Well that was interesting. I’ve run into a driver problem. On a Mac! They’re not supposed to have driver problems, especially problems created by Apple!

Here’s the thing. I’ve got a Merlin XU870 HSDPA card for my ExpressCard/32 slot in my MacBook Pro. Three (the mobile phone company, not the number) gave me some fairly basic software from Novatel to make the card work. It was a kernel extension and a modem script – that’s about it. It worked just fine for a few months.

The other day, Software Update came up and told me about WWAN Support Update 1.0. Noticing the Merlin card amongst the hardware it supports, I allowed it to be installed. That’s when the problems started.

When I put the card in after the update, the status icons in the upper right corner of the street started flashing. It was like there was some kind of error loading them up. I took the card out again, and all was well. Installing the old drivers overtop of the new ones did nothing.

After speaking with a very nice senior person at Three (the mobile phone company, not the number), and a very nice guy at Apple (the computer company, not the fruit), I found some discussions at Apple’s website that led me to an article at MacFixit.

Here’s the deal. Delete these files (you’ll need to be root: sudo su -):

• /Library/Modem Scripts/WWAN Support
• /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/WWAN.menu
• /System/Library/Extensions/IOSerialFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleWWANSupport.kext
• /System/Library/Extensions/IOSerialFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleWWANVerizon.kext

• /Library/Application Support/AppleVerizonSupport.kext
• /Library/Application Support/AppleVerizonSupportKicker.kext
• /Library/Application Support/Verizon.menu

Then reinstall the Merlin software from Novatel. I did this, and everything seems to be back to normal now. No more flashing icons or similar weirdness, and I can connect to the mobile Internet the same way I used to.

Now all I have to do is wait for Three (the mobile phone company, not the number) to finish their network upgrade in Melbourne and turn on HSDPA – and Apple to fix their problem and release version 1.1 that’s compatible with the non-Cingular users of the world.

This interview with David Servan-Schreiber, published in Ode Magazine, was one of the more interesting things I’ve read in a while. The interview hints at a cover-up (even a conspiracy!) of Big Medicine to simply teach only solutions to medical problems that involve purchasing large amounts of chemicals from multinational companies. So few doctors take the extra steps to realise that there’s other ways to solve a problem. Here’s a quote:

Back in the United States he started examining the medical literature on [the natural treatments he’d seen in India]. And indeed, nearly every method he had seen was clearly documented. Why, he wondered, didn’t he know anything about them? Why hadn’t he learned these techniques in medical school?

Many thanks to Hergy for passing this one on.

(From last year’s Get Fuzzy calendar).

Now that the iPhone hysteria has died down a bit, the feature people seem to be talking about the most is this “multi-touch” thing: the hitherto unheard-of feature where a touch-screen can understand multiple simultaneous touches. One company that has been at the forefront of this technology is Perceptive Pixel. Check out this very cool demo:

There’s got to have been some serious graphics muscle behind that screen too.

And, by the way, this will be the basis for the upcoming Mac tablet computer. And you know, gentle reader, just how accurate my predictions have been in the past.

More news from the land of the free and the home of the weird. In this case, it was the headline at El Reg that caught my RSS-skimming eye: School tasers naked, oil-smeared student. Now, as far as I’m concerned, you probably can’t get a much better headline than that. Go read the story, there’s nothing I can say here that can top that.

Except maybe “soooooeeeeee pig!”