Thursday, August 25, 2005

Mac in Mac

By now, most of the Singaporean Mac users will have known that if you updated your operating system to Tiger 10.4.2 or if you are using Panther and have applied the Airport Software Update, you lose connectivity to the free WiFi connection at McDonalds (SSID:skynetglobal). There's a long thread at the Mac User Group's forum in which the "unlucky" users reported their problems. I was fortunate to be late enough to hop onto the OS X Tiger bandwagon and thus knew about this and avoided the 10.4.2 update, thus still able to use the free WiFi service in McDonalds. :)

A friend and I were in the McDonald's at Bugis Junction, and I took out my PowerBook to go online and show him some photos. A speech impaired person with an iBook gestured to me asking me how we got online. I booted up his iBook, and went "oh no" when I saw the Spotlight icon in the menu bar. My fears were confirmed when I couldn't logon even with the famed "Control-Key" trick. I clicked "About this Mac" and saw that it is indeed 10.4.2.

Since I can't communicate with him by speech and gesticulation is going to be difficult, I opened TextEditor and typed to him, IM-style, that Tiger 10.4.2 is not compatible with the skynetglobal network. He said that his friend using Panther isn't able to get online as well, which I replied that Panther with the Airport Software update isn't able to get online too. He went away for a while and brought his friend's iBook. Tried the Control-Key trick and we got online without a hitch. Phew. Opened TextEditor again, and taught him the trick. He went away happy that he is now able to get online.

I sure hope the sysadmin for that network (and/or Apple) is able to get this fixed.

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