It’s ten o’clock at night, and I’m standing at the lecture theatre bench in the Royal Institution. A couple of hours ago, we recorded the second Christmas Lecture here, but now, there are just four of us.
I’m here partly because I’m photocopying scripts for tomorrow, but also because I’m trying to test an iChat connection out to the world (we’re planning to use it tomorrow). It seems to work… but I don’t actually know that. And since I don’t really use instant messaging, I’m a bit scuppered, since I have a tiny tiny buddy list of chums. Only one is online… and he’s somehow contrived to have left his Mac on but not be near his phone. Harrumph.
If anyone reading this can IM me on iChat or AIM as jjsanderson(at)mac.com, that would be fantastic. Preferably right now. If it’s after, say, 2300GMT on 26th December then it’s rather too late.
Thanks!
[update 00:13. Forget it. The router packed in just after I discovered it’s doing some really weird NAT rubbish. Ugh. Came home to catch some sleep.]
For completeness: it turns out that a few particular types of router (some models of ZyXel Prestige, for example) barf out when they try to pass traffic using whatever magic happens with instant messaging. The solution is to tweak your IM software to connect using a different port – 80 or 8080 are usually the recommended ones, unless you’re also running web servers in which case blah blah blah.
Basically, some routers are utter utter rubbish. And the Ri happened to have bought one of those. Ugh. But once you know there’s a work-around it takes all of five seconds to fix, and then everything works like a charm. Ruddy typical.