How can I use AirportExtreme to extend range of iMac based AirportNetwork ?

Question

I've read a lot of infomation about using Airport Extreme or Express to extend a network that has an Airport Extreme base station as its 'hub' via WDS, but nothing about the case where the 'hub' (that creates the network and is connected to the internet) is not a base station, but a computer.
I have a cable modem connected directly (Ethernet) to my iMac G5. My MacBookPro can connect to the internet via an Airport network created by the iMac, but i need to extend the range of this. A friend has given me an Airport Extreme that he isn't using and I have spent all day trying to get it to connect to the iMacs network ... to act as a 'relay', but can't see how to do it.
(I can get the iMac, and MacBookPro to connect to a network created by the Airport Extreme with no problems, but not the other way round) .... Please help, i'm going crazy with this !
Many Macs/ Many OS's     desperate
Many Macs/ Many OS's    

Answer 1

Hi SGIII,
I just wanted to say thanks for kick starting me. I am well on my way to accomplishing this task with some modifications to the Applescript source you provided. I figured out that I would need to loop through the input and lookup each individual character in the dictionary (so I created a separate service to handle simple dictionary lookup). I parse the definition using your suggested code wrapped into a function, and then append the output. Right now it's close but not perfect: showing this output for the characters above:
"wǒshìAměiAguórén" (the A is wrong and the reason is that I need to change the delimiter to factor that some definitions will have a capital A in them). I will share the finished script on my pastebin.
----on run {input, parameters}
set my_string to "我是美国人" --input
set output to ""
repeat with counter_variable_name from 1 to count of my_string
  set current_character to item counter_variable_name of my_string
  set current_definition to do shell script "automator -i " & current_character & " ~/Library/Services/GetChineseDefinition.workflow"
  set output to output & parseForPinyin(current_definition)
end repeat
--end run
on parseForPinyin(character_input)
  set pyCharSet to {"a", "ā", "á", "ǎ", "à", "b", "c", "d", "e", "ē", "é", "ě", "è", "f", "g", "h", "i", "ī", "í", "ǐ", "ì", "j", "k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "ō", "ó", "ǒ", "ò", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u", "ū", "ú", "ǔ", "ù", "ǖ", "ǚ", "ǜ", "w", "x", "y", "z"}
  set {oTID, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, "①"}
  set cc to (character_input as string)'s text items's item 1's characters 2 thru -1
  set py to ""
  repeat with c in cc
  if c is in pyCharSet then set py to py & c
  end repeat
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oTID
  return py
end parseForPinyin
The GetChineseDictionary Service couldn't be simpler: