Wireless Woes

Strange behaviour: Everything was fine, working with my MBP on a multi-AP WDS network of new Airport Extreme base stations; move to another floor, just next to an AP, can't see the signal, or rather I see it fleetingly, get asked for password, then it disappears. My first conclusion is that the AP must be caput, but back upstairs, where I started, I now see no signal.

Another laptop can see the signal fine. I try manually changing network setup, restart, shutdown, even taking out the battery then restart. Still no wifi connection. I conclude that the wifi card in my laptop must be damaged, or at least have a dodgy aerial connection.

Back at home I still have the same problem—and neither Airport Utility, nor iStumbler can see the signal either. I think I'll try looking at the wifi card.

To check on how to do that I need to get online. So I find an ethernet cable and connect a LAN port on one of my base stations. I'm now online, as expected, but I didn't expect to see Airport Utility and iStumbler burst into life just because I made a wired connection. Everything looks normal, and Network preferences now says I have a wireless connection.

I unplug the ethernet cable, and everything stays fine; back to normal. I don't pretend to understand why.

update

It happened again!

Same symptoms - persisting across two different WDS networks.

Again, recovery coincided with my decision to give up hope and use a wired connection to my base station.

Crazy!

Microsoft Office 2004 broken: dead as a parrot

Quicktime 7.2 update breaks Office 2004 on Intel Powerbook

For solution, see below

If you haven't yet installed QT7.2, my advice is to wait!

Here's what happened to me:

• Office Update 11.3.6 refuses to launch.
• MS Word refuses to launch!
• MS Powerpoint refuses to launch.
• MS Excel refuses to launch.
• decide to remove Office, and reinstall!
• MS Office refuses to install—the installer won't run.
• Remove all traces of Office in preferences etc.!
• MS office installer won't run.
• !

macfixit has some suggestions these didn't work for me.

It seems that the prebinding of the java libraries is at fault!

Steps to Fix:

Remove Java 6

> su Administrator
> cd /Library/Receipts/JavaSE6Release1.pkg/Contents
> lsbom -s -f Archive.bom > /tmp/file-list

Edit /tmp/file-list to replace all " " with "\ " and all "./" with "rm /" (I use emacs for this.)

> sudo bash /tmp/file-list
> rm -r /Library/receipts/JavaSE6Release1.pkg
> sudo update_prebinding

I removed the following

sudo rm -r /Library/Receipts/JavaForMacOSX10.4Release5.pkg

and installed it again. (From http://developer.apple.com/java/download/)