCMCIA-ExpressCard bridge from Sewell Direct. No drivers to load on OSX Leopard, but make sure the switch on the underside of the card is in position ‘A’ (Mac mode) like it says in the manual. That’s it. The VzAccess Manager detects the card as normal. I tried a few other Type-II cards I had lying around and they behaved as expected, which is to say, they registered but not all of them did anything, that being a matter of having an appropriate driver.

The NationalAccess service is no slower, or faster, than it was with a PCMCIA slot equipped Mac running Tiger. At home I’ve seen a peak of 310KB/s down, 105KB/s up. On the train I usually see 30-50% lower (sometimes much lower) which is still fine for ssh and casual web-browsing.

My only gripe is that the DuelAdapter is big. Not including the size of the expresscard itself, the cable is 9″ long and the PCMCIA carrier is nearly 6″ long and 3″ wide so it doesn’t fit on a standard tray table with the laptop. I’m thinking I might solve this with a piece of medium-duty velcro on the lid of the laptop which would also orient the card in a good position.

Ion3 is a minimal, tiling, tabbing, keyboard-oriented window manager and extensible using Lua. It was removed from macports because its author changed the license to a variant of the LGPL with additional clauses that boil down to: only the core project may use variations on the name ‘Ion’, that anything using the name must keep 28 days current and that anything else is a derived work and must be renamed and not mention the original or the original name. That the author is volatile and abusive might have a lot to do with it being dropped too.

On the other hand, it’s a great keyboard-driven window manager. If you’re still reading along, as of release candidate 20080103 it can still be built and installed under macports without much trouble. Try the following quick hack:

cd /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/x11/ion3
sudo mv Portfile old.Portfile
sudo wget http://db.macports.org/file_ref/emit/34709 -O Portfile

edit the file and replace the version and checksum lines with:

version           3rc-20080103
checksums         sha1 f2ce01631b67a4d317b608d2173b368bf716a2ce

then build as normal, for example:

sudo port install ion3

Note that these changes will be wiped out if you sync up with the repository so you may want to follow the instructions at the Macports Guide: Local repositories and create a local branch.

Common Lisp tutorial

Ok, engaging in a bit of benign google-bombing/search-engine optimization/what-have-you here. The point is that Peter Seibel’s book, Practical Common Lisp, is a better starting point for learning Lisp than the list Marty Hall maintains but last updated in 1999. After a read through PCL the newbie can try tackling the titles Marty recommends.

Great idea and public doman code from Michele Bini for tying the Emacs calculator into hippie expand.

I bought a Kensington Expert Mouse a little over a year ago as a New Year’s gift to myself. It’s a nice trackball; I left-click with my thumb, roll the ball with index and middle fingers and scroll using the ring with my ring finger. I can use it all day without getting soreness in my right hand and wrist and it “just works” with OSX and FreeBSD. I like it more than any other pointing device I’ve ever used. Recently the scroll ring started to stick and skip, not all the time, just often enough that it interfered with my concentration. This annoyed me enough that I dug out an old Logitech trackman that I never really liked but at the time was an improvement over a sore wrist from the mouse. The Logitech is not even in the same league as the Kensington.

The unit has a 5-year warranty, and should given the premium price, so I called up the toll-free number expecting a hassle. I was bristling for an argument that the unit needed replacement. I had my original receipt, the warranty card and most of its original packaging. There was no hassle. The service representative took my information, apologized and informed me that a replacement was being shipped and should be at my home in ten days. No need to send in the old unit, no problem at all. I didn’t know what to think.

A week later, just as said, a new one was delivered. New, not refurbished, not restored. New. Original box and another 5-year warranty. Way to go Kensington! I’m now looking at their other warranteed products with a different eye, instead of asking myself “Who pays that?” I’m thinking, “Hmm. Maybe it’s worth the price.” If they made a mechanical, buckling-spring keyboard I’d buy that in a second. Thumbs up.