Category: Product Deficiencies

Features, capabilities, extensions, or performance lacking in products.

Garmin WebUpdater

I own a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx in order to geoencode my photography using HoudahGeo.

Garmin now has a means up updating the firmware in their GPSs by using a WebUpdater, of which I use the version for the Mac.

I Got Myself Into Trouble
In retrospect, I got myself into trouble by starting the program, it failed to detect the GPS, to which I turn on the GPS, and plugged it into the USB port. While the WebUpdater saw the device and went to update, it stayed in the “Erasing… Do Not Unplug” state for about two hours before I got brave.

What I Did, And Boy Was I Lucky
I couldn’t cancel. I couldn’t Quit. So I had to Force Quite by using Command-Option-Escape, that at least got WebUpdater to stop. The GPS was still stating “Loader Loading…” when I pulled the USB, and when that didn’t change anything, I turned off the power to it. I wasn’t so sure I was going to see much of anything when I powered it back on.

I got lucky. I turn the power back on and I was still at the old revision. Then plugged in the USB to the computer. Then started WebUpdater, which again noticed the GPS version, downloaded the firmware again, and had no problems installing it. Seems doing things in this order works just fine.

My Plans If I Was Unlucky
Over on Bill Turner’s site, he’s written an article about Fixing a Dead Garmin GPSMap 60CSx. It seems he’s learned holding down the Power Button and the Up Arrow at the same time while starting the WebUpdater software (I think he has three hands to pull this off), he’s able to force the GPS to identify itself to the updater. Problem is, according to his instructions, you have to keep holding down these button chord during the update; some comments on the blog state it isn’t necessary, and there’ve been mixed results as to whether this works universally or not.

I’m not sure I would have had the bravery to just go killing processes plain outright, but since Bill did such a nice job of providing an alternative, I felt it was worth the risk — even if I didn’t have to go that route. Thanks Bill for blogging your GPS recovery notes.

Firefox Slow Page Load – Solved

Firefox 3 slow? 20 second page load times? Figured out why. And how to fix it.

A co-worker showed me an interesting problem with Firefox today. He loaded a page from our application (running on localhost) and the page content loaded instantly, but the page load itself didn’t end until a time out 20 seconds later. Literally.

Everything we saw a measured from the browser or from the sending application showed that the content was sent in milliseconds, and the page load was just sitting there doing nothing. We were even using the latest Firefox beta.

Other browsers had no such problem.

Turns out, we figured out what was going on using the Tamper Data add-on.

Turns out there was a Connection: keep-alive in the header. When we changed it from keep-alive to close, the browser behaved as expected. That is, it loaded the page instantly.

A little web investigation showed that when you use the keep-alive attribute, you must also use Content-Length: header, which the sending application wasn’t doing.

A quick application tweak to send the content length, and everything ran super spiffy.

Now, if you don’t have access to the application that’s sending you web pages, you can twiddle with the about:config and change the network.http.keep-alive setting to false.

iChat Problems: Fixed

Got Leopard? Find that iChat isn’t working? Do you run Parallels? Guess what, that may be it. What? You’re not running Parallels at the same time you iChat? Not relevant, Parallels has network services active even if the client isn’t. Here’s the workaround to get you chatting…

iChat and Parallels
While trying to iChat using Leopard to a system running Tiger, I ran into a problems that I never had using OS X 10.4 before: bad video quality to downright refusing to connect.

With a little research, I ran across this article and that was enough to resolve the problem.

Here’s how to get iChat working on OS X 10.5
…if you’re running Parallels.

See, turns out that Parallels, I’m using 3.0 Build 5582 (Dec 5, 2007), appears to be running some services, even when the virtual machine is active, that gets in the way of iChat.

Get out of iChat.

Go to Apple / System Preferences…, select Network, and click on Parallels NAT and change the Configure drop down to Off; then go to Parallels Host-Guest an change the Configure drop down to Off. Press Apply.

Get back into iChat and try again. For me, it instantly fixed the problem.

Five Things I Can’t Do with OS X Mail’s RSS

With the new OS X release of Leopard, there were amazing improvements in Mail. One of which was the addition of RSS feeds. Here are five things I can’t do with RSS in Mail that I wish I could… Apple, are you listening?

I notice with OS X 10.5 (Leopard)’s new Mail integrated RSS reader, once I have a feed there’s a few minor annoying limitations that aren’t available.

OS X Mail RSS1) While I can review what the RSS feed URL is by hovering over it, I can’t copy it to the clipboard.

2) If the RSS feed location changes, I can’t change the feed’s URL.

3) I’d love to be able to drag the RSS icon to a browser and have it open the page.

4) Or, I’d like to be able to right click the feed and have it open it in a browser or my default RSS reader (NetNewsWire).

5) Drag the RSS feed icon, or an article from the feed, into an open Mail message to share the URL.

I hope Apple will enhance the feature capabilities soon.