I'm waiting for an iMac (or perhaps a new "mini" Mac Pro) with eSATA to come out. Won't buy any new personal computer without an eSATA port. I wonder what's holding up both Apple and PC makers. And they must find a way to make it "hot swap" — add and remove eSATA devices while the computer is running, just like USB and FireWire devices work (currently, your computer must be switched off before you can remove an eSATA hard disk). Here's some discussion that reveals why eSATA is so desirable: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=440925
UPDATE (2008-03-11): After I read Apple in Talks with Sony about Blu-ray Drives, I wish for the next iMac to also come equipped with a Blu-ray drive. Would also appreciate the traditional matte (non-glossy) display, at least as an option. Apple, please don't disappoint!
Here are my recommendations for time synchronizers for PCs (Macs have this functionality built in)… Both update automatically using a frequency you set.
Accurate time on your servers is essential if you are running an Apple Xserve that is bound to your Windows Active Directory (for user authentication) since Apple’s “Active Directory DS plugin” uses Kerberos which is very time sensitive and basically won’t work if the time skew between itself and the AD servers is too large.
1. ArGoSoft Time Synchronizer - freeware
http://www.argosoft.com/rootpages/TimeSync/Default.aspx
Simple with “Synchronize Now” button and settings for update frequency. Settings via a Control Panel.
2. Dimension 4 - free for personal use (donations welcome); US$10 for commercial use
http://www.thinkman.com/dimension4/
Has a lot of features and a nice System Tray icon to either “Synchronize now” or “Open” to change settings.
Screenshots:
This is crazy... a new post after over 2 years!
Well, I just thought I'd throw this out there in hopes it might help someone else. Apple support and warranty service is the absolute worst in the world!...
2 problem-resolution items here for Apple Xserve (Mac OS X Server 10.4.9):
PROBLEM-RESOLUTION 1:
When attempting to connect to an Apple Xserve (bound to a Windows Active Diretory) by hitting Command-K, entering afp://server (e.g. afp://x1.bbdohk.com), and using Active Directory credentials, the following error pops up:
Connection Failed
Unknown user, incorrect password, or login is disabled.
When logging in using a local, Open Directory account, connection is successful.
On the Xserve in the Console app, a ton of the following errors are logged:
May 11 08:42:54 x1 DirectoryService[90]: Active Directory DS Plugin: Kerberos Time Skew Too Large. Check Date/Time!\n
May 11 08:44:54 x1 DirectoryService[90]: Active Directory DS Plugin: Kerberos Time Skew Too Large. Check Date/Time!\n
May 11 08:46:54 x1 DirectoryService[90]: Active Directory DS Plugin: Kerberos Time Skew Too Large. Check Date/Time!\n
So the fix is to match the times on the Xserve and Windows AD servers.
PROBLEM-RESOLUTION 2:
In Windows, when attempting to connect to an Apple Xserve by entering \\servername (or using the IP address, such as \\10.1.1.20) in an Explorer window, the following error appears:
Windows cannot find ‘\\servername’. Check the spelling and try again, or try searching for the item by clicking the Start button and then clicking Search.
Fix is to start the “Windows” service on the Xserve using Server Admin.
The problem is on my Xserve, the Windows startup state (Running or Stopped) does not stick after a reboot. And it may even stop on its own. Not sure what the fix is for that.
Finally, after weeks of researching and fine-tuning hardware specifications to meet our needs, today I confirmed about HKD96,000 worth of purchases for our company, BBDO Hong Kong. From DELL I ordered an LTO-2 tape autoloader external backup drive (PowerVault 122T LTO-2, 200/400GB capacity per tape) and 3 Optiplex GX280 desktop PCs (P4 3.0GHz/512M/80G/Combo) with 17" UltraSharp LCD displays. Got the new Optiplex case which is more boxy and looks cooler — their "Next-Generation Desktop (DT) Chassis" as shown below. These just came out! Even on DELL's US site, they still have pictures of the old case. Also ordered a Fortinet FortiGate 200A firewall bundled with the 2nd-year hardware/firmware maintenance. Next week I'll be ordering 2 DELL PowerEdge 2800 servers, 1 for file serving and the other as an application server running SQL Server. These will replace existing servers that are aged. Am waiting to meet face to face with one of DELL's tech support engineers on Monday to discuss storage options before firming up the server orders. Am anxious to start playing with all this cool gear but it'll be a lot of work — some of it on the weekends, unfortunately.
Day before yesterday I came back home to find the lights on my D-Link DWL-2000AP Xtreme G Wireless Access Point completely out. Power connection on both ends was fine so I felt the AC adapter and it was cool, not warm as it normally is, and then I put my nose up close to the adapter and sure enough, I smelt the familiar burnt odor of a failed power supply. So last night I picked up a new AC switchable adapter that supported the 5V, 2.5A rating that the D-Link uses. Lights turned on and started blinking. But I soon found out that the unit itself had problems that were hardware-related. Tried resetting and reconfiguring it and initially, I got some of the web-based config pages to show up (although strangely, some graphic elements were missing, which hinted at more serious problems) and I even changed a few settings (admin password and SSID) but later I was totally unable to connect to it, even after multiple resets. The LAN light just continually flashed on and off.
So tonight I picked up a Belkin High-Speed Mode Wireless G Router (model F5D7231-4) from the helpful and knowledgeable folks, Sam Shum and Eric Chu, at IntelliTech System in the Wanchai Computer Mall (Southorn Centre, just above the Wanchai MTR station). These guys sell all the major wireless broadband brands, including Linksys, D-Link, ZyXEL, 3Com, and Buffalo but have always recommended Belkin for its stability and high-quality drivers. And based on their recommendation, I recommended Belkin to 4 of my friends and colleagues — Greg Li, Patrick Wei, Raymond Leung, and Andy Man — who ended up buying their product and were happy with it. So finally, I myself got a Belkin and just got it set it up and can say that I am totally impressed with their product. Everything from the packaging, printed manual, exterior casing, and through to their web-based configurator is top notch. I can see evidence everywhere of the fine details they took care of (e.g. sticker that seals the bubble packaging that holds the unit and says "STOP: Run the Installation CD-ROM FIRST"). The instructions, explanations, diagrams, and definitions in the manual (and in the web-based configurator) are easy to understand and follow (lots of screen captures and diagrams help!) — definitly one of the best I have ever come across. I also like the "Designed in California" note (just like Apple products!), tastefully printed in small type under the unit. Lifetime warranty (competitors only offer 1-year warranty)! Mac OS 9 and OS X support! Access Point and Wireless Bridge modes! Dynamic DNS, Parental Control Web Content Filter, and STOPzilla pop-up blocking support! And last but not least, a high-quality Delta AC adaptor!
If you're in the market for a new wireless broadband router, I strongly recommend Belkin over all the rest. And I have had my fair share of experience with broadband routers and wireless devices (access points and wireless network cards and antennas). Before the D-Link I used an Apple AirPort Base Station (1st generation) along with a Linksys broadband router (wired only). Worked with the old WaveLAN and Lucent (now Agere) gear too. I currently have the Belkin in Access Point mode hooked up to my stable and reliable ZyXEL Prestige 314 broadband router (wired only). I have a somewhat fancy setup here at home with basically 3 web servers (2 IP cameras and this PowerBook G4/500MHz running Mac OS X Server 10.3.8 which has served you this very page!) that use different TCP ports (to get around my ISP, PCCW Netvigator, blocking incoming port 80).
On this Mac OS X Server-based PowerBook G4/500MHz server, I installed Webmin a few days ago following these instructions. Tonight I got phpMyAdmin installed and then converted the database this blog uses from Berkeley DB to MySQL following these instructions. Thank God everything went smoothly! I am amazed at how well these Open Source applications work and am thrilled to be learning much more about getting programs installed Unix style. I have a lot more I want to share about my experiences with, for instance, getting DBI and DBD::mysql Perl modules installed but at the moment, I just have my notes on each step of the process in email messages that I have sent to myself. I will write up and post some of what I have learned here soon. I also majorly need to update our photo gallery — 8 months out of date! Time now to hit the sack though!
Upgraded Movable Type from version 3.11 to 3.15. Downloaded just the "upgrade distribution file" rather than the full distribution. Since my PowerBook is now my blog server, using the Mac's Finder, I just opened up my mt folder and the MT-3.15-upgrade-en_US folder, selected all files in the 3.15 folder except the extlib folder, and dragged and dropped the 3.15 files into the mt folder, replacing the old-version files. I then I opened both extlib folders and dragged and dropped all the 3.15 files into the installed extlib folder, replacing. My existing extlib folder contained additional "external libraries" that I had added earlier so this is why the extlib folder had to be updated that way (as per the upgrade instructions). Then I did a full rebuild of the site.
Just finished migrating this (Perl-based) Movable Type blog and our (PHP-based) photo gallery over from a Linux-based server in the US (web-hosting service) to this very laptop I'm typing on right now at home — an old PowerBook G4/500MHz (Titanium) running Mac OS X Server 10.3.7. This PowerBook is connected via an 11Mbps 802.11b wireless connection to my D-Link wireless access point, ZyXEL Prestige 314 broadband router, and then through to a 6Mbps DSL broadband connection from PCCW Netvigator. Took like 3-4 weeks(!) to do but I learned a lot in the process. As it's almost 3am here now, more later on this later as I'm off to hit the sack!
PROBLEM: Microsoft Outlook 2003's File > Import and Export menu item is grayed out so you can't import your old messages (perhaps you are migrating your data to a new computer).
SOLUTION: Pointed out to me by Henrik whom I had made contact with via Computing.Net's Office forum, here's the solution from Outlook's built-in Help:
Why is the Import/Export wizard unavailable?In our case, the 2 languages we were dealing with were English and Simplified Chinese. In Henrik's case, English and Slovenian. On Windows XP, the key setting to change is under Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Advanced tab > Language for non-Unicode programs. Since my colleague in Beijing had the Simplified Chinese version of Office installed on this English Windows XP system, he had to change that setting to Chinese (PRC).
If the Import/Export wizard is unavailable, verify that the language or country/region selected in the Regional and Language Options (Microsoft Windows XP) or Regional Options (Microsoft Windows 2000) dialog box in Control Panel matches the Outlook User Interface (UI) language. See Windows Help for more information.
Thanks, Henrik of Slovenia!
Here was my post on Computing.Net's Office forum on this problem. And here was Henrik's previous post on this exact problem which went unanswered but he eventually figured out on his own.
$ whois 209.43.147.138 [...] ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.verio.net:4321/ [...] Comment: ******************************************** Comment: Reassignment information for this block is Comment: available at rwhois.verio.net port 4321 Comment: ********************************************Well, how do you proceed for further info with that?
$ whois -h rwhois.verio.net -p 4321 209.43.147.138That resulted in the answer I was looking for.
Here was my post on MacInTouch about "Flash screen recording" software:
Have been trying to find Mac software that does "screen recording to
Flash (SWF)". Did searches on Google and VersionTracker and came up
empty. In the PC world there are several such programs that are
excellent for software demos and training.
For screen recording, the Flash format is much better than video
formats such as QuickTime or AVI because the files are much smaller,
playback starts almost instantly without any stalls or jerkiness, and
you can make it interactive. Notes, captions, callouts, commentary,
and sound effects can be easily added.Here are some examples of the Flash-based software demos:
Here are some PC-based "screen recorder to Flash" applications and
all offer free trials:
- ViewletCam ($99)
- Macromedia RoboDemo (formerly Flash Cam, $499)
- BB FlashBack ($199)
- Camtasia Studio ($299)
- FlashCast ($129.99)
I posted this last night to the EIMS-L mailing list which discusses usage and administration of the Mac-based EIMS (Eudora Internet Mail Server) mail server. No response from anyone on the list!... But I do hope it's helpful for others. It works well for me!
I have pieced together an AppleScript that might be helpful if you use the EIMS Archive Filter. I have been using the script with EIMS Server X 3.2.4 and Archive Filter X 1.1a1 on OS X Server 10.3.4. By scheduling the script to run daily, you can automatically have each day's archived messages saved in a folder with the date (YYYYMMDD format) as the name to another disk/partition.Don't laugh because I'm a total AppleScript beginner and by posting this here, I am hoping more experienced AppleScripters can make corrections and improvements (error checking, etc) and share it with everyone here. I have been using this for about 2 weeks and it works well for my needs.
To use, copy from below everything after ===== and paste into Apple's Script Editor. Follow the 'Setup instructions' (basically, just edit 3 variables to match your environment) and then hit the Compile button. Save as 'Application' file format and no other options. Use CronniX and choose File > System Crontab. Create a new crontab entry to run your AppleScript at 11:59pm (23:59). Should look something like this:
59 23 * * * root /usr/bin/open /Volumes/MS/cronnix/ArchiveFilter_script.app
That's pretty much it. Hope this is helpful for others. Again, corrections and comments very much welcomed!
Cheers,
DerekP.S. Thanks to Kurt Harvey for passing on Webgraph's EIMS Log Archive script which was very helpful.
=====
-- The date calculation part of this script is from Webgraph, Inc.'s 'EIMS Log Archive 0.9.scr' script
-- The remaining few lines I got from just scrounging around for the correct verbs and syntax, partly from 1 script-record session-- What this script does:
-- 1. Deletes previous day's 'Archived mail' folder (folder would have been named previous day's date in YYYYMMDD format) if it exists
-- 2. Empties trash
-- 3. Quits 'EIMS Server X'
-- 4. Renames 'Archived mail' folder to today's date in YYYYMMDD format
-- 5. Relaunches 'EIMS Server X' (EIMS automatically creates new 'Archived mail' folder)
-- 6. Copies YYYYMMDD folder (previous 'Archived mail' folder) to target disk (root level)-- Assumptions:
-- 1. EIMS is running when this script is run
-- 2. This script is scheduled to run exactly once per day (at 11:59pm recommended)
-- 3. Name of EIMS app is 'EIMS Server X'
-- 4. Path to 'Archived mail' folder is MS:eims:Mail Folder:Archived mail
-- 5. Path to EIMS app is MS:eims:EIMS Server X
-- 6. Target disk is 'archiveDisk'-- Setup instructions:
-- If you renamed your EIMS app, do a find and replace for 'EIMS Server X' (2 instances)
-- For items 4, 5, 6 above, change settings (labeled 1, 2, 3 below near the end) to match your environment------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Date calculation for folder renaming
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Day
on shortDay(theDate) -- Takes AppleScript date parameter
set {dd, theMonth, yyyy} to the {day, month, year} of theDate
if dd is less than 10 then
set dayZero to "0"
else
set dayZero to ""
end if
return (dayZero & dd) as text
end shortDay
on shortDay2(theDate) -- Takes AppleScript date parameter
set {dd, theMonth, yyyy} to the {day, month, year} of theDate
if dd is less than or equal to 10 then
set dayZero to "0"
else
set dayZero to ""
end if
return (dayZero & dd - 1) as text
end shortDay2-- Month
on shortMonth(theDate) -- Takes AppleScript date parameter
set {dd, theMonth, yyyy} to the {day, month, year} of theDate
set theMonths to {January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December}
repeat with mm from 1 to 12
if item mm of theMonths is theMonth then exit repeat -- replaces the month names with numbers
end repeat
if mm is less than 10 then
set monthZero to "0"
else
set monthZero to ""
end if
return (monthZero & (mm as string)) as text -- returns the current month as a two-digit number
end shortMonth-- Year
on longYear(theDate) -- Takes AppleScript date parameter
set {dd, theMonth, yyyy} to the {day, month, year} of theDate
return (yyyy) as text -- returns the current year
end longYear
on run
set archiveDay to shortDay(the current date)
set archiveDay2 to shortDay2(the current date)
set archiveMonth to shortMonth(the current date)
set archiveYear to longYear(the current date)
set todaysDate to (archiveYear & archiveMonth & archiveDay) as text -- Sets today's date in YYYYMMDD format
set yesterdaysDate to (archiveYear & archiveMonth & archiveDay2) -- Sets yesterday's date in YYYYMMDD format------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- actions
------------------------------------------------------------------------------tell application "Finder"
if folder yesterdaysDate of folder "Mail Folder" of folder "eims" of disk "MS" exists then
delete folder yesterdaysDate of folder "Mail Folder" of folder "eims" of disk "MS"
empty trash
end if
end tell------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- quit EIMS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------tell application "Finder"
quit application "EIMS Server X"
end telltell application "Finder"
activate
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- 1. EDIT NEXT LINE: path to 'Archived mail' folder
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
set name of folder "Archived mail" of folder "Mail Folder" of folder "eims" of disk "MS" to todaysDate
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- 2. EDIT NEXT LINE: path to 'EIMS Server X' app
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
select file "EIMS Server X" of folder "eims" of disk "MS"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- launch EIMS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
open selection
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- 3. EDIT NEXT LINE: path to 'Archived mail' folder and your target disk
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
copy folder todaysDate of folder "Mail Folder" of folder "eims" of disk "MS" to disk "archiveDisk"
end tell
end run
Looking for a web browser like Apple's Safari that supports tabbed browsing but for Windows? I've done some research and highly recommend Avant Browser. It uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine so you get the same website compatibility but it adds tabbed browsing and a ton of additional features and yet it's free (donations accepted). "Tabbed browsing" is awesome: from a site's main page, when you click on links that interest you, those pages are loaded in separate layers "in the background" while you continue to go through the full page undisturbed. When you're ready to look at those linked pages, there's no backtracking and, best of all, no waiting because those pages are already loaded — just click on the tabbed layers.
UPDATE (2004-04-21): I now recommend Mozilla Firefox over Avant Browser. It also has tabbed browsing but pages load much faster. A colleague, Peter Smyth, introduced it to me.
TIP (2004-04-21): If you have used web page links or bookmarks/favorites that have a username and password embedded and use a non-standard port (non-working example: http://username:password@myserver.com:8080), you will have probably found out by now that they no longer work after recent Internet Explorer security updates have been applied. Solution I have found is to use the Opera browser — or a Mac!
This tip from Macintouch reader Peter Chin in the Safari 1.2 report is a winner:
Feb. 9, 2004Safari 1.2 update released
Peter Chin
I have observed that sometimes while surfing with Safari my CPU usage jumps to and sustains 100% (even when idle!) and scrolling is sluggish, especially while browsing UBBS and similar HTTP-based forums. I also noticed that entering text in those forums and in web-based email pages was painfully slow. Thinking that this could be similar to the problems with Sherlock and Adobe Reader, where there were too many enabled languages and/or plugins loaded, I did a Get Info on Safari and went to the Languages window and found all of the languages enabled.So, I unchecked all languages except English, closed the Get Info window, and launched Safari. What a difference! Now scrolling seems back to what it was and my CPU usage idles back to the usual 15-20% when idle in Safari.
It definitely helped me out on my 3-year-old PowerBook G4/500. I suspect this problem is only noticeable on older, slower Macs and on web pages that support multiple languages. Prior to coming across this tip, I suspected Safari was the problem after trying to investigate by opening up 2 terminal windows and running tcpflow in one and the top -u command in the other. top revealed high CPU usage whenever my machine seemed to stall or hang as it never did before.
SITUATION
Freshly-installed (Erase & Install option) Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) on PowerBook G4 17" (European languages deselected for installation; Asian languages included)
ISSUE
Just after reboot and completion of registration and setup wizard, all menu bar icons (date and time, battery status, AirPort status, Bluetooth status) are missing.
Logging in as another user does not help.
Moving /Library/Preferences folder to the desktop and rebooting does not help.
Hard disk format with zero data option and reinstall of Panther from scratch does not help.
Booting off an external FireWire hard disk containing a Panther backup (using Carbon Copy Cloner 2.3) of another PowerBook is alright — menu bar icons are there as normal.
AppleCare support stated that others have had same problem but could not offer any solution or suggestions other than the troubleshooting steps I had already taken. They said that hopefully the next OS update would fix the problem.
SOLUTION
Try adjusting the Dock Size in Apple => System Preferences => Dock. My colleague and I think that after we did that, the icons magically appeared in the menu bar. Yes, incredible that this seemed to work even when reformatting with the zero all data option and reinstalling from scratch did not help. Very strange.
Cool!... Just tonight, a fairly detailed email I submitted about network cameras was posted on the popular Macintouch site. I emailed it out to the Macintouch guys at 5:38pm my time and like 5 hours later it was up on the site. Here's what I wrote:
The popularity of "network cameras" is definitely gaining. These are cameras that have an embedded Web server (usually Linux-based), connect directly to a network (no computer required), and stream live video to Web browsers (among other capabilities such as uploading still JPEGs to another server, motion detection, email alerts). I have an AXIS 2100 network camera at home pointed most of the time in the area our baby plays. This allows my wife and me to see live video (displayed in our Web browsers) of our baby from our offices. It also allows our parents to see their grandchild from Hawaii or Singapore too (we reside in Hong Kong).The "1st generation" network cameras use Motion-JPEG as a compression format to stream the video (my AXIS 2100 uses this). When a user first visits the camera Web page, a Java or ActiveX applet quickly downloads and installs in the user's browser and the video then starts streaming. On subsequent visits the video just instantly shows up — applet is not re-downloaded.
The "new generation" of network cameras use MPEG-4 which supports both video and audio in a single stream (Motion-JPEG only supports video so with optional audio in a separate stream, there can be AV sync problems). Some of the new models have a Pan/Tilt/Zoom control feature and work over a wireless 802.11b connection. The problem is that NONE of these cool, new MPEG-4 network cameras work with Macs!
Even the cameras that do claim to be Mac compatible have glitches. For instance, on a Mac, the video from my AXIS 2100 tends to flicker; on a PC it's a smooth as silk. With an AXIS 2130 PTZ camera demo I tried viewing from my PowerBook G4/500MHz/768MB running OS X 10.2.6 and using Internet Explorer 5.2, the video flickered badly and parts of the page seemed to completely reload. With the Safari 1.0 (v85) browser, although the Pan/Tilt/Zoom/Iris controls and preset-position pop-down menu showed up, the video never did.
So here is another cool technology that Mac users are really missing out on. I wonder if the problem is with the Mac Web browsers, the Mac OS, the Java/ActiveX applet provided by the camera makers, or a combination of factors.
I'm hoping this situation can improve with, perhaps, Apple helping some of these camera makers to rework their Java/ActiveX applets to work with Macs. Also, the more Mac users who pressure the camera makers to make their products compatible with Macs, the better.
Here's a list I compiled of some network camera manufacturers:
References:"1st generation" network cameras [Tom's Hardware Guide, Sep 2002]
AXIS 2130 PTZ camera review [Tom's Hardware Guide, Mar 2003]
I came back home tonight to find my Internet broadband connection not working. My cable modem was online (green light as usual) and so I telnetted into my ZyXEL Prestige 314 broadband router to check WAN IP address settings and everything looked just fine. Still, I was unable to ping to IPs that I know are always up (e.g. 202.14.67.4, DNS server for ISP Pacific Supernet Hong Kong). I called i-CABLE tech support and after a rundown of troubleshooting steps which took about 20 minutes and included cycling the power of my cable modem and router to reset the IP address, the tech guy ran out of options and told me he'd have someone else get back to me by tomorrow. I called tech support again to just double-check the correct Subnet Mask setting and got another tech guy. The Subnet Mask setting I had (255.255.254.0) was actually correct and I again went through the process of resetting the IP address with this new guy. After that didn't help, the tech guy suggested that I bypass my router and connect the cable modem directly to a computer via Ethernet cable. So I connected the cable modem directly to my PowerBook G4/500 running Mac OS X 10.2.6 and guess what?... My PowerBook got assigned a different IP and the connection worked! So with that, I thanked the tech guy because then I knew that the problem was on my end and specifically with my broadband router. So then using my PowerBook, I visited ZyXEL's download page over a painfully slow modem connection and downloaded a new firmware file. Using the router's Web interface I upgraded the firmware from version 3.50(CA.1) to 3.50(CA.3). Unbelievably, that did the trick!
Bonjour!
Interesting thread. If you have time :
Mark
painting
I just upgraded the Gallery scripts to version 1.3.4 from 1.3.3 for our photo gallery section. The process is very easy but a couple nights ago when I first attempted the upgrade, I got an error (Warning! Apache is not obeying your .htaccess file...) when running the Web-based configuration script. I reread the upgrade instructions (for the 5th time!) just today and sure enough, I apparently failed to do step 2!
Here are the commands and steps I took... The commands I issued over a ssh (secure shell) connection in Mac OS X's terminal (ssh -l username hostname) and for the file transfer I used the Transmit FTP client.
Done!
Oh, one more thing: Because I had customized the CSS (cascading style sheets) files, I had to replace the new CSS files (just 2 files in the "css" directory) with mine (from the "gallery-old" directory). Of course, in step 5 above, I could have omitted trasferring over the "css" directory instead.
Also, if after the upgrade, all is well, you can delete the gallery-old directory.
Here's an email I just sent out today to all our Hong Kong staff regarding spam reduction measures (note that I'm not using our real address below to prevent "spam bots" from harvesting our address):
Hi all,The content-based anti-spam filter I talk about is SimpleText Filter for the Mac-based EIMS mail server software we use. Here are the DNSbls I've installed:JFYI...
We have a "content-based" anti-spam filter on our mail server that has been in use since Feb 2002 and currently blocks about 175 spam messages a day. ("Spam" = "junk mail")
From last Thursday, I installed 3 new anti-spam filters that use "DNSbls" (Domain Name System-based "blacklists"). These have been blocking around 350 spam messages per day so many of you may have noticed a decrease in the number of spam messages you receive.
As with any anti-spam measure, some (but very, very few) legitimate messages may get rejected by our server. (These are called "false-positives".) If any legitimate sender (non-spammer) has their message rejected by our server, they will receive a return-error message like this:
550 5.7.1 If your message was wrongly rejected, please EMAIL help@ourdomain.com. A real person will get back to you within 8 hours to help. Your mail server is on the SpamCop blocking list (http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml).
If they read the message, they can easily mail help@ourdomain.com and I will help them get their message delivered successfully.If anyone complains of difficulty in sending email to you, just email me and I will help.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
Setup:
After having read the DVD problems and fixes that many others reported on Macintouch.com, I made sure that I: (1) unticked the "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver preference pane; (2) selected no more than 3GB of data to backup; and (3) left the PowerBook alone with only the burning sofware running while burning. When using Toast, I tried burning with and without "Buffer Underrun Protection" and at 1x and 2x speeds — all settings combinations failed. Initially, I tried burning with data stored on an external 3.5" FireWire hard disk. I then tried burning with all the data stored on my PowerBook's internal hard disk with only the DVD burner connected on FireWire. I got 1 successful burn that way. But then subsequent tries that way were unsuccessful. I also tried different FireWire cables and different software (CharisMac's Discribe) but the various combinations didn't help.
What would happen is the DVD burner would simply stop burning (burn LED indicator would go off) and the software would "hang" anywhere between 8 to 45 minutes after starting the burn process. I guess I could try different media but then again, I successfully burnt 10 or so DVD-Rs on my PC using the same DVD burner and media. I might try burning the files using my PC with Nero burning software.
At this point, I'm extremely frustrated, yet am tempted to buy a new Pioneer DVR-105/A05 DVD-RW burner.
On and off over the past few months I've been researching ways to transcode (convert) my DV tapes to DVD format (DV stream to MPEG-2 format) to better preserve our videos of Justin. I was hoping to find an external box that had some sort of hardware acceleration to do near-real time DV stream-to-MPEG-2 transcoding, had FireWire ports for connection to DV camera (input) and computer (output), and ideally, included software for both Macs and PCs. Guess what? I didn't find anything like that. I heard that I could buy a new Mac and do the transcoding of a 60-minute tape using iDVD in about 2-3 hours. An advantage of using a Mac would be the excellent software — iMovie and iDVD — for editing the video and then organizing and laying out the DVD with backgrounds, buttons, and menus. My colleague, Eric Lin in Taiwan, recommended CyberLink's PowerDirector Pro for doing the transcoding on the PC although he said it took about 5-6 hours on a 2GHz Pentium 4 box with 1GB SDRAM — slower than on the Mac. At present, I'm not prepared to buy a new Mac for this "project". My feeling is that right now, Apple's existing Power Mac line-up is over-priced and under-powered. I think they need to start using faster processors. I'm waiting for Macs to use the successor of the PowerPC G4 processor with speeds close to 2GHz. So thus far, I haven't transcoded any of my DV tapes!
I did find an article, Video Editing: PC or Mac?, that was quite interesting and insightful. It makes a strong case for going with a PC for video editing and also introduced some cool applications such as the Windows-only DVD X Copy. With DVD X Copy (and DVD X Copy Xpress) you can make perfect backups of your DVDs and I think it's the only product out in the market that does it.
Yup, I got my PowerBook back today, earlier than expected. They replaced my logic board for the 3rd time — this time a new one, I am told (sometimes Apple will provide only refurbished parts to the repair centers). On my Customer Service Report I see this under Logic Board part no. 661-2537:
Serial No.
New: QT22502KLF8A
Old: QT225027LF8A
Cool, huh?
I picked up the PowerBook after work, at around 6:45pm. When I reached home, I showered, played with Justin a short while before his bed time (around 8pm), had dinner, and read the newspaper. Now, I have just finished migrating all my Eudora mailboxes/messages that I had in PC format to the Mac. I used a very handy external hard disk (2.5", bus-powered FireWire + USB 1.1/2.0) to get the mailbox files across. I had been using Eudora on my home and work PCs (running Windows 2000) while my PowerBook was in the repair center, since May 20th (10 days).
With Eudora, the text part of all messages are in a standard text format and all attachments are saved individually to a separate folder. Each "mailbox" (e.g. In, Out, Trash) is a separate text file and the only difference between the format on Macs and PCs is how each system (Mac or Windows) handles text — with only the carriage returns and line feeds (CR/LF) being different. On the Mac, I can convert between the Mac and PC text formats using the popular text editor, BBEdit, or in Mac OS 9 I used to use a program called "CRLF" (unfortunately, no longer available) that I could just drag and drop a bunch of files onto to do the conversion in sort of a batch mode. On the PC, I found a nice program called ChangeText (US$10 shareware) that does the same thing as CRLF. When converting the Eudora mailboxes from Mac to PC, I just did the text conversion and made sure each mailbox file ended in .MBX. When converting from PC to Mac, I did the conversion, removed the .MBX filename extension, and added back the Eudora mailbox "Type" (TEXT) and "Creator" (CSOm) codes using an OS X program called FileInfo (freeware). Attachments would be a problem because in the mailbox files, Eudora records down the absolute path to the attachment files and Macs and PCs handle paths differently (e.g. C:\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora\Attach vs. Macintosh HD:Users:derek:Documents:Eudora Folder:Attachments).
Whoa, time to go to sleep! G'night!
Whoa, a whole month has gone by without me writing a single entry here! Why no updates in such a long time? Well, a bunch of factors, really. I have been lazy. I have been extremely busy in the office. I have been spending more time with little Justin. Here's one of the main reasons though: My main computer, a PowerBook G4/500, has been never been working right since I had the logic board replaced, the result of coffee I had spilt directly onto the keyboard.
I have had the logic board changed 2 times already and it looks like it'll be changed yet another time. With the first 2 replacement logic boards the problem was a relatively minor one — a push of certain keys would have the effect of 3 or 4 other keys being depressed. With the 3rd logic board, the problem is quite serious — the machine would totally freeze/lock-up anywhere from 4 to 20 times a day. The mouse pointer/curser would completely freeze or disappear. These freezes occured in a freshly-installed OS X (10.2.4), stock OS 9 (9.2.2), in Single-User command-line mode (booted with Command-S keys held down), booted from an OS 9 install CD and a Disk Warrior boot CD, and in many different applications (i.e. Eudora, Disk First Aid, Terminal, Internet Explorer). Another important point is that I had never experienced these sort of solid lock-ups since I started using OS X, almost a year ago. Of course, all of this pointed to a hardware, rather than software, problem. On a recent visit to an Apple authorized repair center (one visit out of over half a dozen in the past 2 months or so), the technician suggested the problem was my hard disk. Fed up with the constant freezes and visits back to the repair center, I immediately bought a new hard disk and had it installed. For 2 days, on Saturday and Sunday, the PowerBook worked without any freezes. On the following Monday, however, the freezes came back! I actually took over half an hour of video showing my PowerBook continuously freezing (freeze, power off, start up, disk check, freeze, power off, start up, disk check...) in an effort to convince the Apple repair center that the logic board was likely the problem. So now my PowerBook has been at the repair center for a week of thorough testing and I've been told that the logic board will likely be replaced again (for the 3rd time!) and that I'd probably be able to get the PowerBook back in another week or so, on around June 2nd. So I have spent a tremendous amount of time in the past month troubleshooting and continuously backing up my data. I'll be using my Windows 2000 PCs at home and work for another week.
My favorite site about the Macintosh is Macintouch.com. I visit it almost every day and I also enjoy sharing my thoughts and opinions on it by submitting emails which most of the time are published in various "Reader Reports". Lately, I've brought up issues and submitted comments on Mac OS X. Here was my latest submission as it was published here (2nd from the bottom):
I'm no usability expert but as an ordinary user, I find that with Column view, navigating to a file or folder is slower and more difficult — even after having been forced to use it in Open/Save dialog boxes for 8 months now.
I've tried to analyze why and here's what I've come up with:
In contrast, with List view there's only 1 focus area so you instantly know where your keyboard and mouse actions take place — you don't have to first figure out where exactly you are, then take action. Also, when navigating up the hierarchy in List view, you only see the path back up to the root which aids navigation by clearly showing you your organizational structure (and not all the files and folders at each level). List view is the way that all computer users, even Windows users, for over a decade have been accustomed to — seemingly for good reason.
I propose that Apple add the option to use the traditional List view instead of Column in Open/Save dialog boxes.
Am I the only one that feels this way about Column view?
I just purchased the US$20 Keyboard Maestro, a system-wide utility for Mac OS X that allows you to create new "Hot Keys" (keyboard shortcuts) or remap existing ones. I had been using the free Keyboard Maestro Lite for many months so I figured it was about time I paid the author, Michael Kamprath, what he deserves!
Here's how I've used Keyboard Maestro's features:
If you use OS X and have not tried Keyboard Maestro, go check it out!
Had a situation where Outlook Express users (Japanese version) in our Japan office were not able to retrieve any POP3 emails. Our HTML-based newsletter, BBDO AsiaNews, triggered the problem. If the newsletter was deleted from the server (using Webmail or by manually telnetting to port 110) messages were immediately retrieved, as usual. In Outlook Express, the retrieval of messages would simply get "stuck". Error on the server was "Connection timed out". The server and the clients were on the same LAN. Troubleshooting was difficult not only because I was in Hong Kong and the users were in Japan, but also because both the Windows system and the Outlook Express program were entirely in Japanese! I ruled out the newsletter as being the problem because none of the 800 or so other recipients had any problem. I also doubted that Outlook Express was the problem because users of Outlook Express in our Korea and Taiwan offices who were also using localized versions didn't have the problem either. I recalled that many antivirus packages intercept data between mail servers and clients so that viruses can be caught before actually hitting the clients' Inboxes. With the help of "Junko" in our Japan office helping to change settings and do tests, we determined that the "Mail Search" (or "POP Trap") component of Trend Micro's "PC-Cillin" (and "Virus Buster" on some of their PCs) antivirus software was causing the problem.
My company just started doing a monthly e-newsletter named "BBDO AsiaNews" and I just finished working on our second issue last Friday. I work with colleagues, Jörg Dietzel, who manages the whole project and does most of the copywriting, and Paul Lau, who does most of the coordination and gathering of material. My job in the project is the most laborious (I'm pretty sure!). I have to layout and format the newsletter in HTML (separate email and Web versions!), go through numerous last-minute revisions, test the newsletter on various email clients, scale pictures (of our print work) into standard resolutions, convert videos (of our TV commercials) into Windows Media and QuickTime formats, load our work (using FTP and browser configuration) into a Gallery-based Web album (thanks to Jörg for handling the captions!), manage the list of addresses, and finally send the darned thing out! The little details are what's so time-consuming and tedious. All in all though, when the newsletter goes out, it's extremely satisfying!
Oh, the difference between the email and Web versions, is that for the Web version all mailto: links are specially encoded (using the free Enkoder for Mac OS X) to prevent "spambots" from harvesting email addresses off our Web pages. Also, for the email version, in the intro, we have a little note with a link to our Web version for our recipients whose email client doesn't render HTML email very well (e.g. Lotus Notes users).
If you're interested, here are our first 2 BBDO AsiaNews newsletters:
Yes, this last issue, we just barely made the deadline!
I should also note that for Issue 1, I formatted the newsletter in Microsoft Word 2000 (with a bit of hand-editing using BBEdit on my Mac). The HTML code that Word produced was far from optimal — included a lot of Microsoft/Word-specific stuff). I did Issue 2 in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and the results were far better all around — "cleaner" code and better typographic control using CSS. In Issue 2's email version, all graphics (and the CSS stylesheet) were Web-based links (better because the email is smaller) whereas with Issue 1's, a GIF picture was embedded in the message itself.
What follows is something I wrote up for and emailed to all our staff in Asia just yesterday. I hope this is helpful to you as well!...
Smaller pictures = Smaller PowerPoint files = Benefits
PowerPoint files are often overly large in size because the PICTURES embedded in them are much larger than they need to be. In most cases, reducing picture sizes results in PowerPoint files that are 50-75% smaller than the originals (e.g. 30MB => 9MB). Benefits of smaller PowerPoint files include faster emailing, uploading, downloading, printing, playback, and saving of your presentations.
Pictures too big?
You can tell if you should reduce the size of a picture if, when you insert it into PowerPoint, it extends way beyond the boundaries of the slide. Or you find yourself scaling down pictures more than 10% (scaled picture is less than 90% of original size). (Often, the large pictures are photos taken from digital cameras.) Generally, no picture's file size for PowerPoint should be larger than around 300KB.
You should resize your pictures down (reduce their resolution) to get rid of excess data while maintaining adequate detail and clarity. Your pictures must be resized before inserting them into PowerPoint. If your pictures are already in PowerPoint you're going to have to resize the original pictures and then reinsert the resized pictures — sorry!
Use Resize! to downsize your JPEG pictures
If your pictures are in JPEG format (most are), you can use a free software called "Resize!" (PC and Mac versions available) to resize your pictures. Download it here:
http://mapage.noos.fr/cedricdj/re.html
(Much thanks to Cedric of KStudio for creating such a helpful program and releasing it for free!)
Basically, here's how you use the software:
Size Guidelines:
Full page picture = 700
3/4 page picture = 550
1/2 page picture = 500
1/4 page picture = 420
1/8 page picture = 300
smaller picture = less!
Example:
pictures <= name of original folder
pictures (B500) <= name of new folder if you entered 500 in step 3
You can quickly resize your pictures at various sizes all at once by repeatedly entering in different numbers (e.g. 420, 500, 550, 700) and clicking Go!. This helps speed up the process of getting just the right size for all your pictures. When inserting pictures into PowerPoint, if the picture is too small or too big, just navigate to the appropriate folder and insert another size till it's right:
Desktop
|----- pictures (B420)
|----- pictures (B500)
|----- pictures (B550)
|----- pictures (B700)
If you're finding that you're losing too much picture detail or sharpness, I've found that inserting the picture at a size that's 10-15% larger than you actually want it to appear, then scaling it down in PowerPoint gives you that higher quality picture. In the Resize! program, you can also try increasing the JPEG Quality setting (default is 80 out of 100).
Another thing: I emailed my tech tip to most of the IT managers in our multinational company, BBDO, and Franklin from our Pages/BBDO office in the Dominican Republic had this to add:
We encourage our executives to do the following, after the presentation has been made, the first thing we do is go to One picture in Powerpoint and select picture properties and select COMPRESS and CROP ALL pictures, and powerpoint will convert all pictures in documents to 72 dpi and crop pic areas. This is Powerpoint XP only and will lean the PPT a lot depending on Picture usage.
We're still using PowerPoint 2000 in most of Asia but when we do purchase Office XP, we'll be sure to take advantage of that new feature.
Marcin Gos of our NoS/BBDO Warszawa office in Poland also offered these helpful tips and links:
For optimizing of existing presentarions on pre-XP Powerpoint there's 99$ RnR Presentation Optimizer http://www.rdpslides.com/pptools/FAQ00013.htm It's great tool, with many options — it works on pictures, OLE objects, allows you to ungroup charts and sheets... For creating new presentations from jpgs I personally prefer PPTImport — it's cheaper and allows batch inserting of slides (that's the tool that created mentioned earlier 168 slides presentation) http://www.consumerdvreviews.com/pptimportLinking http://www.powerpointbackgrounds.com/powerpointlinking.htm allows us to use two color templates instead of Powerpoint's one (AFAIK PPT XP allows you to use more templates, but we run PPT 2000 in Account Dept.)
And for Flash movies we use Swiff Player for PowerPoint http://www.globfx.com/products/#swfplayers — it must be installed on the computer that will run the presentation, that's the only small disadvantage, otherwise it runs fine.
Excellent PPT FAQ: http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq and set of useful tools: http://www.rdpslides.com/pptools
Just yesterday I praised Outlook, Microsoft's integrated email and PIM (Personal Information Manager) client for Windows PCs, and I mentioned Microsoft Entourage as being the closest thing to it for the Mac. At work for several years now, I've been considering switching to using Microsoft Exchange Server (the server component for corporate environments) for our email (and groupware) but mainly because of its high cost, security concerns, increased administration, and poor Mac support, I have shied away from it. (We are currently using Mac-based EIMS as our email server.) Apart from cost concerns, I'm not yet convinced that Exchange server is the way to, but news that the next update of Entourage X (for Mac OS X) will incorporate Exchange server connectivity in summer 2003 is defnitely welcome. I first heard about this in the February 11, 2002 edition of the Lockergnome Tech Specialist e-newsletter.
I love and use both Macs and Windows PCs but my primary computer is a Mac. So when my PowerBook went into the repair shop I was forced to my Windows PCs (at work and at home) for my everyday work for 4 days! Everyday work for me is mainly emailing, Web browsing, network troubleshooting, and referencing info I have in a notepad-like database I have. I realize that these 4 days without my Mac was a good thing. It made me realize what key programs and data I have on my Mac that I really depend on and it also forced me to become more intimately familiar with key programs like Outlook Express and Outlook.
I really like Outlook. Even in IMO (Internet Mail Only) mode, Outlook has some impressive features like integrated and full-featured calendar and contact modules, and support for IMAP. In a typical corporate environment used with Exchange Server, it boasts an incredible feature set including shared calendaring, scheduling, shared folders, and shared global and personal address books. In my opinion, its user interface is top-notch too. I much prefer how Outlook has one main window with multiple window panes (objects such as Inbox, Contacts, Calendar on the left; list of selected object's items on the top right; and detail of selected list item on bottom right) over how Eudora — and really any program on the Mac — has multiple windows that can overlap each other and get really messy. Apple's solution in Mac OS X with separate programs (never mind multiple overlapping windows!) for email (Mail.app), contacts (Address Book), and calendaring (iCal) seem to me to be a step in the wrong direction. Oh, and Palm's PocketMirror conduit that allows Palm handhelds to sync contact, calendar, notes, and to-do data with Outlook is very nice too. Microsoft's Entourage for Mac (bundled with Microsoft Office for Mac, versions 2001 and X) offers a feature-set that is the most similar to Outlook.
More time on my PCs also encouraged me to explore and have fun with these PC-only utilities:
Well, despite all of this, I'm still sticking with my Mac and Eudora (for now, at least)!
I picked up my PowerBook from the repair shop just yesterday, Tuesday. The PowerBook hasn't yet been repaired but I'm typing this on it by using an external USB keyboard. Everything is functioning as normal except for the built-in keyboard but as it turns out, keyboard-related circuitry on the logic board has been damaged. So the repair will cost HK$3000 for a new logic board and HK$700 for a new keyboard. We already paid a HK$600 inspection-only charge as well. Although unrelated to damage caused by the coffee spill, I'm also going to try and get a crack in the headphone jack area of the "top case" (the titanium and plastic top enclosure that includes the palm rest, trackpad, power button, and slots for the DVD drive and PC-card) fixed. Well, to fix that means replacing the entire top case which costs a whopping HK$2000+! Our company's insurance covers anything over HK$3000 but the insurance company will have to approve the claim first, of course. Tomorrow I'll need to take a photo of the cracked top case and submit that to them. So just to get the built-in keyboard working again (excluding the cracked case) will cost a total of HK$4300 (~US$550) — ouch! Yes, it kind of doesn't seem worth it for a 2-year old machine and considering prices and performance advantages of the latest PowerBook models. Still, given the insurance, our company shells out only HK$3000 out of the HK$6000+ repair bill.
To avoid future coffee spills on my PowerBook, I have already purchased a new, spill-proof vacuum flask for my coffee and I am going to purchase and install a "keyboard skin" — a protective latex membrane that waterproofs the keyboard. I saw one of those on another customer's PowerBook G4 at the repair shop. Hmmm... I wonder how it affects heat dissipation.
First day back at work after a 5-day holiday and what do I do first thing in the morning?... Colleagues excitedly pop into my office to collect "lai see", I get a bit nervous and then, yes, topple my coffee thermos right onto my PowerBook G4! The coffee drenches the keyboard and I quickly hold the PowerBook upside down. For about 15 seconds the PowerBook still runs but then goes out. I disconnect the power cable, take out the battery, pop off the keyboard and start wiping down the keyboard and try to absorb the coffee from underneath the keys. After the keyboard's exterior is dry I take off the thin titanium base plate of the PowerBook. The mainboard and most everywhere else is pretty dry. I leave the exposed PowerBook resting open and on one of its sides like an open book. I discover that the keyboard's ribbon cable easily disconnects from the mainboard and I start popping off keys, one by one to try and soak up the coffee from inside the thin membrane-like keyboard base. The keyboard is well designed because it protects the mainboard from spills and the keys pop off and back on easily, yet firmly. I want to blow everything dry with a hair dryer but none could be found in our office. I let everything air dry for about an hour while I go off to sort out another emergency — a PC that had a power supply that had blown. In the end, many keys on the PowerBook's keyboard don't work and so now in order to do any work I need to plug in an external USB keyboard. Thankfully, my company insured the PowerBook for accidents like this and so soon I'll be taking it in to a repair shop. I understand that they need 5-6 days to fix it so I'm wondering how I'm going to get much work done without it for that long! Well, I'm definitely going to try and rush them.
On the way back home I stopped by the Wanchai Computer Centre and picked up a cheap, HK$55 (US$7) Genius-branded USB keyboard to use at home. It works but the Command (Apple) key is the key with the Windows logo on it.
A nice thing that happened today was Nancy, who now lives in Tokyo and is visiting Hong Kong for just a week, dropped by to see Justin and ended up joining us for dinner. It was nice to catch up with her!
This morning I just changed my home Internet broadband service from Cyber Express to i-CABLE. My Cyber Express connection was a 6Mbps PPPoE DLS (PPPoE = Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet, DSL = Digital Subscriber Line) link and I was paying HK$410 (~US$52) per month (yes, expensive!). The new i-CABLE connection is a (theoretical) 10Mbps cable broadband link and I'm paying HK$278 (~US$35) per month. Both services provide unlimited service around the clock so basically my connection is permanent, although my IP address changes periodically (usually once every 1 or 2 weeks). The dynamic IP addressing isn't a problem even though I have an AXIS 2100 Network Camera because I have a ZyXEL Prestige 314 broadband router that supports a feature called "DynDNS". DynDNS is a service that allows me to always access my (private) home network camera at http://webcam.justintom.com even though my home IP address changes. When the Prestige 314 detects a new IP address, it automatically updates name servers at DynDNS.org which hosts my justintom.com domain so that webcam.justintom.com resolves to the new IP. I also have a 1st-generation Apple AirPort Base Station (hooked up to the Prestige 314) that provides 802.11b wireless networking for my (company-owned) Apple PowerBook G4 and Windows 2000 desktop PC (not branded, MSI motherboard and AMD Athlon processor).
Actually, all I wanted to say was that the the switchover from the DSL connection to the cable connection went very smoothly — better than I expected! After the i-CABLE technician came in and installed the Terayon cable modem and hooked it up to the Prestige 314, I telnetted to the Prestige 314 and changed the Internet Access Setup (menu 4) from PPPoE to Ethernet encapsulation and 5 seconds later I was using the new connection!
Here's a photo of my home network setup right now. The UFO-looking thing is the AirPort Base Station, the blue thing just below is the newly installed cable modem, and the white box below that is the DSL modem (NEC ATU-R300, soon to be returned to Cyber Express). The dark gray box on the right is the Prestige 314 broadband router. Not included in the photo is my AXIS 2100 network camera (Linux-based Web server and Ethernet port built in) that's connected via Category-5 cable directly to the Prestige 314. Pretty cool, huh?! ;)
Problem:
Unable to insert an .asx or .wmv video into a PowerPoint 2000 presentation (inserting a .mpg file was okay). After choosing Insert => Movies and Sounds => Movie from File..., I immediately got the following error:
PowerPoint couldn't insert a movie from the selected file. Either the file is non-standard, or QuickTime is not installed properly.Setup:
Strange that I was unable to find the Windows Media Player 7.1 English installer from Microsoft's Windows Media download page. On that page, if for Version you choose "Player 7.1 for Win98, Win 2000, Win Me", your options for Language are narrowed down to "Czech", "Danish", "Finish" and several others but excluding English! What's up with that?! ;)
I eventually did find Windows Media Player (English version) off of Download.com's site:
http://download.com.com/3000-2139-5948260.html?tag=lst-0-1
These did NOT work:
Looking for a dictionary and thesaurus for your Windows PC? I highly recommend the free WordWeb. (There's also a fuller-featured Pro version for US$18.) Since all the data is stored locally and not on the Internet like some other dictionary/thesaurus programs out there, WordWeb is fast and always available (not only when you're online). You can highlight a word in any application and then just click WordWeb's system tray icon or HotKey (Ctl+Alt+W is the default) and that word is instantly looked up and displayed (initially showing type, definitions, and synonyms). The user interface is top-notch too with buttons on the right to filter or jump to a specific type — noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. Tabs at the bottom let you quickly see synonyms, antonyms, attributes, or similar words.
I only wish they had this available for Mac as well!
If you've got hard disk problems on your Mac, I highly recommend Alsoft's DiskWarrior. Yes, Symantec's Norton Disk Doctor (part of Norton Utilities) used to be tops, but in the last few years, DiskWarrior has proven to be the safest and most effective. In general, though, you should try Apple's Disk First Aid (OS 9 or earlier) or Disk Utility (OS X) first, then DiskWarrior, and then Norton Disk Doctor or Micromat's Drive 10. (A good friend and Mac guru, Patrick Yeung, initially passed on this sound advice.)
I was able to quickly fix 2 disks today using DiskWarrior. One was an removable 3.5" MO (Magneto Optical) disk and the other was an internal hard disk. The MO disk wasn't recognized by Mac OS 9 and so everytime we inserted it, the system asked whether the disk should be initialized or ejected. I had to run DiskWarrior first (and have it as the active application) and then insert the MO disk so that DiskWarrior was able to "see" it (without the system interrupting first). On the second disk, we were not able to delete any folder located on the desktop; the system would say that the folder was locked. I tried using Norton Disk Editor to unlock the folders (unticking the Finder Locked checkbox) but the changes were not sticking. In both cases, DiskWarrior fixed the disks in about 5 to 10 minutes. The whole process is pretty much automated — you just click a few buttons and disk problems are gone!
Mail links in most Web pages (mailto:) allow spammers with special software — sometimes referred to as "spambots" — to automatically harvest email addresses. Well, using Hivelogic's Enkoder (a Web-based script or downloadable Java applet formerly known as "Email Address Encoder") you can have the same functionality as mailto links but without revealing addresses to spammers. It basically "encodes" mailto links using JavaScript and HTML escape codes. You simply enter 3 things — email address, link text, and hover text — and click the Encode It! button. You'll end up with something like this in the Results box:
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var first = 'ma';
var second = 'il';
var third = 'to:';
var address = 'dt-bl
og';
var domain = 'bbdoa
sia.com';
document.write('<a href="');
document.write(first+second+third);
document.write(address);
document.write('@');
document.write(domain);
document.write('" title="Email me">');
document.write('Email me<\/a>');
// -->
</script>
You then substitute the above code for everything in between and including the <a href="mailto:...">Email me</a> in your normal mailto link. The result is this:I used this in the first issue of our company newsletter which we made available for readers whose mail clients don't support HTML well or at all (e.g. Lotus Notes). The original HTML/XML code was done in Microsoft Outlook using Microsoft Word as the editor. I then tweaked the code using BBEdit on my Mac.
I first learned of Enkoder from the 01.10.2003 edition of the Lockergnome WebREPORT.
I suppose that programmers who develop spambot software could update their code to circumvent this technique. We'll then have to come up with something else. ARGH!... the battle with the spammers never ends!
We got a new DELL PowerEdge 1400SC server (Pentium III 2.8GHz, 512MB RAM, 18GB Ultra-160 SCSI 10K HDD, built-in Adaptec 2-channel Ultra-160 SCSI controller, 3-year warranty) to replace an aging Taiwanese server (ASUS motherboard) that had been intermittently locking up recently (the old server running Windows NT Server 4.0 had been very reliable for at least 4 years though, so I'm not knocking Taiwanese products). The DELL server only cost HK$8770 (US$1125) without an operating system. We purchased a Windows 2000 Server license for it though so yesterday I installed Windows 2000 Server and I only had 1 glitch during the Windows 2000 Server Setup. I got this error:
The following value in the .SIF file used by Setup is corrupted or missing: Value 1 on line 0 in section [Keyboard] Setup cannot continue. To quit Setup, press F3.It stumped me for about 20 minutes (it was a continuous loop!) and I tried searching on the Web for answers but eventually, based on the error mentioning "Keyboard", I figured out that the keyboard was the problem. I had to swap out a cheap Filand-branded keyboard for an HP-branded one and that did the trick (disconnecting and reconnecting the Filand keyboard and rebooting didn't help). And so by yesterday afternoon, I had Windows 2000 Server installed.
This morning, I needed to transfer two 9GB Seagate SCSI hard disks, an Adaptec AHA-2940-UW SCSI controller, and an external HP SureStore DAT40 tape drive from the old server to the new DELL. Opening up the case and getting at the drive cages on the DELL was a snap! It's extremely well-designed and constructed and needless to say, I was impressed. Getting at the hard disks in the old server's case was just the opposite — it was like trying to work out a puzzle! The two old SCSI hard disks are 1" thick and they heat up quite a bit and so I wanted to ensure they had empty space above and below. I ended up mounting one in the last free 5.25" drive bay and the other two in the lower 3.5" drive cage with an empty slot in between. I needed to change the SCSI ID number on one of the old disks so I did a quick Google search for "ST19171W" (the model number of the old disks) and the very first item in the search results was just what I needed: ST19171W Illustrated Configuration. I used another SCSI cable to make use of the extra Ultra-160 channel on the motherboard, hooked up all 3 disks, added in the Adaptec card, connected the external tape drive and powered up the system. To my amazement, Windows 2000 Server recognized all the new devices, asked to be rebooted, and then everything worked! I was very impressed at how smooth all of this went.
Apple, PLEASE get rid of Column View in OS X's Open/Save dialog boxes SOON! Users would be able to work much more efficiently — type to jump to specific file and no horizontal scrolling — if the old List View were brought back in the Open/Save dialog boxes. I'm afraid that even with Default Folder X installed, using OS X's Open/Save dialog boxes are just incredibly painful.
A colleague on a Windows 98 machine had trouble logging into Admango.com (a subscription-based monitoring service for Hong Kong advertising media). She'd enter her username and password but after clicking the (Javascript) Submit button nothing would happen. A few times Internet Explorer's status (bottom left corner of window) would show the form data being submitted to "do_login.asp" but it would get stuck at that. She had no trouble accessing other sites or any local network resources such as servers or printers. She could also use her username and password on other PCs without a problem.
Initially, I figured Javascript might have been disabled (or somehow messed up) so I reset Internet Explorer's Security settings to their default values (Medium level) and examined the values. I also deleted all browser cookies and temporary Internet files. This did not resolve the issue so I upgraded Internet Explorer from 5.5 SP1 to 6.0 SP1. Problem was still there. Another strange circumstance was that she was able to log in instantly using Admango's version 1.0 Login screen. With Admango's version 2.5 beta Login she'd get an "Invalid Login Name, Password, And/Or Insufficient Priveleges" error. This was consistent: 1.0 Login = success, 2.0 Login = no response, 2.5 beta Login = error.
At that point I began to suspect that her network interface card (NIC) might be the culprit. I found out that her NIC was an old Compaq 10Mbps ISA-type NIC. I swapped in a 3Com 10/100Mbps PCI NIC and that did the trick!
So the next time you experience any strange network problems, don't rule out a bad NIC as being the culprit. Other hardware such as memory and even the power supply can cause what would seem to be software issues as well. Accordingly, if you're building your own PC, don't skimp on the motherboard (MSI is good), power supply (SPI is good even though their site sucks), memory, and NIC (3Com is good). But then again, these days, why build your own when you can just buy a DELL with a nice 3-year warranty?
For a work project, we wanted to have our staff in Asia fill out a Web-based survey and then have a "survey engine" automatically record and tally up all the answers and display the results using bar charts on-the-fly.
So I did many hours of research, sifting through the more than 150 Perl- and PHP-based scripts in the Polls and Voting category at HotScripts.com. Many sounded good but had dead links. Many were missing key features we needed, like the ability to accept text (e.g. name, email, and comments) and an "Other" answer text field (in addition to radio, checkbox, multiple choice, and true/false type answers). I also wanted one that prevented multiple submissions by using browser cookies (not by just IP which I think would be problematic for those behind firewalls). It also had to be free or cheap and not require a backend database (e.g. MySQL) which would make things complicated and be overkill.
EventHandler by the funny-sounding UbiDog Productions turned out to be the star. Instructions and documentation are excellent but I still managed to run into problems getting everything to work. Before I went to bed last night, I posted my problem on UbiDog's online support forum and this morning I got a helpful reply. Incredible — excellent free support for free software! The details of my fix are in the forum, but basically, I got the scripts working this morning.
By this evening, I had fully configured the system, created and fine-tuned our survey, did multiple tests, and customized the template file which defines the design and layout of the pages. So now I have a functionally-rich Web survey system that looks very professional and is free. UbiDog has a US$100 "Pro" version which adds a TON of additional features. I'm hoping to convince our management to purchase the Pro license — the UbiDog folks certainly deserve it! Heck, the time that EventHandler saves us from having to manually tally up and tabulate the answers is worth several times the price.
In short, I highly recommend EventHandler for conducting online surveys. I'm quite sure it's best in its class.
Just got a DELL Latitude X200 ultra-portable notebook computer for a new colleague. I especially like that the X200 weighs only 1.38kg (2.9 pounds), is only 0.8-inches thick, and comes with the "Media Base" docking station — all for only HK$13,800 (~US$1,770). The dock concept is fantastic because it eliminates having to constanly plug in and disconnect cables. Right now with my Apple PowerBook G4, twice a day — at home and office — I have to plug in at least 2 cables (power and USB mouse) and up to 5 (Ethernet cable, USB cable for my Canon PowerShot G1 camera, and FireWire cable for external hard disks). (As an aside: More digital camera manufacturers should use a dock, like Kodak's EasyShare digital cameras. Canon, please!...) Docking and undocking the X200 to the Media Base was a snap too (much simpler and more reliable than the mechanism used on the old DIGITAL HiNote Ultra notebooks I had used in the past).
Other specs:
I REALLY wish Apple had ultraportable notebooks like this on offer; if they did they'd no doubt sell like hotcakes!
At work almost daily now, I've been converting analog video (TV commercials on VHS tapes) to digital format. This allows for quick distribution and review of TV commercials by clients and colleagues in other countries. We have been using a pretty crappy external video capture device called Video Blaster MovieMaker by Creative Labs (the Sound Blaster people). MovieMaker's slow USB 1.1 interface is probably partly to blame but the software bundle is horrible as well.
The most irritating thing about the MovieMaker video-capturing software is that after you click the Record button no less than 10 seconds pass before it actually starts recording video to disk! The user-interface is quite poor as well. Videos are saved in MPEG-1 format.
To edit the MPEG-1 files, Ulead's VideoStudio is included. It has probably the worst user-interface I've ever seen — if not for the tooltips, it'd be impossible to even get started without referring to the manual. For me just needing to cut out unwanted video from the start and ending of raw video clips, the most frustrating thing is that when you move the marker to a point in the video on the slider bar (to try and pinpoint the lead-in and lead-out points), there's huge delay before it shows you what frame you're at. Sometimes the delay can be 10 to 15 seconds long. There's also no button to step up or down a few frames at a time — you have to use the marker on the slider bar which is difficult to move precisely in small increments.
After the videos are edited, I use Discreet cleaner software to convert the MPEG-1 files to Windows Media Video (WMV) format which usually halves the file size while maintaining good quality. I like cleaner but it's slow.
So basically, I've been investigating a better solution. I sought advice from Eric Lin, our IT Manager in Taiwan who's very knowledgable about this kind of stuff, and he recommended TMPGEnc and PowerDirector Pro. I tried TMPGEnc's MPEG tools (File => MPEG Tools => Merge & Cut) and it worked superbly — simple and fast with the right controls! So now TMPGEnc will replace VideoStudio.
I didn't try PowerDirector Pro but I remembered reading about Microsoft's media tools. I dug around Microsoft's site and found Windows Media Encoder 7.1. Within a 5 minutes I had it installed and had quickly and easily converted an MPEG file to WMV format. Oh, I will need to figure out how I can batch process several files at a time but I'm sure that'll be easy. So now Windows Media Encoder will replace cleaner. By the way, I also came across Canopus ProCoder which is direct competitor to cleaner.
I'm pretty happy with my 2 newly-discovered software tools. I'm sure they'll improve my workflow and I can't wait to try them out at work. I certainly wouldn't mind a better video capture device (either an external FireWire device or a AGP- or PCI-based video card) and new Pentium 4-powered PC too though!
Quick links:
TMPGEnc - AVI to MPEG-1/2 converter and MPEG-1/2 editor (free for personal or non-commercial use)
Windows Media Encoder 7.1 - converts and encodes video into Windows Media formats (e.g. WMV, ASF) and more
Windows Media Encoder 9 is at Release Candidate stage.
CyberLink PowerDirector Pro - digital video editing ($95.95 download, $99.95 physical shipment)
Discreet cleaner - digital video encoding/conversion (cleaner 5 for Windows - $529.99, cleaner 6 for Mac - $599.99)
Canopus Procoder - digital video encoding/conversion ($699.00)
I love the power and flexibility that Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings bring to the system but I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by what the immature system lacks — especially from a usability standpoint — compared to Mac OS Classic and even Windows 98 and newer systems. I have been using OS X daily for about 4 months now and here's my long list of complaints (the first 6 are the most annoying to me):
(An aside: This period reminds me of the time Apple just switched to using PowerPC processors and so much was running in emulation — everything was slower on Apple's newest hardware. Applications needed to be rewritten to be "PowerPC native" and the system needed to be optimized much more. The situation only really got better around the time G3-based systems were introduced.)
After many hours of researching and testing (over the past 4 months) dozens of OS X add-ons that improve OS X's usability, here's my list of the best of them:
DiskSpy Solid ($5.00) - indicates network and hard disk activity, very helpful for troubleshooting
WindowShade X ($7.00) - brings back Mac OS Classic Window Shade functionality
Labels X ($7.00) - brings back Mac OS Classic file/folder (color) labeling
FruitMenu ($7.00) - brings back customizable Apple Menu functionality, submenus for System Preferences (and more)
Show Desktop ($5.00 donationware) - hides all open windows to show desktop (like 'Show Desktop' QuickLaunch item in Windows Taskbar)
Keyboard Maestro (Lite version free, regular version $20.00) - define keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) for hiding all open applications, quitting all applications, activating a specific application, reconfigure Command-N for New Folder in Finder, and much more including program switcher and clipboard switcher
USB Overdrive X ($20 shareware) - allows you to use any USB mouse with scrollwheel and right-button contextual-menu functionality (trackball, joystick, and gamepad support as well)
ASM ($15 shareware) - brings back Mac OS Classic application switcher menu (shows current application and allows switch to another open application from menu list)
wClock (donationware) - simple calendar in menubar
FileXaminer ($10.00) - better Finder "Get Info" (shows number of items in folder, edit file Type/Creator codes, permissions (and more)
If you use Mac OS X and you always want to be able to see your Mac's network and hard disk activity, I highly recommend DiskSpy Solid. The US$5.00 shareware puts 2 indicators — 1 for network activity and 1 for disk activity — in your menubar. The indicator on the left is network activity and the indicator on the right is disk activity (in snapshot above, network is 3rd icon from left and disk is 4th from left). The indicator tells you whether network data is flowing in or out (or when data is being written to or read from disk).
You can customize the look of the indicators (or use your own) simply by using different TIFF files in the program's resource. Instructions and 9 sets of indicators (the author calls them "themes") are provided. I am using the Arrows theme but I swapped the DiskSpyRead.tiff and the DiskSpyWrite.tiff files so that when data from the network is flowing in, the arrow points down (default is to point up) and vice versa. DiskSpy (no "Solid") is freeware but only shows disk activity.
We use the excellent PaperPort Deluxe 8.0 software for scanning and management of our scans. PaperPort software is US$99.00 and works with just about any scanner (any with TWAIN drivers) but sheetfed ones work particularly well.
I recommend Visioneer's sheetfed scanner + PaperPort Deluxe bundles for US$199.99.
PaperPort has its own compressed file format that supports multipage scans: MAX. There's free PaperPort Viewer software for both PCs and Macs that can open these MAX files. Two other common formats used for multipage scans are multipage TIFF and Acrobat PDF. Note that TIFF supports several compression schemes so there are a number of TIFF formats.
Well I compared these 3 file formats (MAX, TIFF, PDF) to try and find the best one for multipage scans. We basically want a file format that produces highly compressed files that are readable with the least amount of hassle on both PCs and Macs.
Here are the results of the quick comparison I did:
Software: PaperPort Deluxe 8.0
(Adobe Acrobat needs to be installed in order to save to PDF format)
Scan Mode: Fax, Filing, or Copying (1-bit, 200dpi, text imaging mode)
Test Document: 9-page b/w text document
MAX = 227KB
TIFF multipage-group 4 = 198KB
TIFF multipage-class f = 341KB
TIFF multipage-uncompressed = 4.49MB
PDF = 287KB
Conclusion:
I got a real kick out of this: This morning a colleague of mine reported that his monitor was broken. His Mac CPU was on but the LED on his monitor was out. Normally this is the result of the power cable coming loose, usually on the end that plugs into the monitor. But not this time — his monitor was truly dead! That was no biggie. The kicker was when I found out how old his monitor was. His AppleColor High-Resolution RGB Monitor, serial number 5099986, was manufactured in 1988 and put into use some time in 1990... And it lasted until today, October 21, 2002 — 12 years old! Now THAT's amazing!
This is a far cry from today's Apple CRT monitors and LCD displays. Starting from about 4 or 5 years ago, 90% of all the Apple monitors our company bought died within 2 years. Needless to say, we don't buy Apple monitors anymore.
I still have my Apple Mac Quadra 700 CPU and although I haven't fired it up in a few years, I'm quite sure it still runs.
They certainly don't make 'em like they used to!
Over the weekend I upgraded the firmware on our Axis 2100 Network Camera from version 2.30 to 2.32. The upgrade process is pretty easy but certainly not user-friendly and can get hairy. Some of the snags I ran into this time:
I am hoping that by me documenting all of this here, the next time I upgrade won't be so hairy!
Been researching video conferencing solutions lately. Polycom seems to be the global leader for professional TV set-top box solutions that support ISDN and a ton of other features. For lower-end Internet video conferencing, of course there's Microsoft NetMeeting for Windows PCs. Yahoo Messenger supports very basic video conferencing (well, at least video exchange) and their solution works between PCs and Macs. I have come up with the following list of Internet video conferencing solutions that I'll be testing with Eric Lin, our IT manager in Taiwan:
There are probably many more Internet video conferencing solutions but I've tried to find ones that work with both PCs and Macs (NetMeeting and CUseeMe don't).
I have also been researching webcams to use with the above software as well. And since I'm using Mac OS X, I've been trying to find ones that work on that.
2 sources for Mac OS X webcam drivers:
FireWire (rather than USB) webcams seem to be the way to go. Video quality is better.
I love the looks of the iREZ KritterDigital but unfortunately it's impossible to buy in Hong Kong or online and it's very expensive. Also, the company seems mainly focused on the OEM market.
Orange Micro's iBOT seems the most popular FireWire webcam. Apparently it works well and was one of the first FireWire webcams in the market. Sadly, it's so ugly! The standard model is selling here for HK$1180 and the Pro model is selling for HK$1380.
Right now I'm leaning towards getting the PYRO 1394 WebCam by ADS Technologies. This is selling for HK$980.
Oh, there's also Unibrain's Fire-i FireWire webcam. Specs look good and it has 2 FireWire ports. Cost online is US$119 which is cheap for a FireWire webcam. It doesn't look to pretty though!
Unfortunately for me, prices here for those webcams are 30-40% more than online prices.
UPDATE 20021019@2:48pm: After reading several poor reviews on Epinions.com of the iBOT webcam and PYRO 1394 WebCam, I've decided not to buy any of the existing FireWire webcams on the market. Given the consistent reports of only mediocre image quality, the over-US$100 price tags don't seem worth it. Faster video but same quality video as USB webcams costing less than half the price? No thanks.
UPDATE 20030814@10:20pm: For a TON more info on Mac OS X video conferencing I refer you to John Kenn's excellent Mac OS X Videoconferencing page. I'm sad to learn that Apple's new iChat AV (Public Beta) video conferencing application only works with FireWire cameras. I ended up buying a Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks Pro camera which is USB-based but is high quality, looks cool, has OS X drivers, and works with Yahoo! Messenger. I'd certainly purchase Apple's new and very cool iSight camera if I didn't already have the Logitech one!
UPDATE 20030815@12:05am I just got my USB-based Logitech camera to work with iChat by installing iChatUSBCam (US$9.95 shareware with 7-day trial). Would love to do some testing soon. Too bad iChat only works with Macs.
Finally got around to trying Yahoo's latest version for Mac, Messenger 2.5. They have finally caught up to most of features that the Windows version has had for a long time. They added a pop-down menu of smileys (which the Windows version has had) but the coolest new feature is Webcam. I hooked up my Sony DCR-PC115 DV video camera (using FireWire cable) and Messenger instantly worked with it. On my Windows 2000 PC and with Yahoo! Messenger I was able to view the video from my Mac without a hitch. (I did have to upgrade Messenger for Windows to version 5.5 to be compatible.) The Mac version still lacks audio chat though.
Just bought a Bluetooth USB adapter, Mitsumi brand (model WIF-0402C). (I didn't get the D-Link one because it didn't have any Windows drivers and it looked uglier! I also passed on one by LevelOne because it was just so plain — black color and rectangular shaped — even though it was slightly smaller and had an LED!) Cost was HK$390 (US$50). With it I was able to backup the contacts on my Ericsson T68 mobile phone wirelessly to my PowerBook G4 using Mac OS X's built-in Bluetooth support and the US$10-shareware Ericsson Client application. Worked well!
Oh, I replaced a 128MB SO-DIMM with a 512MB one for a total of 768MBs of memory in my (company's) PowerBook G4/500. Cost: HK$1,100 (US$142). PowerBook is noticeably faster.
Now if I can only get Mac OS X versions of Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office! I actually have company approval to purchase Microsoft Office v. X so I'll hopefully be placing an order on Monday.
http://www.macintouch.com/mosxreader10.2pt13.html
Selecting/deleting single file in List view is problematic:
Let's say you want to delete a file (or folder) and you are in List view. You click the name of the file you want to delete and hit Command-Delete. File does not move to Trash because the filename field, not the file, is selected (filename is highlighted for renaming).
In Mac OS 9, if this happened, you'd simply click Command-Delete once more and the file would move to the Trash. In Jaguar, not so: Command-Delete (multiple times) does nothing if the filename is selected.
This is very frustrating because in List view it is actually much easier to click on a file's name than to click on the file's tiny icon — filenames are almost always bigger targets to point at than the icons.
I'd prefer that clicking on a filename select the file, not highlight the filename for renaming. Clicking a second time on the filename should then highlight the filename for renaming. I believe this is the behavior that most people — Mac OS 9, Windows, and Linux users — are used to and just works better.
http://www.macintouch.com/mosxreader10.2pt12.html
Carlton Hogan wrote in reply to my post:
But Derek Tom wrote in about his frustration over lack of a path backward display in panel view. I can't say whether this is the case in Jaguar, but in OS 10.1x, if you go to finder preferences, there are a number of new icons you can drag to the window bar, including a path pull down. Hope this helps.In reply to Carton's feedback, I'd like to thank him for his suggestion but clarify that the pop-down path menu is not what I was after. Here's what I said:
This is not the same as Jaguar's "Path" pop-down menu item (or Command-clicking a window title) — with that, you can't just type in a path you might know (e.g. /docs/work/jobs), you can only navigate backwards, and you can't copy any part of the path you're in.If there were some instructions that said to go to the following path and delete a few files there, wouldn't it be nice to be able to just copy the line of text, paste it into a field in a window toolbar, and hit enter to go directly there?
/Library/Application Support/Coco Doodle/Candy Dandy
This is just like pasting a URL into a Web browser's location/address field. It's much more efficient than double-clicking folders one level at a time, particularly when some of the folders have tons of files that make moving to the next level down very slow.
Likewise, if you were giving some instructions to a friend and wanted to tell him to go to a certain folder that was several levels deep, wouldn't it be nice to just copy out the path from a text field in a window toolbar and then paste that into your email to your friend?
With a pop-down menu you can't copy and paste paths and you can only navigate backwards. With a path field you can copy and paste paths and you can navigate both backwards and forwards.
Both Windows and Linux GUIs have this feature (in Windows it's the "Address Bar" and in Linux's Gnome it's the "Location Bar").
Yes, unbelievable but true!... Here's what I submitted to the famous Macintouch site and thankfully it got included in their Mac OS X Reader Reports: Jaguar Part 10:
What drives me nuts is that with the new column view used in all Open/Save dialog boxes, I can't type the first few letters of a file I want to go to. There doesn't seem to be a way to select a specific column to work in. And even for experienced Mac users, seeing only 2 columns at a time and not knowing that you can scroll to the left is frustrating. At this point, I'm thinking Windows Explorer is more user-friendly. Apple needs to improve this.Also, why no path field in window toolbars? This would make navigation both down and up the directory structure more efficient. Most other GUIs have had this for ages - in Windows it's the "Address Bar" and in Linux's Gnome it's the "Location Bar". This is not the same as Jaguar's "Path" pop-down menu item (or Command-clicking a window title) — with that, you can't just type in a path you might know (e.g. /docs/work/jobs), you can only navigate backwards, and you can't copy any part of the path you're in.
I sure hope Apple is listening and does something about it. I know many others have complained about this same thing.
On a note related to the one below about working with digital photos, I have stopped using Resize! X which I mentioned previously. The reason is that I discovered that files processed with Resize! X lose their EXIF information.
Here's an example of the EXIF info that gets lost:
File size: 78767 bytes
File date: 2002:09:02 03:04:41
Camera make: Canon
Camera model: Canon PowerShot G1
Date/Time: 2002:08:14 19:50:18
Resolution: 800 x 600
Flash used: Yes
Focal length: 7.0mm (35mm equivalent: 36mm)
CCD width: 7.06mm
Exposure time: 0.017 s (1/60)
Aperture: f/2.0
Focus dist.: 0.82m
Metering Mode: center weight
Jpeg process: Baseline
File Upload Date: 09-02-2002 03:04:41
Item Capture Date: 08-14-2002 19:50:18
Another reason is that I prefer to have sharpening applied to all downsampled photos and the author of Resize! X, Cedric de Jacquelot, politely informed me that he is not planning on adding any new features.
So what I do now is use a Photoshop Droplet that reduces the Image Size 39.0625% (with Constrain Proportions) and applies the Unsharp Mask filter (Amount=70%, Radius=1 pixel, Threshold=5). This scales my original 3-Megapixel photos (2048x1536) down to 800x600 and sharpens them. (Since it's scaling by percentage, it handles both portrait- and landscape-oriented photos.) I then drag and drop the folder containing my photos onto ExifRenamer and I'm set to upload my photos to my Web gallery!
You can see the results by going to this latest album, clicking on an individual photo, and clicking on "full" for the View Images option. To see the EXIF information, click on the "photo properties" link.
You own a digital camera and use Mac OS X? Well, if so, check out ExifRenamer. Basically, it's a drag and drop application that renames your digital photos using the date and time that each photo was taken. In the Finder, this allows you to easily sort your photos chronologically and see the actual date and time each photo was taken — without having to open the file. ExifRenamer gets the date and time information from the EXIF data that is stored within each digital photo by digital cameras.
As an example, it renamed a photo named "839-3920_IMG.JPG" to "20020814-075018pm.JPG". So this photo was taken on August 14, 2002 at 18 seconds past 7:50pm! ExifRenamer is speedy and its naming format is highly customizable too.
The author, Stefan Robl of Germany, very politely asks for a donation if you like the program. I'm certainly donating!
Hello World!
Version 1.3 didn't quite work but I emailed the author, Adriaan Tijsseling, and he told me this brand new version, version 1.3.1, fixes the problem. Apparently, Apple changed something in Jaguar's AppleScript at the last minute that brought about the problem.
Let's see if it works...
Yup! Cool!
I just came across this app which sounds like just what I need since this site is powered by Movable Type and I use Mac OS X!...
Kung-Log is a donation-ware OSX application to post to and manage entries of a Movable Type weblog.
I'm downloading now!
I cloned my hard disk using Carbon Copy Cloner this past Saturday then backed up my key files and folders today to an external FireWire hard disk. Then this afternoon I simply upgraded my Mac OS X system from version 10.1.5 to 10.2 (codenamed "Jaguar"). The process couldn't have been easier and went very smoothly. After the initial setup which involved clicking half a dozen or so buttons and options (I opted for the equivalent of a "Clean Install"), the only other user involvement was to insert the second CD. The entire upgrade took about an hour to complete without any "hiccups" whatsoever. The new system definitely feels snappier! I expect to be madly updating software over the next week for maximum compatibility.
If you are constantly getting the following error when trying to burn a CD-R disc, the problem might be the discs (media) that you're using.
Sensekey hardware error (0x04)
Sense Code = 0x44
Internal Target Failure
(Note how misleading the error message is — "hardware error" sounds like the CD-RW drive is broken!)
That was the case for me when I used either Roxio Toast or CharisMac Discribe on my Mac (OS 9 and OS X). The discs that caused the problem for me were labeled "Encore - gold series" by imation (yes, imation). I have heard that the Encore-branded discs are second-rate "B Grade". "A Grade" discs made by imation are clearly labeled with the "imation" brand. Other A Grade discs are generally more expensive — in Hong Kong, over HK$100 (US$13) for 50-disc storage spindle pack.
Been using OS X for about a month now and I must take back what I had said earlier about all OS 9 applications working flawlessly (FreeHand 9 crashes) and no speed degradation (OS 9 IS noticably snappier). What was I thinking?! Well I had only been using OS X for about 3 days when I made those comments. I must have been overly excited by the whole new range of applications and the Unix command line. OS X is still very usable and robust but it and many applications for it need tweaking. Indeed, many OS X applications I'm running now are beta versions. I am disappointed that Apple would charge so much (US$129) for the next upgrade to version 10.2 (Jaguar). That's undoubtedly too much to charge for what I consider to be a lot of bug-fixes to the system. Sorry if I mislead anyone out there. (I only have 1 reader, so probably not!)
fsck -y
The fsck program will scan your hard disk and try to fix any problems. This will take about 5 minutes. If there were problems that it fixed, after the scan you'll see the message: FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED. In that case, run the fsck -y command again until it tells you your hard disk seems fine.
Then type the following command and hit Enter:
shutdown -nh now
Power your Mac back up and you're safely back in business!
Was looking for a small, fast program to quickly and easily downsample a bunch of JPEGs (taken by my Canon PowerShot G1 at 2048x1536 res) to a specified size (e.g. 600x450). No, nothing like massive Photoshop. I was thinking I'd be able to drag and drop a folder containing all my JPEGs and it would spit them back to a specified folder at my specified resolution. I wanted it to handle both landscape and portrait pictures such that I'd just need to specify the size of the longest dimension. So if I specified 600 pixels as the longest dimension, it'd size a standard digicam picture (4:3 aspect ratio) to 600x450 if the picture was landscape and 450x600 if the picture was portrait.
I searched on VersionTracker.com and downloaded and tried a bunch of suitable apps including ImageEdit, ImageConverter, ConvertImage, Fast Webpictures, and DropJPEG. The best one I came across was KStudio's Resize!. It has all the features I was looking for, it's freeware and is available for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and even Windows! When it processes a folder of images, it automatically creates a new folder on your desktop using the same name as the original folder and the size of the longest dimension in parentheses appended at the end (i.e. from an original folder named 20020802 Photos, folder 20020802 Photos (600) is created on your desktop containing the resized pictures). I'm hoping that an updated version will have the ability to apply a bit of sharpening to each picture as well.
Unbelievable that in Mac OS X (10.1.5 and older), there is no setting to change the default paper size to A4 (mine defaults to US Letter, of course). (In OS 9, for most apps, after changing to your preferred paper size you could hold the Option key down while clicking on OK in the Page Setup dialog box and that would set your default paper size.)
Well, thankfully, this freeware utility by Rod Yager will change your default paper size to A4 or US Letter in OS X: Paper Sizes 10.2. Download it off this page:
Thanks, Rod!
I hear that OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) WILL have a setting to change your default paper size.
Spent much of the day battling an apparent new worm that infected a PC in our Malaysia office. The worm repeatedly (over 22 times!) sent a 6.8MB MPEG attachment to 2 group email addresses. Of course, this very quickly filled up the server's hard disk! Before I had realized what was happening, I'd free up like 200MBs of space on the server and then like 5 minutes later the hard disk would be full again! I used Timbuktu to remote control the Malaysia server from Hong Kong for the troubleshooting. Initially I could do nothing because for some odd reason, our firewall in Malaysia was dropping packets for ports that Timbuktu uses (407, 1417-1420, tcp and udp) even though previously we configured Timbuktu communication to pass through and it was working. With the help of our part-time IT guy there, Chris Chow, we eventually got it working again (had to remove the rule, remove the service, add the predefined service again, add the rule again). Tomorrow we have to figure out what kind of worm it is and then clean it out of the infected system (if it is in fact a worm). The worm is sending via Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 (as shown in the headers) and through our local mail server so it does not appear to have its own SMTP engine. The Outlook Express Sent Items folder does not contain any copies of the big message though.
Shift-Command-3 captures your entire screen and saves the screenshot on your Desktop.
Shift-Command-4 changes your mouse pointer to a crosshair (+), after which you click and drag (from upper left corner to bottom right corner of area) to select an area of your screen to capture. Screenshot is saved on your Desktop.
(Note: Command key = Apple key, next to space bar)
Default format is TIFF.
To change format to JPEG (or PNG or PICT), open a Terminal window, type in the following line and hit Enter:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleScreenShotFormat JPEG
For PNG or PICT (or back to TIFF) format, just substitute for JPEG in the above command.
Took Mac OS X out for a few spins over the past several months but was turned off by the unfamiliar user interface and presumed poor performance and compatibility issues with OS 9 applications. So I stuck with OS 9. Well now I've been using OS X for 3 days straight and am pleasantly surprised. All the OS 9 ("Classic") applications work flawlessly in OS X with no noticeable degradation in speed (amazing!) and I am now more comfortable finding my way around the new system. With the Classic environment running within OS X, it's like having 2 computers in 1!
There's one essential OS 9 utility I use that is keeping me from using OS X versions of all my applications: EZNote. EZNote allows me to instantly store, name, categorize, and retrieve text/notes from within any application using just a couple of keyboard shortcuts. I use it to store interesting or important tidbits of information that I glean mainly from within my email program, Eudora, or my Web browser, Internet Explorer. The info can be just a few paragraphs or an entire story or email... EZNote is fantastic! An OS X version of EZNote is supposedly in the works but until then, for compatibility, I'm using OS 9 versions of Eudora and Internet Explorer. Switching between OS 9 applications and OS X applications is totally transparent, which I find amazing.
The migration to OS X has prompted me to upgrade to OS X versions of the following applications:
Looking for a great Web-based photo gallery app? We may be using this for our intranet as well...
Check out Gallery (written in PHP and works with Apache). It's FREE and extremely well done (just like Ikonboard)! I am totally amazed at the quality of these free Web-based apps — many are better than the commercial software! NOTE: This is installed on a Linux-based Web server (Windows running Apache and PHP might work too).
http://gallery.sourceforge.net
Check out the Screen Shots link on the left.
If any of you need help installing and configuring it, just drop me a private email.
I'm using Gallery to share our photos and videos... Click that Photo Gallery link on the right or go here:
At around 3:45pm, users started complaining that our mail server wasn't responding and sure enough, it wasn't! I quit and relaunched the server app, EIMS Server, even though it seemed fine but still no response. Our Internet servers are all networked off of our firewall's DMZ port and so I tried pinging our FTP and Web servers and they weren't responding either. Our servers were unable to access external sites too. So I tried rebooting our firewall but still no response. The problem turned out to be a mini-switch (the one that all our Internet servers are connected to) that had "hung" due a super-brief electrical outage (the lights on our whole floor flickered for a split second). I cycled the power on the mini-switch and that did the trick! Phew!
I can't believe how incredibly well done this Movable Type system is. And FREE for personal use or only $150 for business use? Unbelievable. Ben & Mena Trott, creators of Movable Type, deserve ah... well, something HUGE! Movable Type just blows away competing systems that cost many times more. Well, I'm going to need to learn MUCH more about this system but so far I very much like what I see. Don't know anyone who could complain, really. Graphics, fonts, design, UI... everything is just top-notch. Well, it did take me several hours to configure so although I thought the installation manual was well done, it can be improved. I am going to write my own version of the installation manual to help other new users.
Well, let's see how this looks! Here goes...