dicianno.org/blog

First, I’m glad Apple began support of multiple workspaces with the release of Leopard last year. Workspaces was a feature that was truly lacking from an otherwise feature-rich user interface in OS X.

Having spent a long time with GNU/Linux — long enough for it to shape my formative computer development years in high school circa 94-98 — I’ve spent time with the various desktops that implemented workspaces. None — and I really mean none — have done workspaces better than wmii. While the window-manager-that-actually-manages-windows-for-you concept might be strange to some (indeed, not being able to resize windows freely is strange to most), the concept of workspaces via tagging is so amazingly powerful.

It’s how workspaces should be done.

I’ve begun looking into implementing this on OS X using a combination of AppleScript and QuickSilver, or something similar. Research so far isn’t promising. The numbers of workspaces in Spaces.app really does correspond to an underlying data structure, so tagging — especially tagging of windows that should appear on multiple, but not all spaces — will have to be stored seperately.

I wonder how much fighting I’m going to need to do, to implement this? Would anyone out there like to start an open project to collaborate on with me? Contact me, and let’s get the ball rolling.

If you’re running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and you see a somewhat frightening and terse error message that says “Your wireless network has been compromised“, then you’ve probably entered into a world of annoyance. If you’re in the situation I was, this message begins to pop-up every few minutes. Every time it does, your network access is disabled for 60 seconds. if you’re in a Mac-centric office, and many of the developers run VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop, you probably noticed this issue begin to appear by now.

You might have tried the following:

• Disabled security on your WiFi network
• Regressed to WEP security
• Told everyone not to use the wireless

Clearly, none of these work-arounds is ideal. There is hope.

The problem is among OS X 10.5 - VMWare Fusion / Parallels Desktop - the TKIP WPA2 security protocol. For some reason, installing the VM programs creates a situation on the wireless network that causes a TKIP MIC (or a “Michael“) message integrity check error. In short: OSX and your router think that the network is being cracked, because of a way that the VM programs use or abuse the networking interface stack.

The solution is to regress the security, but by as little as possible. Simply turn of TKIP or “TKIP+AES” encryption on your wireless device, and only allow AES encryption. This is not ideal, because the Michael check is trying to warn you about network intrusion, however, it simply does not work.

Caveat: if you find that AES encryption does not work on some devices, you are probably use the stock Linksys firmware on your router. Consider upgrading to the DD-WRT firmware. Read the docs, go over notes for your router model, and take the plunge. The stable Linux-based environment for your router will make your network work, as well as offering you more features, such as local DNS, for example.