I’m astonished to find that the pre-iPhone hype is so strong that I want one. I’m generally pretty resistant to early-adopter hype. I’m not exactly gadget-shy, but I tend to hang out on the leading edge of the mainstream. It took me two or three years to buy an iPod, a Tivo, or a cell phone. My current phone remains very primitive. There are camera phones with better resolution than my ancient digital camera. I gave up on Palms after losing one and then wearing out a second one. I’m pretty shy of carrying portable gear at all, actually, after being pickpocketed out of one Palm and one digicam. And the iPhone is not exactly cheap, particularly when you consider the AT&T factor: I’m guessing that the iPhone data plan is not going to be the world’s best value. They are going to turn the first customers upside down and shake the change from their pockets.

But. Still. The commercials are truly stunning. Moreover, there are rumors that Apple is going to open up the API after all. If this is true, then holding back that announcement until this month is yet another brilliant Steve Jobs marketing move. Nobody at the World Wide Developers Conference will even care that the next Mac OS is running late. They will all be dreaming happily of the killer iPhone app that they’re gonna write. I haven’t tried to write a Mac app since the mid 1990s and even I am salivating at the possibilities.

The problem is that it’s hard not to look at the iPhone and see the computing device of the future. Cell phones are already the device of the hour, as I would know if my own cell phone and its plan weren’t so crappy. (Of course, this is the USA, so it’s not as if I have a lot of non-crappy choices.) Today I heard that most Twitter users access the service by phone. That thought never even occurred to me, hopeless dinosaur that I am. Every time I send a text message with my phone I have dark visions of my monthly bill secretly increasing by a dollar. I need to join the 21st century and get more familiar with the charms of platforms like the iPhone. By, say, buying one. For educational purposes. Yes. Standing in line at an AT&T store at midnight clutching $500 for… educational purposes.

My wife’s computer had a hard drive crash and so I’ve been working to reinstall Windows XP. Her machine is connected to the home network via wireless link, and we’re using wireless security. Since the WEP “security” standard was broken when it was released and has only gotten more broken since then, we’re using WPA with preshared keys, or “WPA-PSK” in acronym-speak.

Configuring this has required a lot of exercise:

• WPA requires you to generate a random key. You can create a 64-digit hexadecimal key, or a “passphrase” of up to 63 characters (which will be converted to a 64-digit hex key behind the scenes). It turns out that my wife’s wireless card has drivers that won’t accept 64-digit hex keys. This is very strange, since we’ve been using such a key with that very wireless card for the last two years or so. But now I can no longer remember how to enter the key into the software, and the docs don’t help. Rather than spend hours googling around trying to rediscover what I knew two years ago, I decided to switch all our machines over to a 63-character passphrase.
• I generated a random passphrase and entered it into our SMC wireless router. SMC wins the award for thoughtfulness: after I typed in my 63 random characters, the SMC converted the phrase to a 64-character key and then printed out the key so that I could write it down. This turned out to be very important - bless you, SMC!
• Next I went to switch my MacBook to the new key. There was no obvious way to do this from the Internet Connect panel; it would simply try the old key over and over again, reporting failure each time. I needed to open up the Keychain and change the stored password there. I typed in the new 64-digit hex key (perhaps the 63-char passphrase would have worked, also, but I didn’t bother to figure that out.) The MacBook worked fine after that.
• Now to change the WPA password in my Slim Devices Squeezebox. This is always a pain, since the Squeezebox doesn’t provide you with an actual keyboard, just a remote with cellphone-style number keys to type your letters and characters.The following saga ensued:
  • Turned on the Squeezebox, which promptly failed to find the wireless network using the old key.
  • Tried to edit the wireless connnection. The Squeezebox promptly crashed.
  • Several dozen crashes later, I tried resetting the Squeezebox to factory settings (hold down Add while unplugging and replugging it). Then the Squeezebox allowed me to enter a new WPA key.
  • The Squeezebox wouldn’t accept 63-character passphrases. It limited the size of the phrase to something like 16 characters. Fortunately, typing a 64-digit hex key will work, although there is a catch - once you’ve typed in the first 63 digits, the Squeezebox whisks you away to the next screen before you can get the 64th digit in. It tries to log you in, and fails. To fix this you must hit the back button and go back to the password screen, where the Squeezebox will now allow you to type the elusive 64th digit.
  The Squeezebox firmware still needs a little work, I’m afraid.
• Finally, I entered the new key into my wife’s computer. Here I was required to use the 63-character passphrase, which eventually worked. Except that I had to type it into the network card driver, then (after resetting the machine) type it twice more into Windows’ own wireless-network control panel.

Now I need a drink!

If you want to know what all the Web developers are so excited about, go download the Firebug extension and then point it at meyerweb.com. Two great tastes that taste great together.

When I set out to revive my Web development career I naturally bought a copy of Eric Meyer’s CSS: The Definitive Guide —- because (a) he’s the CSS guru and (b) I knew him back in college and used to see him all the time at the CWRU science fiction marathon, and it’s important to stick by one’s friends. Fortunately I seem to have a knack for making smart friends, because Meyer’s book is working out great.

Unfortunately, one thing this particular book doesn’t do is explain which CSS to use, when. I’ll probably seek out some more books after I finish the useful free content on A List Apart and meyerweb. Which will probably be months from now, because there’s quite a backlog. In the meantime, Firebug seems to be the perfect tool for stealing layout ideas directly from the sites of the Web’s best designers.

I might have spent today working on making my blog less generic (I am no big fan of the default Wordpress theme!) but instead I was at the Boston Ruby Group learning about Hackety Hack, a programming environment for kids that’s being designed by everybody’s favorite enigmatic Ruby-hacking cartoonist, _Why the Lucky Stiff. It looks like lots of fun.

_Why is a man on the move. He’s just closed his old blog and has started up a new one. Here’s his final comment on the old one:

Is this the first time a Ruby blog has closed?? No matter. There will three more by supper.

I guess I’m proving him right.