Getting low number of bars when it should be high, or getting errors trying to join a network it should have no problem with?

Here are some things to try when Airport seems to not be connecting well.

1. Go to System Preferences
Click on “Network” (under “Internet & Network” in 10.4 & 10.5, under Internet & Wireless in 10.6).
Select “AirPort” from the column on the left.
Click on the Advanced but in the lower right.
Be sure you are in the “Airport” Tab, then select the name of the network you are having trouble connecting with from the list. Click on the “-” (minus) sign to throw it out. Click “OK” in the lower right.
Close System Preferences, and restart the computer.

2. You might want also to reset the Parameter RAM (PRAM) at the same time. Do this by holding down CMD & OPTION & P & R all at the same time as soon as you restart. Let the computer “bong” (startup tone) for three times. This resets a number of system parameters. (The

3. If these tricks don’t continue to work, then some other solutions might be needed. These might include re-installing the system software, upgrading the operating system, or reseating the AirPort card, or trying a different AirPort card. Let me know if it’s still not behaving.

I recently had the opportunity to help InformationWeek writer Mitch Wagner – one of the people I “follow” on Twitter (as “MitchWagner”) – with a slow starting Macintosh system. He mentioned a couple of times on Twitter that it was taking his Mac 8 minutes to start up. Such a lag time can be quite frustrating if you’re having to restart for some reason, like he was.

Here is the thought process and the actions I took, for the enlightenment of you the reader:

The first step is to get a handle on the system in question: what’s there in terms of hardware and software, how big is the storage and memory relative to what is needed, and how much is space left over.

1. First I had him to send his System Profiler file. I saw that he’s got an Intel-based iMac, running OS X Leopard (updated to the latest version – 10.5.6), with enough RAM memory (working memory, as opposed to storage, such as a hard drive) to know that isn’t the cause of the slowdown. And nothing is jumping out at me in terms of the software he’s running, at least from the System Profiler report. But you can’t tell from a System Profiler how much storage (hard drive space) is left over, only the total space. So …

2. Had him “Get Info” on his hard drive volumes and tell me the “Available” and “Used”  space. He had 25.71 Gigabytes available on the (single) volume that he was using as his system, and plenty on his backup (Time Machine) volume. So that wasn’t the problem. I needed to see what was going on inside the system as it was running, while starting up. Time to look at the system log.

3. I sent Mitch this message via Twitter:
“One more : open Console (Utilities folder), and under LOG FILES, pick system.log, go to File, Save a Copy As, and email that.”

Looking at the system.log file, I was able to trace when his last startup was, and how long various processes took. I could see that indeed, his system was taking about 8 minutes to start up. And certain system messages looked suspicious. There are always entries about error conditions in any system log, as the hundreds of UNIX processes run into conditions that they report, but in this case two third party emulators (used to run Windows) - Parallels and VMware – were repeatedly reporting error. There was also at least one USB issue going on. From experience I knew that USB devices (and FireWire too) can hang up or slow down a system. The computer will wait until it’s happy about what a external device or network condition is doing before it releases it’s stranglehold on the system to allow input from the hapless user.

So I emailed him with this advice:

I would try these experiments to see what in particular may be slowing it down
 (if you just re-install you may run into the same issues again):

 Disconnect all USB devices except your mouse
 Turn off or de-install Parallels
 Turn off or de-install VMware

Mitch emails me back later:

I unplugged all USB devices but the keyboard and mouse - that cut boot
time to 2 minutes. Thanks!

Here’s how I changed the text size and color for th articles on this blog. (I thought the text was too small and too grey). In the Site Admin panel, I found the “Editor” button under “Appearance”. Exploring the various things to edit in the list on the right, I saw at the bottom “style.php”. Clicking pn that link, and looking at the code, I noticed this line:

body { font: .79em <?php echo $traffic_body_font; ?>; line-height: 1.6em; background: #D0D4D4; color: #<?php echo $traffic_font_color; ?>; }

OK, so “body” of course refers to the HTML body, which is what we want, and the part within the { } includes some CSS code specifying the font size. I recocgized “em” as a text size measurement. So I made it bigger – .99em. That made the text bigger and more readable, but pushed the text in the header down below the banner graphic. I tried it at .89, and that worked better.

I did a quick little spreadsheet to see how many photos I’ve taken since I started keeping them on the computer (this doesn’t include scans of slides and stills - I’ll try and include that later!). Notice how the gigabytes jump up this year. This is because I’ve started shooting in RAW mode (with a Canon 40D), and they take up much more space than a jpg. Anyway, the total number of photos so far is almost 21,000:

Screenshot of spreadsheet calculating my total number of photos

So here is this newly-installed blog. I wonder what  version of Wordpress it is? Ah - it’s 2.7 (my other blog is 2.6 at the moment).  So what’s the difference with WP 2.7? The interface looks different.

Meeting Notes (need to be edited):

People pay him (Enrique Gutierrez) to create WP themes. He did a blog post about it.

Here’s his post about Customizing Wordpress

1. Planning: personal, pro? Monetized? Ad placement. How many columns - 2, 3 (pro) 4 (annoying). PLugins. Discuss, sociable you can style - avoid the mess. what pages are you planning - image galery, carasel, portfolion, boxes god forbid, contact forms (Cform). How to remind peopel to come back (RSS…) , what colors - Colorjack.com.

2. Design. Go into Photoshop . Not only for blog posts but for searches, page not found. Wp also has navigation, parent child relationship, blogroll, navigaition issues. Then PHP. Just enough to know what you are looking at. Use default to see what is there, start modifying it, throw images, the layout, Then the phase is modifying.

codex site

WP has functions that are English-like names. Google funciton name - will come up with codex site.

XAMP - (cross platform) - put WP on it. Localhost. for dicking around with thesemes, the way to go. Apache friends.org (Sourceforge). Will install services, web server.

Do this with OS ? MySQL

3 column these - two sidebar files - easier if it’s in one file (a programmer faux pax but easier mainentance).

Wordpress these read in top of CSS file has info about the theme.  WP will inform people of new version if you uplaod. PNG file thumbnail screenshot. 240 x 180 pixel.

happyandfun.org?

Q: recreate look of a site that exists already. match header file you already have. edit each file that creates pages

Dreamweaver - WP themes?

Wireframe = CSS framwork (2, 3 columns, …)

Wordpress.org has good docs. Wordpress Camp, SF, NY. Matt is founder.

SEO for WP. Wordpress.org has. Post at Weblosers.org. No, webwizrds

1. Self-host. Customization.

permalink structure is not search engine friendly.

3. Customize titles, keywords up front - heavier weaight on firs couple of words. Optimize descriptions, grab title, url, description tag

Optimize More text. Cusomize this for each post, specific keywords, incoming links

optimize images embedded - alt tags, title tags

All-in-one SEO

related posts plugin

simple tags plugin

twitter - good for networking, faster than facebook, updating with seeing hwat peopel are doing in more real time

search.twitter.com

tweetup

danlarson

tweets. twitter plugin - noice way to update a blog if you haven’t posted for a while

oscommerce - link to it form a WP site, make it look like your site

downtownrob  WEbwizards