The vonBelow.Com Weblog - WWDC 2005

Widearea Bonjour

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:56:00 +0200

I had always been very interested in using Apple's TTFNAR beyond the local subnet, as it is really a great technology. Stuart Cheshire pointed me to dns-sd.org which has a good article on setting up your own Bonjour DNS Server.

However, some questions remain unanswered on the site, so this is my attempt to prepare a little FAQ compiled from some questions and answers from the Bonjour mailing list.

Q: Do I need special hardware to use DNS-SD?
A: Yes, you need a router which supports a port mapping protocol (UPnP). Most newer gateways do, I will try to list some examples

Q: When I check the resolution of my bonjour server (e.g. `dig bonjour.example.com`), everything looks fine but I do not get an answer section:
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
A: That is OK. You don't really need to have an address record for your Bonjour domain. As long as you have an NS record for the domain, mDNSResponder will know where to send the updates

Q: I think I have set up everything correctly, but I still can not register services with my server from the Bonjour Preference Pane. What am I doing wrong?
A: Check the console. You may find somethink like:
Jun 16 12:27:51 Tigerbook mDNSResponder: ERROR: mDNS_SetSecretForZone - could not convert shared secret **************** from base64
This can mean that the password actually was saved as a series of stars (a bug in the current version of the pane). Re-enter your password and try again.

The Day after

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 20:00:58 +0200

Day two after Intel.

It seems most here at WWDC try to embrace the change and see the good side of it.
Mostly this will be a hard time for Apple's marketing department, who have been touting the PPC's superiority all those years. Worse, would you buy a high-end G5 system right now? Actually there is no good reason not to, but I bet sales will decline.

Somebody brought up an interesting point: Intel may actually use the closed Apple platform as a way to bring their innovations to market sooner. Apple can happily live with smaller quantities than other manufacturers, and might be more open to develop for new hardware than Microsoft.

WWDC itself is a little different this year: No product announcements besides "The Big One", no product displays (last year had BMWs all over the moscone), no gifts for the attendees (well, wow, I got Xcode 2.1 on DVD). But more labs, much more Apple engineers, many hands on sessions.

And here is the (almost) official Soundtrack for WWDC 2005: Rubberneckin'.

So what do you say about the Intel rumor?

weblog@vonBelow.Com (Alexander von Below) — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 06:16:32 +0200

Usually I do not give much for Apple rumors other than crazyapplerumors.com, but because I have been asked about my opinion about the Apple switching to Intel rumor so many times today, I decided to comment on it here.

1) I think there are a number of reasons why this would be a Bad Move, one of them being that I am an old-schooling orthodox Apple fanatic. Big Endian or bust. Don't make me list the other ones, the Mac rumor sites have them all.

2) Because of that, if true, Apple would not do it just because His Steveness had a bad joint last Tuesday, or Sam Palmisano forgot to send him a birthday card. Should Apple make this drastic move, I am fairly certain they have considered all the consequences. Tomorrow I will find out, and I will keep you posted.

Alex