Aric's Tech Blog

EDID Reader for Windows that Works

2011-08-02T11:44:00.002-07:00

Chances are if you need to read the EDID information stored in a display you are already frustrated. Usually you only need to see this low level information if something isn't displaying correctly. The last think you want to do is download multiple applications that claim to extract the EDID information only to find they do not work correctly or at all.

So I've done the searching and experimenting for you and if you are on Windows (specifically I was on Windows 7 64bit but this should work on most versions of Windows) I recommend the free Extron EDID Manager that can be found here.

Applications Allowed in Parental Controls don't Show Up

2010-09-06T22:24:00.005-07:00

Parental Controls are a nice integrated feature of Mac OS X. The problem is they have some problems.

This article specifically addresses when you allow specific applications for a restricted user but they still do not appear available to the user.

I’ve been fighting this issue for nearly a year. Sometimes I’ll add a new application for my child (usually a game or educational application) via the Parental Controls control panel only to find the application is never made available to my child. There are tons of posts that span several years and different versions of Mac OS X describing this problem and a few suggestions that never worked for me. After a particularly frustrating day I decided to determine what was causing the issue. The good news is I did find the cause and offer a solution here...

I tried a lot of things that didn’t work including reading the console log entries, reinstalling software, running Disk Utility and repairing permissions. Finally I started comparing an application that behaved as it should and one that refused to show up. Here’s a picture showing the comparison.

Preview behaved as it should and MarbleBlast Gold would not. BTW my username and main admin account on this machine is “aric.”

See the difference? Preview is set to system: Read& Write whereas MarbleBlast is set to aric: Read&Write.

For the record I had run repair permissions multiple times so this is apparently a permission issue that is not corrected by Disk Utility.

So we’ve identified the problem… what’s the easiest way to fix it if Disk Utility doesn’t do the trick?

Instead of working on the individual applications and manually adding system: Read&Write (which should work if you only have one application to fix.)

I recommend selecting the Applications folder and doing a Get Info (either command I or File->Get Info). You should see permissions similar to those shown on my Preview application consisting of system, admin, and everyone.
Now click the lock in the lower corner of the Info window for the Applications folder so you can make changes. I show it circled in red in the picture below. It should ask for your admin password.
After that you should have access to the permission settings. We don’t want to change the permissions for this folder but we do want to use a feature here.
Now click on the Gear icon at the bottom of the same window. I show it circled in green in the picture below. A drop down menu should appear with an option called “Apply to enclosed items…” Go ahead and select that.
Now on my computer applying that setting took several minutes so be prepared to let it run until it is finished. You’ve really solved the problem at this point.

Parental Controls seems to cache permission data sometimes so I recommend rebooting the system now too. After that everything should work as you expect! Unless you run into Parental Control Issues with applications due to creator problems which I’ll save for another blog post.

iPhone forces you to double accept appointments you already accepted in Outlook

2010-06-01T21:32:00.003-07:00

Ok, so here are the symptoms. Your iPhone is setup to get/send email and appointments with your corporate MS Exchange server. You use MS Outlook as your email and calendar application on your Windows machine at the office.

If you get a meeting invitation it shows up on your iPhone calendar notifications as well as Outlook. If you accept it on your iPhone everything is fine and Outlook understands it's been accepted. However if you accept it from Outlook your iPhone won't realize it's been accepted and will still show it as a notification and an unaccepted meeting in your calendar. You then have to accept it from your iPhone which sends an additional accept notification to the meeting creator causing them to think you are an idiot.

As I searched the web for a solution I found convoluted answers about Exchange not being setup correctly, MS and Apple bugs, etc.

There was another clue to my issue. Two other co-workers with iPhones were not having this behavior so it was somehow specific to my setup.

It turns out this is a bug in the iPhone if you have Outlook setup to keep meeting requests in your inbox after accepting/declining. You see by default (and most users keep their default settings) Outlook will remove a meeting invite from your inbox once you respond. At that point the only way to find that meeting is in your calendar and no longer in your inbox. This can be annoying if a meeting request had an attachment and you didn't remember the date of the meeting and need to open the attachment. So whenever I get a new work PC with Outlook one of the first things I do is change that default setting to leave meeting requests in the inbox.

Apparently the iPhone uses that information to determine if you've accepted/responded/denied a meeting request. This appears to be a bug in the iPhone as it assumes the user hasn't changed their email settings in Outlook.

To get the iPhone to recognize that a meeting request has been responded to in Outlook so it stops asking you to accept/decline, do the following in Outlook (This should work for Outlook 2003 and 2007, not sure about other versions): Go to Tools->Options->Email Options->Advanced Email Options. Look for the item called "Delete meeting request form Inbox when responding" and make sure it is selected.

If it was already selected then you have a different issue then I did. This has solved my problem 100%.

Unlink YouTube and Google Account or Gmail passwords

2010-05-12T09:48:00.004-07:00

Hey so the last time I tried to log into my YouTube account it said:

So I tried using my YouTube account that I've had for years, but then it said:

Please use your Google Account. We no longer support signing in with your old YouTube password.

So apparently Google linked my Google/Gmail account with my YouTube account. I don't remember asking it to and it sure doesn't seem like something I would want considering I've had the same YouTube login since early 2007. Anyway if you run into this situation you can unlink your two accounts by following the link below.

Unlink YouTube and Google Account.

Good luck!

iPhone heads to Verizon?

2010-03-30T07:22:00.003-07:00

The iPhone becoming available on Verizon in the U.S. has been an ongoing rumor for the last few years. A new iPhone is always released in June and leading up to June the rumors start to fly. Supposedly the sources this time are "more accurate" so it's possible but don't get your hopes up. Also it *is* understood that AT&T's exclusive contract runs out this year so that may indicate more of a chance as well...

To keep some perspective I've posted the rumor as it has appeared over the past few years...

Here's the same rumor in October 2007:

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2007/10/rumor_iphone_2_for_macworld_2008.html

Here's the same rumor in September 2008:

http://www.9to5mac.com/cdma-iphone-verizon-sprint

Here's the same rumor in November 2009:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/06/report_apple_to_launch_verizon_iphone_in_q3_2010.html

Long story short... I'll believe it when I see it (or rather when Steve Jobs says so.)

My favorite Regular Expression for deleting a line at a time

2009-11-16T14:35:00.002-07:00

Ok, so you probably know the power of regular expressions or regex. One of the great things about regex is that with most modern text editors (and even some old classic ones) you can use them to do quick editing over a large file.

My favorite (and this will work in Visual Studio) is for removing lines at a time based on some match.

Let's say we want to select (most likely for removal) any line from a file that has the word Bart in it. Our regex would look like this:

^.*Bart.*$\n

The \n indicates new line. If you left off the \n the line would be selected without the new line character. If you are doing a replacement (such as with nothing to delete the line) and leave off the \n the line is selected but not the return character so for removing the text, a blank line would still exist in the file, whereas including the \n will delete the entire line from the file.

Snow Leopard Doesn't Support Some Epson Printers

2009-11-09T12:59:00.011-07:00

UPDATED: See update below...

Well I wish I had known this before I upgraded to Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Apparently Epson hasn't released drivers for some of its more expensive "pro" printers such as my Epson Stylus Photo 2200. It appears the same is true for the 1280 and 2100 and probably others as well.

Epson has stated they will release a new printer driver by the end of January 2010 that will be distributed by Apple as a software update.

The current version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.2) includes the open source Gutenprint driver for these printers, however, most people report that either they don't work, or the colors are so off that they are useless.

For a list of Epson (and other) printers supported with native drivers in Snow Leopard you can go here. If the driver lists Gutenprint next to the printer name (i.e. Epson Stylus Photo 2200 - Gutenprint v5.2.3) you know that the manufacturer hasn't developed a native Snow Leopard printer driver yet and your printing results may vary.

BTW you may find the printer driver on Epson's website here that claims it is compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6. That file is identical to the older printer driver that worked under 10.5 and is not a new one that fixes color issues in 10.6. Epson has stated multiple times that the new version will be available through Apple's software update and not a download from their website.

UPDATED: January 3rd 2010

Well it appears they've released the update. Oddly it doesn't appear during the Apple Software Updates but through the new printer driver update facility that Apple added to Snow Leopard. Now you might be wondering how to get the update to appear? Well, mine showed up automatically when I plugged in the USB cable of the printer to the computer. Immediately I got a dialog saying updated drivers existed and asked if I wanted to download them. Note that I had already uninstalled the non-working Gutenprint drivers, so if you were using those, I have no idea if you would get the update notification. I hope you would.

After downloading it automatically added the printer, and I was able to print. I haven't done any detailed photo printing but printed a few color pages on plain paper the colors looked good. So good luck to you and thank you Epson for living up to your word. It would've been better if you had these drivers available when Snow Leopard shipped but better late then never. You can see several printers have been added here to the list here with a + which indicates the Vendor software was recently added via software update.

Clicking HTTP URL Links in Outlook 2003 on Windows opens two browser windows in Safari

2009-11-06T12:32:00.010-07:00

I've seen this happen in both Safari and Firefox. This fix is specific to Safari although the Firefox fix is probably similar.

If you open explorer.exe (the Windows file manager, you can just double click "My Computer" or "My Documents" to get an explorer window) then go into

1) Tools->Folder Options...

2) Then click the File Types tab.

3) I scrolled down and found two entries for:

(NONE) Safari URL

As you can see from the picture, the Delete button was grayed out so I couldn't delete one of them.

4) I selected one of them and clicked Advanced.

In the Actions list was a single entry named "open"

5) I selected that action and clicked Remove.

After that I only get one window in Safari when I click links in Outlook 2003.

I've gotten some feedback from other users (including Firefox) that this isn't always the problem/solution so I'm adding another step here.

You may have to remove the DDE entry. Follow the steps above 1-4. Select "open" and click Edit...

If you see anything in the DDE Message area, just clear it out and click OK.

iTunes 9 Released, new version of Fetch Art coming soon

2009-09-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

Today Apple released iTunes 9. I am currently testing a new version of Fetch Art and should know about compatibility with iTunes 9 and have a new version with some bug fixes available in about a week.

Robocopy trumps RichCopy

2009-08-26T12:13:00.004-07:00

Microsoft has released a new replacement for Robocopy. What's Robocopy you ask? Only about the best way to copy a lot of files across a network via the command line in Windows.

Robocopy will copy a directory with any amount of files and subdirectories. It will merge the contents of the directories if duplicates already exist in the destination depending on options you pass it. If a file cannot be read, it will pause and retry a certain number of times, and if you lose your network connection during the copy, when your connection is back, you can reissue the same command, and it will pick up where it left off, not recopying the files it already copied.

It's a really great command line tool and I wish drag and drop copying in both Windows and Mac OS X behaved like this instead of failing miserably if the network drops or wiping destination directories out even if they contain different files from the source.

Robocopy is great. It's one of the first things I install on a freshly formatted Windows box.

So what could be better then Robocopy? According to Microsoft TechNet, RichCopy. RichCopy is the next generation Robocopy adding an easy to use GUI and performance enhancing multithreaded copying (so it can move more then one file at a time which reduces network lag if you are moving a lot of small files.)

So today I installed RichCopy and put it to the test. I needed to move a directory that had 19.8GB in 69,510 files and 13,654 directories (or folders if you prefer.) I started RichCopy and used its GUI interface to start the copy. My network performance was only about 10Mbps (I'm on gigabit people) but it's an overworked corporate network, so I don't think that's any fault of RichCopy. Unfortunately about an hour and 45 minutes into the job, the server disappeared from the network for a second. No problem, right? That's the kind of thing RichCopy was made to handle. Unfortunately at that point RichCopy crashed with an exception, and the only option was to close the exception dialog which closed the RichCopy application.

So now I've got Robocopy doing the copy. It doesn't have a fancy GUI but it's working.

Oh BTW, there is also a GUI for Robocopy here. But I tried it and it had at least one bug (back when I tried it.) It may work for you, but, if you are looking for a robust copy tool, chances are you can handle the command line anyway.

Here's something to get you started on Robocopy:

robocopy source destination /S

By default robocopy won't copy files that appear the same so it always performs a merge and that's what this command line will to. The /S says to be recursive but don't copy empty directories.

The Wikipedia entry on Robocopy covers all the optional parameters.

Fixing Printer Sharing in Mac OS X

2009-08-25T19:21:00.001-07:00

Ok, so an odd thing happened trying to print the other day. I share a USB printer from my Mac to other computers on the network. After unplugging the USB cable from my Mac at one point to move some stuff on my desk and then plugging it back into the same Mac, printer sharing for this printer no longer worked.

Symptoms:

I could print fine from the computer connected directly to the printer via the USB port. I share it with three other computers and none of them could print to the printer, although they could see it on the network.

When I tried to print from a networked printer the document would simply never print. When I opened the printer queue on the computer I was trying to print from it said:

Unable to get printer status (Forbidden)!

Also if I tried to add the printer to a computer that wasn't using it previously, although the computer could see the printer, it could never choose the correct printer driver.

Here’s the fix:

On the computer sharing the printer (the one the printer is connected to) you have to reset the printing system. Just open Print & Fax in System Preferences and right click in the list of printers and chose “Reset printing system…”

It will ask you if you are sure, and you’ll have to supply an administrator password. That will remove all your printers.

Then you can click the + button and add them manually, however, I found it was easier to power cycle my printer and it was automatically added to the list. Make sure to check Share this printer and you may have to turn on Printer Sharing in the Sharing control panel too. The Print & Fax control panel should notify you if Printer Sharing is not enabled.

You may have to remove and re-add the shared printer on any of your networked computers you wish to print from. Two of my computers started printing to the printer with no problems, but one of them had selected the wrong driver (a generic postscript driver.) You could tell it was wrong because the printer icon didn’t match the one on the computer that the printer is connected to.

It could still print ok with the wrong driver but it couldn’t access any of the printer’s settings such as paper type or print quality.

Here’s things I tried that didn’t work:

Turning off and on printer sharing.
Deleting the printer from the computer I wanted to print from and re-adding it.
Repairing permissions on the computer sharing the printer
Printing from another computer that could see the shared printer. It behaved the same from three different computers.

Amazon requires signing of AWS requests after August 15 2009

2009-07-29T13:07:00.002-07:00

Amazon is changing how applications can interact with their Web Services.

On August 15th 2009 Amazon will make changes and is only supporting C#, Java, PHP, and Perl.

I've contacted Amazon and asked for support for other languages such as C++, C and AppleScript. I've even offered to write necessary libraries for them if they would make more information available about their security algorithms to me.

So far, they haven't replied, and unless things change, a lot of applications that get information through AWS will stop working on August 15th.

Based on the developer forums I participate on many developers are upset at this change.

I've started a petition you can sign here. It just asks that Amazon not exclude popular programming languages from their new secure interface.

iPhone 3GS, 3G, and original iPhone Comparison

2009-06-22T14:37:00.011-07:00

A lot of people are talking about "new" features of the iPhone 3G S, however, many sites listing new features are listing items that exist for previous generation iPhones as well. Also, several sites are only comparing the new 3G S to last years 3G and not even including the original Edge only iPhone in their comparisons. So I felt the need to put together this table.

Hardware Differences

Original	3G	3G S
Metal back	plastic back, more curved shape
Recessed headphone jack	standard headphone jack
No stereo Bluetooth headphone support	Stereo Bluetooth headphone support
Edge	3G (3.6Mb/s HSDPA)*	3GS (faster 7.2Mb/s HSDPA)**
No GPS (simulates using triangulation=very inaccurate and often unavailable)	GPS	GPS + Compass (should allow turn by turn directions in future software)
No video		640x480 30fps video (fixed focus during recording)
2MP fixed focus Camera		3MP auto focus camera
Original CPU		Faster CPU
Original graphics		Faster 3D graphics
Powered by old iPod chargers****	Powered only by newer chargers****
Supports 1 button inline headphone remote		Supports 3 button inline headphone remote including volume control
No voice dialing		Voice Control
No tethering	Tethering**
No MMS	MMS**
No Nike + iPod		Nike + iPod built in

New features added with the free 3.0 software update to all iPhones

Original	3G	3G S
Cut, Copy and Paste	same	same
Global Search	same	same
Horizontal keyboard in most apps	same	same
Voice memos	same	same
Notes sync with Mail/Outlook	same	same

Notes:

* Some reports state that AT&T artificially limits 3G access to 1.4 Mbps instead of allowing the full 3.6Mbps HSDPA speed.

** Not available in the US with AT&T yet.

**** The original iPhone supported the 12 volt charging (as did older iPods) and many car chargers only supplied that voltage. The 3G and 3G S require newer chargers that do not rely on the old specification.

How UPnP failed me and Bonjour for Windows saved me.

2009-04-29T17:02:00.002-07:00

Today I am working in an entirely Windows XP environment. Not a Mac to be found. However, it was Apple software that saved me.

It might seem strange to be extolling the virtues of Apple software on Windows, and believe me, if the Windows UPnP software worked as it is supposed to, I probably wouldn't be doing this, but if you find yourself in the same situation this article might help you.

We just got a new Axis Q1755 network camera. It supports Universal Plug and Play or UPnP. It also supports Bonjour which it turns out is very lucky for me. I connected the camera to our network. At that point, as a UPnP device it is supposed to show up on my Windows XP computer inside My Network Places. I opened My Network Places, and it wasn't there.

I found an article that said Windows Firewall can interfere with UPnP devices. However, since I'm on an internal network, I have my Firewall turned off.

I found another article that mentioned that by default Windows XP might not have all the needed UPnP software installed. I went into Control Panels->Add or Remove Programs. I clicked the Add/Remove Windows Components button. I clicked Networking Services. Then I clicked Details… I saw that UPnP User Interface was not checked, so I checked it to install it. Clicked OK, then Next, then Finish which installed the UPnP components. Opened My Network Places again, but still nothing.

I found yet another article that said I might need to enable the UPnP discovery service. So I went into Control Panels->Administration Tools->Services and looked for the SSDP Discovery Service. Sure enough, it was disabled. I enabled it and started it. I verified its status changed to Started. Closed the Services control panel. Opened My Network Places again, and still nothing.

Now I've already wasted 10 minutes on something that was supposed to be Plug and Play. Then I noticed in the setup manual of the camera it also supports Bonjour for Mac OS X. Hmmm I know Apple released Bonjour for Windows too. It can't work any worse then this, and if it takes less then 10 minutes it's a more efficient use of my time. So I go to the Apple website and download Bonjour for Windows. It installs a new button on the Explorer Bar in Internet Explorer. I click that button and it immediately finds three devices on my network. Two printers, and my new Axis camera. I click on the camera and have full access to it.

So I gotta' say, I'm liking Bonjour for Windows.

iPhone OS 3.0 Adds a lot of features

2009-03-17T11:45:00.004-07:00

In my previous post: iPhone 3G, still missing features I discussed the features introduced by the 2.0 version of the iPhone OS that shipped with the second generation 3G iPhone.

There were a lot of (what I considered obvious) omissions. Let's review those now that Apple released what they will be adding to the next generation of the iPhone OS in June:

Stereo Bluetooth headset support (A2DP) (not on first generation iPhone as it lacks some hardware)
Copy and Paste
Global search (they let you search contacts now, but not notes or calendars, Palm OS has had this for years!)
DUN tethering (so I can use the phone as a 3G modem on my laptop either over Bluetooth, or preferably, USB) (They claim they are adding this in 3.0, however, not all the carriers are ready to enable it...)
Notes syncing (on Windows and Mac OS X)
MMS (picture messaging, so far they still only support text messaging)
Chat/IM support for popular chat apps (MSN Live Messenger, AIM, GTalk, etc.) (With push support finally arriving this appears to be solved.)
API for turn by turn GPS (although Apple will not be supplying maps, so this will have to be 3rd party.)

The following items still won't be added:

Video recording
A ToDo app with syncing with Outlook (on Windows) or iCal (on Mac OS X)
Voice activated dialing
Syncing music/video/podcasts and calendar data over Bluetooth or WiFi. Why should I have to connect a USB cable just to sync?
Forward camera and video chat support
Undo in most apps (something PalmOS apps have had for over a decade)
Bluetooth support for keyboards and standard devices other then headsets and headphones.

So all in all a pretty decent update. They've also added several features that were not in my wish list such as auto discovery of nearby iPhones for gaming etc. I'd say they addressed most of the items on my list I would classify as most important (Thank goodness for copy, cut and paste!)

Disk Utility Erase Failed on Mac OS X

2009-02-18T20:08:00.004-07:00

Ok, I'm always running out of hard drive space. I just bought a $100 one terabyte external USB 2.0 and eSATA drive to add to my current pile of external hard drives.

Of course it ships formatted FAT32 which Mac OS X can read, but isn't a very good format (doesn't support journaling, limits file sizes to 4 gigs, etc.) So we need to erase and format the drive (or partition or reformat... whatever you want to call it.)

No problem. I launch Disk Utility, select the new drive, and click the Erase tab. Then I select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the Volume Format. Then I click Erase. It warns me I'll delete data, blah blah. It starts erasing, and then says the erase failed. Specifically it says:

Volume Erase Failed with error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

After a few more tries I found the solution and it requires changing a setting in the partition. We only want to create a single large partition but we still have to change a setting in the Partition tab.

If you don't see a Partition tab between Erase and RAID try selecting the drive in the list to the left. You may have selected the mount point (or sub volume/partition). To edit the partitions you have the have the higher level drive device media selected.

Ok, after that, click the Partition tab, then select 1 Partition from the Volume Scheme drop down menu. Then click the Options button. Chances are Master Boot Record is selected. You don't want that for a Mac OS Extended format drive. Instead select the GUID Partition Table and click OK (You only want to choose the Apple Partition Map if you are running on a PowerPC Mac with an OS below Mac OS X 10.4 or if you are running a PowerPC Mac and you need the disk to be a startup disk.)

Then click Apply. That should do it.

UPDATE:

I haven't been able to reproduce this problem since the Mac OS X 10.6.3 update. If you have this issue and you are running 10.6.3 or newer could you please let me know with a comment below? Thanks!

QuickTime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.

2008-12-04T13:16:00.009-07:00

So you've been laboring over that PowerPoint presentation or Word document on your Mac for hours or even days. When it was time for final delivery you opened it up on a Windows OS based computer under Office 2003 or Vista or some other version and found that wherever you put a picture the image isn't displaying and instead it just says

QuickTime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.

QuickTime and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture.

Also note that the file compatibility toolbox on the Mac version will not warn you of this issue when that's the whole point of that toolbox. As far as Office for Mac is concerned, the file will be 100% compatible with Office for Windows.

I'll first explain what causes this problem and then we'll talk about a fix.

So the only time you will see this is if you were woking in Office on the Mac, added pictures to your document via either drag and drop or copy and paste, and then open your document in Office for Windows.

Ok so what causes this issue?

The truth is it is a bug in how Office for the Mac supported drag and drop and copy and paste. It used a Mac OS Specific way of embedding the image that Office for Windows can't understand. Even if you install QuickTime in Windows, Office for Windows still can't make sense of the image information. This bug was finally fixed with the Mac Office 2008 Service Pack 1 (12.1.0)

Great, what's the solution?

If you've created/edited the document using Office 2008 with SP1 you shouldn't have the problem. If you've created the document in an older version of Office for Mac, then as long as you have access to Office 2008 with SP 1 all you have to do is open and save the document in the newer version of Office 2008 for Mac and the problem will be fixed. It says so here, and I've verified it worked.

Another solution that I've tested is to import images using the Insert menu instead of using drag and drop or copy and paste. Yes that means if you are trying to use an image from the Web, you must save it from your web browser to your computer's disk first, then import it into Word. In fact, you can safely drag and drop an image file from your computer's disk drive (from a window in the Finder) to Word and it works fine. It's only if you drag and drop (or copy and paste) an image from your Web browser or another application and drop it into Word that causes the issue.

Another solution is provided here by Stephen Rindsberg. He provides some VBA code that you could run on a problematic document in Mac Office 2004. I tried it and it worked...some. I found it fixed about 70% of the images, but several were still not working in Office for Windows. Also any image it fixed it brought to the front of the document, so for example, if you had a back ground image in a PowerPoint file, after running the VBA code, now it would appear in front of all of the text on that slide.

So the best solution seems to be to use the latest version of Office for the Mac 2008 or always import your graphics files from local copies on your computer's drive. BTW If you need to use Office 2004 (for example you need support for VBA which was dropped in 2008) you will be happy to know you can safely install 2008 on a Mac that has 2004 (as I indicated in my previous blog entry about why I'm still using 2004), and at the end the installer will ask you if you want to remove 2004. Just say NO and both 2004 and 2008 will exists happily together on the same Mac.

This doesn't cover movie files, only images...

If you are searching you may find this Microsoft Support article: You receive a "QuickTime and a Video decompressor are needed to see this picture" error message when you try to play a movie in a slide view in PowerPoint Although the description of the problem seems similar, it's a different situation and is specific to movie files and not images.

Why not to upgrade to Office 2008 for Mac and to keep using Office 2004

2008-12-01T13:56:00.004-07:00

Ok, so when Mac Office 2008 came out this year, I was pretty happy to upgrade. After all, 2004 was four years old, and because I had an Intel Mac it had to run under Rosetta which means it ran pretty slow.

Office 2008 promised faster speeds for Intel Mac owners as well as more formatting options and file compatibility with the new Vista Office (DOCX, etc.) formats.

Well, I've installed 2008 and decided to go back to 2004 and here's why...

First Excel and PowerPoint for 2008 do seem improved and ran at least as good if not faster then theri 2004 versions on my Intel Mac. They had obvious improvements in the user interface and PowerPoint had some really nice graphic enhancements. Word however, actually runs slower. Even though now it is running naitive on my Intel processor. Worst, Microsoft removed Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) from Office 2008 so all those Excel spreadsheets with fancy Macros that I have to use for my job won't work on it. Lastly I have a relatively simple newsletter template that I use a few times a year, and in 2008 it has some formatting issues. It's hard to explain but if a Microsoft engineer wants to get in touch with me, I'll explain how to reproduce the problem and send them the file. (Hello Microsoft Mac Business Unit?)

Also Microsoft has released a converter that now allows Office 2004 (and the older v.X even) to open the new Vista DOCX Open XML file format, so another motivation for upgrading to Office 2008 is eliminated. You can get that upgrade here.

Anyway, so what I've decided to do is keep both 2004 and 2008 installed on my Mac. They actually run fine side by side. Just make sure at the end of the 2008 installer app, you do NOT check the "remove 2004" option and you can keep 2004 around for faster Word editing and VBA macro support.

Update: I've applied the latest Mac Office 2008 updates bringing me to version 12.1.5. It does seem Word performance has improved a lot. However, it is still having problems formatting my newsletter template, and I'm seeing this a lot more too:

Excel Password Crack

2008-09-26T09:21:00.006-07:00

Have you ever been handed an Excel spreadsheet and needed to modify it, only to find it had Workbook Protection enabled that requires a password?

To unprotect the workbook, you would go into:

Tools->Protection->Unprotect Workbook.

Of course, the person who gave you the file doesn't know the password or they would have given it to you when they gave you the file.

Well a quick search will find there are several hacking utilities out there to break the password in Excel workbooks. Some of these are free and some cost up to $30. Some run locally and some require you send the file to them (not usually a good idea if your file contains confidential information.)

So I decided I'd try a free utility. The first one I grabbed was kind of large and including a full installer. I was concerned it could install spyware or other unwanted software and I wasn't anxious to run an installer for something that really should just be a simple little app, so I kept looking. Then I found something better. A single file that was an Excel Add-In. Using an Add-In isn't as dangerous as running an installer (perhaps an Add-In could be malicious, but I've never heard of a rootkit being created via an Add-In) and it was provided on a web site that had other useful information. So since this wasn't the publisher's only application it seemed to me they would be more concerned about their reputation then a website devoted only to a password cracker tool and therefore would not tend to include anything malicious in their code.

Anyway, I added the Add-In, opened the sheet, and in a few minutes (it's a brute force password attack) I had a working password! Fantastic.

If you need this, I highly recommend the tool provided by Erlandsen Data Consulting called Find Lost Passwords.

This is a Windows only solution. This Add-In will not work in Office 2008 for the Mac because it relies on VBA which is not supported in Office 2008. This also will not work in Office 2004 although I'm not sure of the reason. It's possible it references compiled Windows only code.

One thing to note, the password you get will work 100%. However, it will probably not be the original password. The way Excel hashes passwords, there are actually a lot of letter combinations that result in the same password "hash" so in other words if you protected a file with the password "ILoveChocolate" there are actually a lot of other letter combinations that will still open that Excel spreadsheet for you. This application simply gives you the first letter combination that has the same hash as "ILoveChocolate." So if you test it on a spreadsheet that you actually knew the password on, don't be surprised if the password doesn't come out to be a the one you expected. But it unlocks the spreadsheet just fine because inside Excel's security procedures, the passwords look the same.

Outlook won’t send email, it just sits in your Outbox

2008-07-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

Ok, so first if you also can’t receive email, this isn’t your problem. This is about a send only problem. I could receive email just fine.

If your problem matches the helpful description here: http://www.slipstick.com/problems/outbox.htm

Also a similar article on Microsoft’s official Office support site here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011879881033.aspx

Then you have the same problem I did. I wanted to specifically mention that it was LANDesk Antivirus causing the issue as that hasn’t (so far) been listed as one of the Outlook add-ins that causes this issue.

The registry key I had to modify was here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\ LDOutlookAddin.Addin

This was installed with LANDesk Antivirus and is identified with the FriendlyName of "LANDesk Outlook add-in" and Description of "Scans email for viruses" (all items a user could search on.) I'm running version 5.0.1.88 which I believe is the latest.

Once I set LoadBehavior to 0 it solved my issue.

Big thanks to Diane Poremsky for writing the post linked to above which helped me debug my issue.

Why I would spend $150 on a USB Keyboard

2008-07-15T12:34:00.002-07:00

Ok, in my previous post I bemoaned the fact that my 19” flat panel monitor broke and took my $150 Matias Tactile Pro 1.0 keyboard with it. I thought I’d follow up on an experience that made me have a huge amount of respect for the Matias company.

Why a $150 Keyboard?

I realize most people purchase keyboards that cost $30 to $40 US dollars these days. Often they don’t purchase keyboards at all but use the ones included free with their computers. So knowing one can buy a completely usable keyboard for $30 then why would I spend $150 on a keyboard? There are actually several answers but I’m only going to discuss one in this post. (For more information on the history of this keyboard read this article on TidBITS.)

Now That’s Customer Service

I type A LOT. It's basically my livelihood. If I couldn’t type, I’m not sure how I could support my family. Because of the fact that I probably spend 10 hours a day typing and it’s so important to my family’s well being I’m willing to invest in a decent keyboard. The keyboard I’m talking about is the Matias Tactile Pro 1.0. It’s a wonderful keyboard that feels great and supports your hands long into the night. When I found my flat panel monitor had broken the keyboard stands off of the back basically making the keyboard useless I was crushed. I went to the Matias site to even see if they were making a Tactile Pro keyboard (I knew they had long discontinued the 1.0 version.) I also knew that due to a tight budget lately, I might have to replace it with a $30 keyboard. I found Matias was no longer making a Tactile Pro keyboard. They will release a 3.0 version next year but the 1.0 and 2.0 versions are no longer available. I know they make a really nice USB 2.0 keyboard but it isn’t anything like the Tactile Pro.

Disappointed, I filled out the web form to be notified when the Tactile Pro 3.0 keyboard becomes available. There is a message section and I just put in pathetically that the feet had broken off of my Tactile Pro 1.0 keyboard so I needed to purchase a new one.

Ok, now you know how web forms work. The email address goes into a database and no one ever reads the message section.

Except at Matias!

Less then 24 hours later I was contacted through email by a customer service representative.

She wrote to me that if I give her my address she would mail me replacement feet. That’s right. I sent her my address. And a few days later, Matias paid $6.50 CAD to send me an envelope with two replacement feet.

Canadian Postage

My new Feet

Truly amazing. Matias, you have a customer for life!

19" Samsung Flatpanel broke away from its stand

2008-07-06T11:18:00.004-07:00

This morning I walked into my office to check email and saw this.

That’s my Samsung flatpanel sitting on my keyboard.

You can see the stand is no longer attached to the back of it. Last night it was fine and hadn’t been touched or moved since then. So sometime during the night the metal bracket holding it to the stand simply gave up.

Now that’s depressing enough as it is, but if you look a bit closer you’ll notice that the weight of the monitor broke the feet off of the bottom of my Matias Tactile Pro keyboard (which cost me $150 USD.)

Why someone would spend $150 on a keyboard will be my next blog entry, but to give you an idea you can read this (You have to at least read the section entitled Protecting the Alps.)

Now I think I should point out this monitor has had a very easy life. It just sits on my desk. It doesn’t move around or travel. It just sits there. It literally broke due to its own weight. I think it is still under warranty so I’ll have to try and find the original paperwork (which reminds me, I need to clean up and organize my office.)

iPhone 3G, still missing features

2008-06-10T09:33:00.009-07:00

Well, the iPhone 3G has been released.

The two new features over the previous generation iPhone are realtime GPS and 3G data speeds.

The sad part is really what it doesn't have:

Stereo Bluetooth headset support (A2DP)
Copy and Paste
Video recording
Global search (they let you search contacts now, but not notes or calendars, Palm OS has had this for years!)
DUN tethering (so I can use the phone as a 3G modem on my laptop either over Bluetooth, or preferably, USB)
Notes syncing with Outlook (on Windows) or Mail (on Mac OS X)
A ToDo app with syncing with Outlook (on Windows) or iCal (on Mac OS X)
MMS (picture messaging, so far they still only support text messaging)
Chat/IM support for popular chat apps (MSN Live Messenger, AIM, GTalk, etc.)
Voice activated dialing
Syncing music/video/podcasts and calendar data over Bluetooth or WiFi. Why should I have to connect a USB cable just to sync?
Forward camera and video chat support
Undo in most apps (something PalmOS apps have had for over a decade.
Turn by turn GPS
Bluetooth support for keyboards and standard devices other then headsets and headphones.

Oh there is also a $99 a year fee for Mobile Me to get some of the live syncing features.

AT&T is also raising the unlimited data rate from $20 a month to $30 a month. Their cheapest family share plan is still $59.99 (plus the iPhone data of $30 a month per iPhone) although it is now 550 minutes a month instead of 450. Assuming you wanted two iPhones (the situation I'd be in with my wife) you'd be looking at $59.99 + $30 + $30 = $119.99. Just prior to the announcement it would've only been $99.99.

Reducing a Printer Driver from 80MB to 9MB

2008-03-10T19:17:00.002-07:00

Ok, so how many times has this happened to you? You just got a freshly formatted computer, and you need to print something, but it has no printers on it. No problem, you check to find your nearest printer (I’m in a client’s office today) and then download the driver right?

Ok, so the nearest printer to me happens to be an HP OfficeJet L7780 all in one. Now I don’t need the scanner or other features accessable from my computer, I just need to print. So I go to HP’s website to download the printer driver. I know that they will try to give me an installer with scanner software, etc. on it, but I just need a printer driver.

I get here pretty quick with a little searching:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=2512010&lang=en&

I choose Windows XP ‘cause that’s what I’m using. And finally I get here: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=228&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=2512010&lang=en

Now it has a few options. There is a full feature software and driver. No doubt that includes the scanner software and more that I already said I don’t want. It comes in at a whopping 314MB. Good thing I don’t need all of that. Let’s see what else? There is a CD ordering option. Two software removal utilites. A wireless configuration utility. A Basic feature software/driver at 68MB (still too big to be what I want) and a Basic Features software/driver 'for IT professional use only' at 43.39MB (oh, BTW the IT pro only is at version 7, where as the others are at version 8.0.1 AND it was updated 2 months prior to the 8.x versions.) Nice eh?

Well I go for the one for IT pros anyway (hey I’m a pro right?) even though it is a full version older. I like the idea of it being over 20MB smaller, and the new software is probably just for the scanner.

Ok after the rather long download across an overburdened wireless network I get my .exe file. Double clicking it expands to a new folder with my drivers in it. That folder is a whopping 80MB with 280 files and 26 folders. Wow that’s some printer driver.

I decided I couldn’t stand it and had to dissect the driver installer and see what extra stuff I could eliminate. Once I eliminated anything that wasn’t needed, this is what I finally had:

The 80MB folder with 280 files and 26 folders is now 9MB with 7 files and 0 folders. Yes that’s right.

Now let’s see what I kept. One of the space savings was eliminating languages I didn’t need, so I go rid of several .cab files for foreign languages and just kept p3i2enww.cab for English. This eliminated a few MB but wasn't too significant.

I also kept the .cat file which provides the driver signature. Without this the driver will still install but you’ll get a nasty warning from windows that the file could be malicious and asking if you are absolutely certain you want to install it.

The other files you see there have necessary driver installation information.

All the other files I eliminated, I didn't need. A lot of them were HP's picture viewing software, scanner software, OCR software, etc. Like I said, I just needed to print!

Doesn't seem like too much to ask they make just the printer driver available to download, at least for "IT Professionals." Oh well, I saved it on our workgroup file server for everyone else to use as needed.

Hope this helps you streamline your printer drivers.

Adobe Updater Crashes on Mac OS X and a Fix

2007-12-08T10:02:00.002-07:00

Ok, so if you're like me, you got your Adobe Photoshop CS3 upgrade, and figured all those problems that have been building up from staying with the old Photoshop 7 would be eliminated?

What problems? Oh, all those failures from automatic updates.

So I was rather disappointed when every time I launched Photoshop, Adobe Updater would generate one of those... "This application has crashed unexpectedly would you like to report it to Apple..." dialogs. I even knew there had been some updates made available, but I couldn't get them because Adobe Update would crash anytime it was launched.

I've got a friend who's situation was even worse. His Adobe Updater was set to run on startup, and would crash his entire system every-time it launched.

So what's the solution? Well, it appears that it must be a permission issue with the updater needing to modify files it doesn't have enough access too.

We can solve this by opening Terminal (in your Utilities folder under Applications) and running a unix command line giving it full access to your system.
(Ok the following line displays poorly in the blogger template, however it should be easy to select and then cut and paste into your Terminal app.)

sudo /Applications/Utilities/Adobe\ Utilities.localized/Adobe\ Updater5/Adobe\ Updater.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Updater

Copying and pasting that into Terminal should cause it to ask for your password. Go ahead and type in your password. Now that should launch the updater app. Assuming you have admin rights and can use sudo, the application should have all the power over you system it needs to complete an update. I had to take a further step and install some updates separately. I think I had about 6 or 7 updates to install, and I'd always get an update failed message when I tried to do all of them. However, I did them one at a time, and eventually everything installed.

Now when Adobe Updater auto launches on my system, it no longer crashes. Yea!

I wish Adobe would spend as much time perfecting their updater app, as they have on their software. Aside from being a resource hog, Photoshop CS3 rocks!

Update: With this blog posting it would appear Adobe is aware of the issues, however, it doesn't imply they'll be able to solve them.

Update 2: Although this blog posting is more to do with the installer rather then the updater it sure points out that Adobe's weak link is in developing their installers.

Props go to Sjan.E in the Adobe user forums for the suggestion of using sudo in this thread.

Warning, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard really ups the requirements

2007-10-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Ok so check out these changes in minimum requirements for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger vs 10.5 Leopard

Ok both require:
* DVD drive
* Built-in FireWire

But now let's look at the differences...

10.4
* An Intel processor or a PowerPC G3 (233 MHz or faster), G4, or G5 processor
* At least 256MB of physical RAM
* At least 3.0 GB of available space on your hard drive; 4GB of disk space if you install XCode 2 developer tools

10.5
* An Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 (867 MHz or faster) or G5 processor
* At least 512MB of RAM (additional recommended)
* At least 9GB of hard disk space

That's a huge leap!
They went from a 233MHz G3 to an 867MHz G4 as a minimum. Doubled the RAM. More than doubled the hard drive.

Roxio Creator Plus Dell Edition Cannot Make Bootable Windows Discs

2007-09-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

My Dell laptop (Latitude D820) came with Roxio Creator Plus Dell Edition for use with the built in DVD burner. I believe this odd OEM version is built based on Easy CD Creator 7.

Sometimes you need to burn bootable CDs for Windows. Mostly this is necessary when you want to create a Windows installer disc to reformat and install a fresh OS. While Roxio Creator Plus Dell Edition does have the option to make a CD bootable, it doesn’t appear to actually work. It requires you supply an image of the boot code (no problem, I have several such working image files, and they are easily found on the internet as well.) However, after burning the "bootable" disc it doesn’t boot the computer giving me an error code 4. Grrrr.

This is only a theory but I believe it is picking the wrong emulation type. There isn’t a dialog or setting that lets you manually control the emulation type (as there is on other versions of Creator) however, the Help File says:

An emulation format is selected based on the size of the image
you select:

If the image is 1.44 MB or less, a bootable CD or DVD will be
created that your computer sees as a 1.44 MB floppy disk. When you
start your computer using this bootable CD or DVD, the disc will
automatically be assigned drive letter A:.

If the image is between 1.44 and 2.88 MB, a bootable CD or DVD
will be created that your computer sees as a 2.88 MB floppy disk. When
you start your computer using this bootable CD or DVD, the disc will
automatically be assigned drive letter A:.

If the image is larger than 2.88 MB, a bootable CD or DVD will
be created that your computer sees as a hard disk partition. When you
start your computer using this bootable CD or DVD, the disc will
automatically be assigned drive letter C:.

Well thanks Roxio for taking out (or breaking) a very important feature in your software. In the full Creator software, you have the ability to choose the emulation type yourself. And for the record, I have yet to see a boot image larger than 1.44MB so it appears it will always choose floppy disk emulation.

Interestingly I’ve heard from several people who have non Dell OEM versions of Easy CD/DVD Creator 7 and 8 (which as I said do give you the manual option of choosing emulation) yet still are not correctly making bootable discs. Roxio, care to comment?

So if you’re like me, at the office, all you have is this version of Roxio software that won’t make a bootable CD (even though it claims it will.) What can you do? If only Nero had a 30 day free trial download or something.

There is hope… nLite is a pretty amazing free (donations accepted) software package that not only will create a bootable Windows install image but it will burn it to a CD bypassing the need for Creator at all, AND it allows you to easily slipstream new service packs into your install.

Now I went ahead and downloaded nLite, tried it out, and it worked great! If you are creating a bootable Windows install CD whether you want to slipstream hotfixes and service packs in your installation or not, this is the app to use!

Working with WMA files on Mac OS X and iTunes

2007-06-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

No doubt MP3 files are the most common format. However, there are also a lot of WMA files out there too. In fact, it's probably the second most popular format, next to MP3s. As long as the WMA file doesn't contain DRM, you can play Windows Media Audio files fine on your Mac.

To add support in QuickTime for the format (so you can use them in most QuickTime enabled apps, or even play them in the preview view in the Finder) simply download Flip4Mac for free here (yep, that's a Microsoft site, because they want their audio and video formats to play on Mac OS X and have dropped support for the native Windows Media Player for the Mac.) Flip4Mac Download. This will let you play and use the WMA files in most Mac OS X applications, except for in iTunes which will still refuse to play WMA files.

If you want to use the files in iTunes, you will have to convert them to a different format. I recommend the $10 utility called EasyWMA which will allow you to do batch conversion on a large number of files at one time.

Oh, and iTunes for Windows will automatically convert and play your WMA files for you. It's only on Mac OS X iTunes that you need to convert the files yourself.

Canon PIXMA MP830 Hack to enable direct to CD/DVD printing on printable media.

2007-02-09T16:03:00.000-07:00

Ok, I just bought on of these babies refurbished for $199 at Fry's Electronics. I've used nearly every all in one printer on the market, and I can say, for my needs, this is the best one out there (well under say $600).

Oddly in the US this printer does not ship with a tray to print on CD or DVD printable media, but you can purchase a tray separately and enable the feature. I haven't been able to confirm this but it appears that it was disabled in this country because someone other than Canon holds a patent on that feature (which sounds silly to me... like holding a patent on printing on paper) and they would not license it to Canon.

You'll also have to remove the plastic door that was placed over the CD/DVD tray insert slot. Just open the printer, and snap it off by pulling or prying. This was easier than I expected and took only a few seconds. I only pulled it off with my hand (and fingernails.) No tools required.

Anyway, to switch it to UK (instead of US) mode and enable printing, follow these instructions:

1. Plug the printer in, but leave it powered off. If it is already on, turn it off.
2. Press and hold the Stop/Reset button.
3. While still holding the Stop/Reset button, press and hold the Power button.
4. Hold both of them down for 5 seconds, then release the Stop/Reset button, continuing to hold down the power button.
5. Press and release the Stop/Reset button 2 times.
6. Release the power button.

At this point the printer should power on, but it will enter a special service mode.

7. Wait until the green copy light on the control panel stops flashing. This takes about 30 seconds.
8. (Optional) If you wish, you can press the Stop/Reset button 1 time, then press the Power button, and a ROM page will print. It should indicate US region at the top.
9. Press the Stop/Reset button 5 times to enter the "Set Region Mode". Then press the Power button.
10. Press the Stop/Reset button 4 times for Europe/UK (3 times for the US if you wish to change it back later). Then press the Power button.
11. (Optional) If you wish, you can press the Stop/Reset button 1 time, then press the Power button, and a ROM page will print. It should indicate Euro region at the top.
12. Press the Power button 2 times to save the changes.

I purchased my CD/DVD tray Type D from here: annocjr on eBay

Command Paths not working, and %SystemRoot% not resolving...and a fix

2007-02-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

This happened to apply to my brand spanking new Dell Latitude D820, however, I believe it is a more general problem that can occur with Windows. I don't know what situations create the problem, but I did find a solution. Also searching the web for this problem reveals others have been troubled with it as well.

Ok, so I found simple "always there" commands weren't working, such as ping or ipconfig. When trying to launch ipconfig from the command line I would get: 'ipconfig' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. (You can see it in the screenshot of my Command Prompt below.)

I did an echo %PATH% and observed that %SystemRoot% was not being evaluated. You can see from the screenshot below instead of showing "C:\WINDOWS" it was showing %SystemRoot% (I've highlighted them in red.) This is the state the computer shipped from Dell with a purchased copy of XP Pro installed so this situation is going to affect a LOT of users. Of course, maybe most Dell customers don't use the command line.

Scroll down to see the screenshot... argh these blogspot templates suck at handling wide images.

Here's a screenshot of the error, and the faulty path lookup in action.

So my immediate thought was that %SystemRoot% hadn't been setup in the Windows Environment Variables. However, bringing up the dialog showed me that it was:

Anyway, the solution is just to kick Windows XP into re-evaluating the %Path% variable. The entries were all there, but somehow Windows has cached an invalid lookup for it. The easiest way I believe to do this is to go into the environment variables. Just click edit, you don't even have to change anything, and then click OK.

Now your old command prompt if it is open won't be updated, but if you open a new one, everything should work as you expected.

New Dell laptop error: Insert the Sonic Update Manager disk and click OK and the fix.

2007-02-03T17:14:00.001-07:00

I've got a spanking new Dell Latitude D820. Of course, like all Dells, instead of shipping with a clean install of Windows, it has a lot of stuff pre-installed.

I supposed that's ok, considering, for example, the Roxio Sonic DVD Creator software wouldn't normally ship with Windows, and it's the only way I can burn DVDs with my new internal DVD burner.

However, Dell, doesn't apparently make sure all of their software is installed correctly. When I launch Roxio Creator Plus (by Sonic Solutions...who owns who here?) I was presented with the following dialogs:

Now this one wouldn't necessarily mean it's an error, as sometimes you see this dialog the first time you launch a newly installed application. However, things went downhill quickly:

Insert the Sonic Update Manager disk and click OK.

Hmm. So now it is asking me to install a CD that I don't have and most likely is a side effect of Dell's setup/installation procedure prior to shipping out the laptop. Attempting to continue at this point finally ends in failure with this message:

An installation package for the product Sonic Update Manager cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package 'UM.MSI'.

The message indicates that UM.MSI is the name of the installation package that Dell used to setup my laptop, which of course, I don't have. Worst, while the Roxio Creator software does launch and looks like it might function, canceling out of these software dialogs just brings up new ones. As long as the Roxio Creator software is open, an infinite loop of these pop up dialogs displays, making the software completely unusable.

Luckily the problem is known. It's actually a problem with the Update Manager component in the InstallShield software that Roxio used to package their product and Dell then used to install their product. A fix for the problem can be downloaded from the makers of InstallShield here.

So you got that new printer, that does borderless printing...but you can't find out how?

2007-02-02T20:04:00.000-07:00

UPDATE May 2007 This doesn't seem to apply with the latest drivers for Intel Macs. It looks like for those Epson figured out how to get the features into a single printer, where they belong. Unfortunately they didn't release the update for PowerPC Macs, which ALSO means you can't printer share from an Intel Mac (with one of these Epsons) to a PowerPC Mac because the printer driver need to be the same version. Ugh!END UPDATE

In Mac OS X, possibly the most convoluted configuration issue is printers that handle different or abnormal page sizes.

I own an Epson 2200 and an R200 (actually my R200 just died, and I'll be throwing it out but that's beside the point.) Both of these printers support borderless printing (and another mode called "minimize margins") as well as roll paper printing. However, after installing the printers, and going through every option in the Page Setup and Print dialogs, it looks like those features are not available in Mac OS X 10.4.

Well those features are available, they just aren't enabled by default. Apparently Mac OS X handles printers in a way that doesn't make it easy to change things like roll paper additions or differing hardware margins in a single printer. You'd think that would be handled just fine in the paper settings from the Page Setup dialog, but it isn't. It's possible this shortcoming is actually Epson's fault for how they implemented support for these features in their drivers, but no matter who is to blame, the configuration isn't obvious. You have to basically setup a different printer on the computer for each of these features that affects the paper margins and paths. So for example, instead of just having the R200 listed as an available printer, you'll have the R200 and the R200 "borderless" and the R200 "Roll Paper" etc. Of course, they are all the same printer, but to your Mac they all look like different printers with different capabilities and will be listed as different printers in your print dialog.

To get access to all these wonderful features, just follow these easy instructions:

You need to open the Printer Browser window. There are two ways to get to the Printer Browser:
Go under the Utilities folder under Applications and launch the Printer Setup Utility. Click the Add printer icon.
-or-Inside the Print & Fax control panel inside System Preferences, select the printing tab and click the + symbol to create a new printer.

Either one of those steps bring up the Printer Browser:

At this point, your current Epson printer should show up in the Printer Browser. Now click More Printers...

In the drop down dialog sheet that appears click on the pop up menu at the top and select "Epson USB" (or "Epson FireWire" if you are using a printer with a FireWire connection like the 2200.) It takes a while sometimes for these dialogs to update as they are scanning the USB busses as well as searching every known printer driver installed on your computer.

At that point your printer should appear with the different features listed in the Page Setup pop up menu. For example, if you now select your Epson 2200 printer, under the Page Setup menu, you should see an entry for your 2200 with borderless printing, another entry for roll printing, etc.

Add any of the ones you want to have available or all of them. Then when printing, you have to choose which printer to use based on what features you want (they will all appear in your printer dialog as separate printers, and you can even designate one of them to be your default printer.) Oh and make sure you select them in both your Page Setup dialogs as well as your Print dialogs if you need features (such as special paper sizes) available. The Page Setup dialog will let you choose the larger paper types supported by roll printing, etc.

So there you go, now you can take full advantage of your expanded printer capabilities.

Excel doesn't even give me the option of running Macros

2007-01-20T18:54:00.000-07:00

I have several Excel spreadsheets that I use regularly that have macros, one of which is a time tracking sheet that automatically downloads and uploads job and client codes based on P.O. information stored on our private server.

Anyway, these normally open fine, with a warning dialog about macros and their inherent security risk, giving you two buttons to let you choose to enable or disable macros for that session. No problem, since I'm familar with the documents, and know they are safe, I always choose to enable macros.

Oddly about once every other month it shows a different dialog saying macros need to be enabled to use this feature, and it doesn't even give me the option of enabling them.

Here's the solution if you wish to open an Excel spreadsheet with macros enabled, and you aren't being allowed to:
To solve this delima, you can go into Excel under Tools -> Macro -> Security and set the setting to Low.

What I couldn't understand was why this setting kept changing. It apearred to me that everytime I install a Microsoft Office update, it seems to change that setting to a higher level. So don't be surprised if you have to change that again after installing an update from Microsoft.

Debugging my latest Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)

2007-01-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

Turns out a service called crypserv.exe was causing my laptop to blue screen. Read below for more info.

My laptop started randomly blue screening. Nothing too unusual for a Windows machine, but as I try to keep my XP laptop for development very clean, it was actually the first BSOD I had seen on this machine that I've been using for over a year now.

Ok, so I knew something in my config. had changed. So I had to think of what I installed recently. I was trying to work with a large source code dump I had gotten as a 3gig tarball. The first thing I needed to do was make some space on my horribly inadequate 40GB hard drive. For some reason Windows Explorer doesn't have the simple ability to list or sort by folder sizes in the Detail View mode. In order to see which folders were taking up a lot of space to know which ones to delete I installed an application called ViewFolderSize Pro. Now I did a search for utilities that would calculate the folder sizes and display them in the File Explorer. I found about three, and ViewFolderSize Pro appeared to be pretty polished and got some good recommendations, so I downloaded it and installed it. It had a timed trial period (30 days I think) after which they wanted you to purchase the software. Apparently they used crypserv.exe as a way of enforcing their licensing.

No blue screens yet and the product basically worked as advertised. It was very slow, apparently made a cache file that it didn't tell me where it stored it, and sorting seemed a bit random. After using the product to find a couple large directories I decided to uninstall it mostly due to concerns about it slowing down my machine, and an uneasiness in how stable the software was based on some of its shortcomings. Apparently the uninstaller didn't remove the crypserv.exe service.

Once I rebooted after the uninstall, the laptop could not function for 10 minutes without BSODing if simply left alone. Oddly I noticed that if I kept the laptop active, it would take much longer to BSOD. I also noticed the CPU fan came on about 2 seconds before BSODing meaning of course, some process was pegging the CPU at 100% just before the BSOD. Ok, so my theory was that some process was running away with the CPU and causing a memory exception. So after rebooting another time, I launched the Task manager, told it to sort by CPU, then I sat there staring at it. After a few minutes a process jumped up to using 99% of the CPU. It was crypserv.exe. In less than two seconds, the laptop BSODed.

Ok, great, I found my culprit. I rebooted, disabled the service in the services control panel, and then removed the crypserv.exe file from my hard drive. Rebooted once more to make sure the crypserv.exe didn't reappear, which it did not, and I've been blue screen free ever since.

New Version (1.2.7) of Fetch Art Released

2006-10-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

The changes are:

This version fixes a Perl error on systems that did not have the Apple development tools installed. (The message looked like, "Can't locate LWP/Simple.PM...")
Select All under the Edit menu now works. Also remember there is a Copy All Art to iTunes command under the Fetch Art menu.
The problem with the installer not placing Fetch Art in the Applications directory, or creating a script menu in iTunes for some users has been corrected.

This version is still NOT compatible with Intel Macs. To donate and help the development of an Intel Mac version, please visit my donations page www.aric.org/fetchart/donation.html

To download the latest installer: www.aric.org/fetchart/

There's actually been renewed interest in Fetch Art since the release of iTunes 7. I figured that with iTunes including an album artwork download, I would no longer be contacted by people interested in Fetch Art. However, I've been told that the iTunes art download doesn't work as well as Fetch Art for several reasons:

It requires an iTunes account, which not everyone has or wants.
According to what I've been told it only works for U.S. customers.
It actually isn't that great at finding artwork, leaving many popular albums without art.

Found a bug in the built in Mac OS X FTP server

2006-10-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

So let's say you are using the FTP sharing abilities in Mac OS X to share a 5GB file.

Now, as a 5GB FTP download will likely get interrupted a few times before completion, you use the REST (restart or resume if you like) command to resume the download from where it last stopped. That will work fine if your download is less than 2GB. It appears for anything over 2GB it won't work, as the FTP server reports: "Restarting at 2147483647" no matter what. Apparently it can't go higher than 2147483647 bytes for the start of a resume download. I've done some searching and Mac OS X isn't the only FTP server to have this problem, however, many do work fine over 2GB.

If anyone is aware of a fix for this, let me know. Until then, I'll be submitting this as a bug to Apple in the next few days.

Running shell commands with Automator or AppleScript and executing with sudo privileges

2006-09-30T23:02:00.000-07:00

Automator is very cool because it will give you a compiled app that can run AppleScript and execute the more powerful Unix shell commands as well. Actually AppleScript gives you this ability too via the do shell script command i.e:

 do shell script "mkdir /Library/StartupItems"

What this example shows you:

How to show a dialog with AppleScript where you can ask for a hidden password that is not visible (not shown) as typed.
How to run commands in a bash shell with sudo access in Automator.
How to run bash shell commands in AppleScript with sudo access.

Ok, so now if you are like me, you know the power of Unix shell scripting, you also know it won't be long before you'll need sudo to run one or more commands in your script. Now I did a quick search on the internet to just find some sample code, and in all my searching I found most people have not posted a good solution. Most people in their sample scripts or Automator workflows resorted to storing the password in clear text within the script. Not only is that a security risk, your script is no longer portable and has to be edited for every user. I found responses like this basically saying it couldn't be done.

Ok, so here's what you do. I created an Automator script, that first runs the following AppleScript (this would also work, just in plain AppleScript without Automator):

on run {input, parameters} 
    tell application "System Events" 
        set the_username to do shell script "whoami" 
        set the_password to "password" 
        display dialog "You now need to enter the password for the currently logged in account: " & the_username & " 

This account must have Administrator access to this computer." default answer "password" buttons {"OK", "Cancel"} default button "OK" with icon 2 with title "Password" with hidden answer 
        set the_password to text returned of the result 
    end tell 
    return {the_password} 
end run

Ok in the Automator script, then my next step in Run Shell Script (in bash of course). That script looks like:

exec echo $1 | sudo -v -S; 
if [ $? -eq 1 ] then 
    echo "you are not a sudoer"; else 
    echo "you are a sudoer";  # replace this with your entire script. 
    exec echo $1 | sudo -S ls /private/var/root/; 
fi

Now all you have to do is put your sudo needing commands inside the else fi block and you're set. If you want to download an Automator script with this code as an example, click here.
BTW if you are running within an AppleScript app you can call sudo like this:

do shell script "sudo ls /private/var/root/" password the_password with administrator privileges

Fetch Art Beta Testers Needed

2006-09-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

I need a few beta testers, to test some fixes for Fetch Art.

If you've read some of the comments, many people are getting this error:

Can't locate LWP/Simple.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level /System/Library/Perl/5.8.6...

I haven't been able to reproduce this error on my system. In fact Fetch Art is working great on all the systems I've tested.

I need some beta testers that meet the following criteria:
1) You get the error shown above when you run Fetch Art
2) You are running a PowerPC based Mac (sorry no Intels at the moment)
3) You are running the latest Mac OS X (10.4.7) and iTunes 7
4) You are willing to have me send you via email a .zip beta version and install it.
5) You'll report back the results to me.

If you meet the above criteria and would like to help, please send email to me at here. (Privacy promise: I will not give your email out to anyone else or post it here.)

Fetch Art 1.2 and iTunes 7

2006-09-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

Today apple announced iTunes 7. I'm currently at work and cannot test it with Fetch Art (although I am downloading the new version, it's going slow, the servers must be busy.) However, they claim they've added an album art download feature which may make Fetch Art obsolete.

I'll have to do some testing to see how it works (and how well it works) to see if this will signal the end of development on Fetch Art which of course will break my heart.

UPDATE: I've completed testing with iTunes 7 on several PowerPC Macs and am happy to report Fetch Art runs great on all the machines I tested on. Still working towards Intel Mac support though.

I'd love to hear you comments as well. Let me know if you think the new feature of iTunes successfully replaces Fetch Art or if there are still reasons to continue developing the application.

I Found another bug in Microsoft Office.

2006-08-17T18:39:00.000-07:00

Found another bug in Microsoft Office for Windows. This one causes the application to crash. This simple small document (see download link below) I created with Word 2003 will crash Word 2000 when you try to open it. Word 2003 and 2000 are supposed to be file compatible but apparently they are not. I have many clients that still use Word 2000 so this is a huge problem for me.

This document doesn't contain any revision info, changes tracking, or metadata, so that can't be causing the problem. It's also just a few words of text, so no embedded images etc.

If anyone (hello Microsoft?) has a fix for this bug, please let me know.

Download test file (scanned to be virus free): .zip version 16K
.doc version 56K

Fetch Art Manual Installation Instructions

2006-07-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

The most common support email request I get is with help installing Fetch Art. I'm not sure why, but for some users the installer does not successfully put the files on the user's hard drive. This may be a permissions issue, or possibly a bug in the Apple Installer (the Fetch Art installer, is actually just an installation script that is used by the Apple Installer application).

Installing Fetch Art manually is very simple, and solves most reported problems except for Intel Mac users. Fetch Art doesn't work yet on Intel Macs. I'm working on it (See donation page.)

To install Fetch Art yourself, without the installer:

1) Place the Fetch Art application in your Applications directory:
[your hard drive]/Applications
You can get the Fetch Art application here.

2) Place the Fetch Art iTunes script in your iTunes script directory:
[your hard drive]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/
Note that if you haven't installed any iTunes scripts before, you may not have a Scripts directory. That shouldn't be a problem, just create one and put the Fetch Art script in it.
You can get the Fetch Art iTunes script here.

Fetch Art Uninstallation Instructions

2006-07-06T22:14:00.000-07:00

So let's say you've installed Fetch Art and now you want to uninstall it.

It's really quite simple. You will find files installed in two locations.

The application itself should be installed at:
[your hard drive]/Applications

The script that appears in the iTunes menu bar is at:
[your hard drive]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/

If it was the only iTunes script you had, you can delete the Scripts directory and the script menu in iTunes should disappear.

Alternately you could go in the Finder, go to File->Find... and search on Fetch Art to find the locations of the files and simply delete them from the Find results window.

SourceOffSite for Mac OS X

2006-04-10T20:58:00.000-07:00

Ok, today I did something I thought I would never be able to do.

I used SourceOffSite on my Mac to download a source tree. The makers of SourceOffSite have compiled an X-Windows version of their client application for Mac OS X.. It was a bit difficult to install, requiring, first to install Fink and download some unix packages. The detailed instructions were nicely spelled out here (props go to Lee Givens who wrote this):

Step by Step Instructions using Fink to get Needed Libraries

Amazing. It worked great!

For some background, SourceOffSite is a remote client for MS Visual SourceSafe. SourceSafe doesn't cache well and works very poorly when you are not local to the SourceSafe server. My company has purchase in addition to SourceSafe, SourceOffSite server which "mirrors" the SourceSafe repository but works with their own SourceOffSite client to improve performance when away from the local network, such as over a slower VPN connection.

There is currently no Mac OS X SourceSafe client since Metrowerks dropped support for their SourceSafe tools prior to releasing them for Mac OS X. Right now, SourceOffSite is the only way I know of to work with a SourceSafe repository natively on Mac OS X and of course, require that your company is running the SourceOffSite server product. The client is free to download as the licensing is based on the server purchase, and the 4.x client appears to work with the 3.x server.

Fetch Art 1.2 NOT Compatible with Intel Macs

2006-03-14T16:12:00.000-07:00

Well you may have already discovered that Rosetta (a part of Mac OS X) is not working well enough to help Fetch Art work on the new Intel Macs. In an effort to solve the problem initially I used my PowerPC based Mac to create a Universal Binary version of Fetch Art. I gave this out to a few users who were having problems on the Intel based Macs. Unfortunately, it didn't solve the issue.

Right now I cannot say whether it is a problem with Fetch Art, Perl, AppleScript, or Rosetta but I can say I'll need some quality time with an Intel based Mac to debug the problems.

Currently I don't own an Intel Mac, and I wasn't planning on purchasing a new computer for a while. My finances are a bit thin to spend several hundred dollars on an unplanned purchase, so I am taking donations towards the purchase of an Intel Mac mini.

If you are interested in supporting Fetch Art, please visit my donation page, here.

Thank you.

Treo 650 HotSync bug that reports "Both versions of this record were copied to the Palm Desktop and the handheld" and a fix

2005-11-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

Ok, I've found an odd bug and an easy workaround with HotSyncing my Treo 650.

I've been using Palm devices for years, and have always been very happy with their HotSync technology. I tend to edit data on both my computer and my palm so the fact that it could automatically tell which records were the most recent and copy them to the other device has saved me a lot of effort. Occasionally when I edited the same item on both the computer and the Palm device, it would warn me when I HotSynced and put both copies on both devices and let me choose which one to delete. Great!

Unfortunately, when I upgraded my Palm phone from the beautiful Samsung SPH-i500 to the large and clunky, but more powerful Treo 650, I was dismayed to find, that if I edited a record on my computer, when I synced it I always got a message stating:
The following record was modified on both the Palm Desktop and the handheld:
“some record name”
Both versions of this record were copied to the Palm Desktop and the handheld. Delete the unwanted record and perform a HotSync operation again.

Then, of course, I had to manually delete the duplicate record on the Treo 650 even though I had NOT edited the record on my Treo 650 as it was stating. Deleting the duplicate record on my computer didn't remove it either, as the next time I did a HotSync it would do the same thing again and once again I had two copies of the same item on both devices.

This was happening when syncing to my Mac OS X Tiger versions 10.4.x (I tried with all version of 10.4). I normally edit most of my data on my Palm phone so it wasn't a huge problem, but after a while, when I found myself updating several items on my computer, I got frustrated enough to debug the problem. I could reproduce the situation 100% by editing a memo in Palm Desktop (and not editing the memo on the Palm device) and then performing a HotSync. I was HotSyncing by pressing the HotSync button on the USB cable that came with the phone. I decided to try and use Bluetooth which is built into my Mac and supported in Mac OS X. When I did the same thing via Bluetooth, I didn't get the error.

Ok, now I was getting somewhere...

It turns out you will see this problem if you have the HotSync connection setup on your Palm device set to Bluetooth but do a HotSync via the USB cable or cradle. I altered my HotSync connection setting to use the cable/cradle option, and did another HotSync with the cable. Again the error was gone.

But I want to be able to sync with my cable, or Bluetooth without having to change the phone settings. Luckily this works to...as long as you create a separate/new connection setup on the phone. Just create one set to Bluetooth (which I made my default when I click the onscreen HotSync button in the HotSync app on the Palm device) and create another one set to cable/cradle, which it uses automatically when you initiate a HotSync by pressing the button on the USB cable or cradle you connected it with.

Problem solved!

I did a search before I started debugging the problem myself and found several people reporting this problem on Treo 650s. The Bluetooth option has probably introduced the bug in the behavior. Oddly, no posting I saw solved the issue, so hopefully this will help someone else out with the same problem. I don't know if it behaves the same under Windows but if someone has tried this out under Windows, I would like to hear from them.

So hopefully this will help some other people who are having the same issue.

Fetch Art 1.2 Verified Compatible with iTunes 6

2005-10-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

I've done some testing with the new version of iTunes, and am happy to report Fetch Art 1.2.0 is fully compatible with iTunes 6.0.

I've tested under Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.2.

For the people who have contacted me with questions:
1) Yes, I am working on a new version.
2) I haven't been able to reproduce most of the bugs reported. Many of them seem to be installation issues with the Apple installer.
3) I do try to respond to all my emails, but the response to this application has been overwhelming, and it's difficult to respond to every one.

Thanks for all the support and kind words. This application seems to work for most people but a few do report bugs or installation problems. I will address some of those issues with the next release hopefully by the end of the year.

Alpine KCA-420i Interface Adapter for iPod is the buggiest piece of consumer electronics that I’ve seen in years.

2005-10-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

Ok, so normally on my tech blog, I mention fixes and solutions to technical problems. Unfortunately no such fixes or solutions exist, so this amounts to a review of the Alpine iPod interface along with the CDA-9853 head unit. The review, unfortunately for me who has already invested in the product, is not favorable.

First the basics
Here is Alpine’s info on the iPod connection kit they sell
and here is information on the 9853 head unit to which I connected it.

And lastly my iPod is the 60GB Photo version. I don’t store many photos on it and have about 7.8GB free. Some of that music was purchased off of iTunes although most has been ripped off of my own personal CD collection. Yes, all of my wife’s music that I don’t like is on there too.

Now previously I was using my iPod with a cassette adapter in a cassette stereo. This worked as well as can be expected. It sounded much better than any FM transmitter I tried and it charged my iPod. It wasn’t integrated in any way, however, so that I had to have my iPod out and handy, and navigate using the iPod’s scroll wheel and screen which is not as easy while driving as operating an in dash stereo.

Enter Alpine
I purchased the Alpine 9853 CD player (in dash head unit) and the 420i iPod connection kit at the same time. They MSRP at $400 and $100 respectively. I was very exited to have integrated control of the iPod and to be able to keep the iPod out of site. I had the dock cable installed in my center console where my iPod would spend most of its time.

The KCA-420i does work about as well as the cassette adapter. It provides high quality sound (actually better than the cassette adapter) and it charges the iPod. However, it doesn’t do much more than the cassette adapter did.

Navigating Playlists, Artists, and Albums
Alpine claims the KCA-420i will allow you to control your iPod with the head unit. Well, sometimes. When connecting the iPod to the Alpine deck it always sees the iPod and will play songs from it but for some reason that I haven’t been able to identify about 50% of the time the Alpine deck will not display playlist information, allow you to search, or scan, or do anything other than skip to the next or previous song. It seems to default playing from the whole library in this case, instead of a play list. The navigate button (which looks like a document icon) is supposed to bring up all the items you could normally navigate on the iPod screen such as Artists, Albums, and Playlists. However, in this case it simply doesn’t function. It beeps, so you know it’s being pressed, but it does nothing. Power cycling the head unit doesn’t solve the problem either. I have found the only thing that works is disconnecting the iPod and reconnecting it. This has always solved the problem, and suddenly you will be able to navigate your songs and playlists as expected. Very frustrating but at least we found a work around.

Shuffle and Repeat Settings
Most people I know listen to their iPod music in shuffle mode (or random or as Alpine calls it MIX or M.I.X. mode, I’ll call it shuffle from here on out) so the songs are never played in the same order and I too personally always listen in shuffle mode. I also always have repeat turned off. When I’ve listened to an entire album or playlist, I want the iPod to stop playing, so I know it’s time to choose another album or playlist instead of thinking to myself later… “did I hear this song already?” Of course the Alpine controller understands these functions and has the same settings.

That would be great if it remembered your settings. I expected the head unit to use whatever settings the iPod was currently set for. So for example, after connecting my iPod I expected it to active shuffle (shows up as MIX on the Alpine display) and make sure repeat was off based on my iPod’s settings. It doesn’t. It starts out at the factory default of shuffle off and repeat All. Ok, so I have to manually go through the process of changing those on the deck. It requires a total of 5 presses of three different buttons to make those changes. A bit cumbersome, but you figure, you’ll only have to do it once, right? Wrong! You’ll have to do it, not only every time you disconnect your iPod but every time you turn off the car. That’s right. It remembers these settings for CD playback after you’ve turned off and parked your car, but even if you leave the iPod connected in the vehicle, after you turned off the ignition it goes back to the default settings. That’s an example of how CD playback works better than iPod playback.

Messes the iPod's Settings
While that’s annoying, I’ve saved the best part for last. Ok, so right now you are thinking, “Wow, Alpine didn’t debug their product very well, and has a lot of issues, but still, it seems like maybe it’s ok.” After you’ve used your iPod in the vehicle connected to the KCA-420i, when you remove it, you’ll find not only does the Alpine not remember the settings you gave it correctly, it modified the settings on your iPod to be repeat All and shuffle Off. Every time I disconnect my iPod I have to turn these settings back on. Even when I already turned them back on in the Alpine head unit. Amazing! So not only does the Alpine not handle its own settings correctly, it messes up your settings on your iPod. Seems to me a playback device should not write data to the iPod, it should only read data from it. Anyway, the cassette adapter never had THAT problem.

Conclusion
So in summary of my review…the KCA-420i promises a lot, and delivers very little. It’s obvious it was rushed to market with little debugging and will not operate as expected, or even as the Alpine instruction manual claims. If all you care about is getting the sound from your iPod into your Alpine stereo, it works, however, if you expect flawless song and playlist navigation or consistent playback settings, you will be disappointed. So in conclusion, it really doesn’t work as well as a cassette adapter.

Update
I contacted Alpine. They are aware of all of the issues. The customer service person on the phone was very friendly and said he owned an iPod and had the KCA-420i product in his vehicle as well. He said Alpine engineers were aware of the issues. He also said they would post information on their web site when a firmware update was available. I asked him, “Oh, so a consumer can update the firmware on the KCA-420i? You supply them with a downloadable CD ISO image they can burn and load into their deck and it’ll update the firmware or something like that?” He replied, “No, it would be an Apple firmware release for the iPod to fix the issues.” At that point I asked him how an update to the iPod would improve how the Alpine product worked. He insisted all the logic of the KCA-420i was handled on the iPod. If that’s true why does it cost $100? Anyway, so it doesn’t sound like Alpine has a way or any plans to fix the issues I’ve listed. Seems like false advertising and misleading marketing to release a product that doesn’t perform as stated, and then not try to solve the issue.

I’ll post here if an update or solution to any of these problems are found.

Software Update in Mac OS X Tiger Doesn't work if Ethernet is turned off.

2005-10-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, found a bug today in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. I have a computer, and the only networking it uses is wireless (Airport). So it made sense to me to turn off the Bluetooth, FireWire, and Ethernet ports in the Network settings, since they weren't being used.

Once I turned off Ethernet, however, I found Software Update hangs right after launching. The Software Update progress bar display fills in about 10% and just sits there forever. As soon as I checked the Ethernet port in the Network settings it worked. I'm not using Ethernet, there is no cable connected, and it's set to DHCP right now, but for whatever reason Software Update won't work without it.

What all new Oracle users should know about SQL Plus

2005-09-15T10:48:00.000-07:00

Ok, I realize anyone who’s used oracle much will already know this, but I still get asked this question a lot. Usually it's from people who know SQL, but haven't worked a lot with Oracle.

If you are using SQL Plus with Oracle, you may be surprised by the odd way it displays results. This is because by default SQL Plus assumes your screen is only 80 characters wide, and 14 rows tall, and wraps accordingly.

You can fix this by entering the following in SQL Plus:

set pagesize 50000 
set linesize 32767

By default those values are 14 and 80 respectively. 32767 is the maximum size for linesize and 50000 is the maximum size for pagesize.

The Register printed my letter

2005-09-06T09:47:00.000-07:00

He he, it's not much, but hey, The Register, my favorite IT news site printed my letter. Just search for Aric on this page: Letters Page

Hacking/Cracking passwords on Windows XP, 2000, and NT

2005-08-14T21:42:00.000-07:00

Have you every been handed a desktop machine or laptop, and been told..."The information you want is on this machine, but the only employee who knew the administrator password left the company and we don't know any way to get into it."

I have on many occasions. That's when this little utility comes in handy: Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

This works so well, it's hard to believe. Originally designed to run from a boot floppy, but also available as a boot CD image (which is good because long ago I gave up my last computer that had a floppy drive), just pop this disk into the machine, make sure in the BIOS you've enabled boot from CD (or floppy if that's what you are using), follow the prompts, most of the time accepting the default answers. And when you get to the end, you have the ability to enter a blank password for the Administrator account. Let it run, eject the disk, reboot the machine, and BAM! Now that machine is owned by you!

Although I haven't tested it on every Windows version, the makers claim support for Windows NT 3.51, 4.0, 2000, XP, and 2003 including Server versions and published service packs.

Very cool, very easy, and very fast. There are other apps out there that claim to do the same thing. Some probably do, others I believe mess up your registry and might even be Trojan horses. It's a little scary to download a disk image from an unknown website and let it boot up your computer and mess with low level registry security entries. So when you are looking for an app that will break that password but nervous about which one to choose, you can safely use this one as I've used it and am very impressed. Now download this app, and go get your hack on! ;-)

Uninstalling Oracle 10g Manually from Windows XP

2005-08-14T21:23:00.000-07:00

Oracle's installation utility has a nasty habit of leaving a lot of items behind. I wrote this up to document what I've found you need to do to uninstall Oracle 10g manually. This is specific to 10g and Windows XP. Removing 9i is very similar if I remember right, but who's using 9i anymore? ;-)

The first thing you should do, is go ahead and run the installation tool to do an uninstall. It probably will leave some things behind, but it's worth running. Then go through this list and remove anything it missed. This list is detailed enough though, that I believe even if you did not run the uninstallation tool, this would fully uninstall Oracle.

The most commonly missed item is to make sure you remove everything from the GAC because the uninstaller doesn't appear to. I get to that later, but if you wanted to know the largest source of uninstallation problems, it's libraries remaining in the GAC.

After running the supplied Oracle uninstallation utility (which may or may not do some or all of the following):

Stop any Oracle services that have been left running.
Start->Settings->Control Panel->Services
Look for any services with names starting with 'Oracle' and stop them.

Run regedit and delete the following keys (some may have slightly different names in your registry):
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\ORACLE
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\Application\Oracle.oracle
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\OracleDBConsole
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Oracle10g_home
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\OraclService

Note that the services control panel will still show the old services until you reboot.

Delete the Oracle home directory
C:\Oracle

Delete the Oracle Program Files directory:
C:\Program Files\Oracle

Delete the Oracle Start Menu shortcuts directory:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Oracle*
Where * indicates the name of your install. Look for and remove all Oracle directories from that location.

Remove Oracle refereces from the path. To edit your path go to:
Start->Settings->Control Panel->System->Advanced->Environment Variables
Edit both of the environment variables user PATH and system PATH. Remove any Oracle references in them.

Remove Oracle.DataAccess and any Polic.Oracle files from the GAC which is at:
C:\Windows\assembly\

There, now your system is Oracle free. If you are installing a new instance of Oracle (and not just an additional DB) I recommend you do this before any new Oracle installation.
Note: I used several other websites and searches as references when developing these steps, but I was unable to find any steps that covered all of the items for Oracle 10g so I assembled them here.

Installing Oracle 10g under Mac OS X

2005-08-14T16:10:00.001-07:00

Ok, so you want to install Oracle 10g for free (under the developer license) to your Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger computer.

There's a couple things you should know. First, Oracle 10g is only officially supported under Mac OS X Server, but it seems to work fine under plan old Mac OS X (non-server).

There's a great blog here about how to install it under 10.3:
Installing Oracle Database 10g on Mac OS X

and another blog here that covers fixes/changes needed to install it under 10.4 Tiger:
Set up Oracle 10g on Tiger

Spaces in hard drive names...unfortunately it turns out Oracle simply doesn't support spaces in its path, which it will tell you about much later in the install. That means you cannot install this on to a hard drive with a space in its name. So while they claim to support Java/Unix/Mac OS X which all support spaces in the names of files and directories, they choose not to allow that. Strange.

Oracle, if you want I'd be willing to help with your native Mac OS X development of Oracle software and installation tools. Are you listening? ;-)

Fetch Art 1.2 for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Released by yours truly

2005-06-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note, that I've taken over development of the excellent Fetch Art application by Yoel Inbar. I finally got a version working 100% with Mac OS X 10.4.

It's available on my website here: http://www.aric.org/fetchart/

In Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, AppleScript reports versions differently

2005-05-22T13:34:00.000-07:00

Previously, when checking for what version of AppleScript Studio you were running under, you would need to follow these articles
Specifying Minimum Requirements for an Application and Version Constant

That state that you should check for your version with a line like this:

if (AppleScript's version as string) ≥ "1.8.2" then

Where 1.9.2 corresponds to AppleScript Studio 1.1 or later. The reason the versions are different (i.e. AppleScript reports 1.8.2 but AppleScript Studio is 1.1) is because 1.8.2 represents the version of AppleScript which came out much before AppleScript Studio came out.

Anyway, in Tiger, now it reports the version of AppleScript Studio, so that line should really read.

if (AppleScript's version as string) ≥ "1.1" then

Just a minor change that appears to have broken a lot of AppleScripts.

After updating to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Project Builder doesn't work

2005-05-22T13:26:00.000-07:00

Ok, so now that I've updated to Tiger, I've found whenever I try to open any project file (.pbproj) in Project Builder, I get an error like this:
Reason: *** -[PBXToolbar _notificationPostingEnabled]: selector not recognized [self = 0x4cf6880].

This happens even to the sample projects installed with Tiger.

I found the solution is simply to load them into XCode instead. It will ask you if it's ok to convert the project first, but every project I have done this with compiles fine in XCode. Apple is phasing out Project Builder for XCode. So, just re-associate your .pbproj files to XCode using the Get Info window.

Updating the iPod’s Firmware Requires Power Adapter for USB users

2005-05-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

As an owner of an iPod for about two years now (first a 40GB 3rd generation, and now a 60GB iPod Photo), and having performed many software/firmware upgrades on my iPod in the past, I was stunned after upgrading my iPod Photo the other day, that after the upgrade, it insisted on being plugged into the wall in order to complete the update. I had never seen that before. What was different? I was using USB instead of FireWire.

Apparently during the writing of the new update to the firmware the iPod requires more power than USB can offer. My guess is some computers could power it fine over USB, but the USB standard is lax about power requirements, and some computers offer less power than others across their USB bus.

While the instructions after the firmware updater are run, and the graphic that appears on the iPod imply you MUST use the wall power adapter, I’ve found that connecting the iPod to my car cigarette lighter adapter, and to my computers 6 pin FireWire port also allowed it to flash its firmware successfully. So apparently it is only 4pin FireWire and USB connections that require an alternate power source.

This was a problem for me, however, as I normally carry my iPod around without the power adapter, or FireWire cable when I’m traveling, as my home laptop is a PowerBook, but my work/travel laptop is a Windows machine that I connect to via USB. Luckily I was able to connect it to someone’s car charger while I was traveling to complete the update, however, I think Apple should put a large orange sticker on the USB cable included with the iPod warning users that you could be stuck with a non-working iPod if you travel with only the USB cable and NOT the power adapter, and choose to do a software update. They should at least, when running the updater software, warn the user they will need a power adapter to complete the firmware update. They allow you to run the update enough off of USB to disable your iPod, but not restore it.

Anyway, here is the graphic on the iPod screen you will be presented with when you do a firmware update, and do not have a power adapter:

The safest thing to do, I guess, is never do a firmware update when traveling without your power adapter.

I found some discussions about this here as well: iPodlounge

Bug in Word 2003 Multiple Image Picture File Import with AutoCaption and a VB Script I Wrote to Import and Caption Multiple Image Files Correctly

2005-05-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

Until Microsoft Word XP there was a huge oversight in image import, that I would call a bug, but most would probably just consider a design flaw. In versions of Word prior to XP and 2003 (up to and including 2000) the insert picture command only allowed inserting one image at a time. So, for example, if you went into Insert->Picture->From File… and tried to select more than one image in the file selection dialog, you were out of luck. Thankfully that feature was introduced in Word XP and continues in Microsoft Word 2003. (Incidentally, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac still does not allow the selection of more than one image at a time under that same menu option, which I consider a serious flaw. This is one example of where the Windows version of Word is superior to the Mac OS X version. And in Word 2004 for Mac, dragging and dropping multiple image files onto a Word document, only results in one of the images being inserted, which I do consider a bug as that is not how any other Mac application behaves.)

Ok, so I needed to put together a report containing several hundred UML diagrams. The diagrams had already been exported in .WMF format, which Word can read, and since I was using Word 2003, I was able to select all of them for import at the same time. I thought my problems had been solved.

However, I also needed Word to AutoCaption (and number) the images, just with a simple caption, like “Figure 10” under each one. So I turned on AutoCaption for importing images (you do this by selecting Insert->Caption… and then clicking AutoCaption in the dialog and then selecting the type of files you want captions to be added to on import.)

Perfect. I had AutoCaption setup to put the word “Figure” and an auto incrementing number after that on every image I imported. I selected my several hundred image files, and told Word to import them. That’s when we found a pretty major bug in Word 2003.

To demonstrate this bug, let’s simplify the task a bit. Let’s say I have three images of cats I want to import and AutoCaption. While I expected, when I imported them to look like this:

Instead, it came out looking like this:

That’s a pretty serious bug as no one would ever want that behavior, and it seems pretty obvious that no one ever tested multiple image file import with AutoCaption on before shipping Word 2003. Since it has been out for over two years now, I don’t have high hopes of it getting fixed anytime soon.

So how did I solve this problem? I wrote a VB script that does the import and captioning for you. I’ve included the source here. Hopefully it will help anyone else who comes across this bug.

Here is the script:


Sub InsertImagesWithCaptions()

Dim fso, d1, file, fileName
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
fileName = "C:\Documents and Settings\aric\My Documents\My Pictures\Cats"
Set d1 = fso.GetFolder(fileName)
For Each file In d1.Files
    Selection.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphCenter
    Selection.TypeParagraph
    Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture fileName:= _
        file, LinkToFile:=False, SaveWithDocument:=True
    Selection.TypeParagraph
    Selection.InsertCaption Label:="Figure", TitleAutoText:="", Title:="", _
        Position:=wdCaptionPositionBelow, ExcludeLabel:=0
    Selection.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphCenter
    Selection.TypeParagraph
Next
End Sub

You'll have to customize the fileName path to point to the directory containing the images you want to import, but that's a lot simpler that manually importing them and captioning them.

BTW apparently even though Word 2004 for Mac supports VB macros, it doesn’t understand CreateObject. If anyone knows how to get a directory like this in VB in Word 2004 for Mac OS X, let me know, and I’ll post a Mac version of this script as well.

Multiple Conflicting FireWire Enclosures from the Same Manufacturers

2005-04-26T20:06:00.000-07:00

I currently use a Titanium PowerBook as my primary computer. However, I’m also a power user and a laptop has a limited amount of upgradeability. That means I have a lot of external devices connected to my laptop using FireWire. FireWire supports 63 devices which is great for someone like me and I’m nowhere close to 63. I have three external hard drives (two 250GB 3.5” and one bus powered 30GB 2.5”), two external DVD burners (a Pioneer 109, and a Pioneer 104), one external CD-RW burner (a Plextor W4824A), and an iPod as well as a 6 port FireWire hub. That’s only 8 devices. Not very close to the limit of 63, however, when I added my latest DVD burner (the Pioneer 109), I had a lot of problems. I eventually solved them, and I’m writing down my experiences so hopefully someone can learn from my pain.

In short…
It turns out, that FireWire devices have unique IDs similar to the MAC address on Ethernet devices. Some manufacturers use the same ID on all of their devices, which causes problems if you connect two devices from the same manufacturer to your computer. My guess is the FireWire people told the manufacturers they needed to supply unique IDs, however, somewhere along the line, that information didn’t make it to the assembly line personnel.

I’ve seen this problem with enclosures from Plumax and Acomdata and I’m sure many other manufacturers out there are doing this as well. I can also say for certain that the Mercury Elite Pro 3.5” enclosures do not suffer from this problem, as I’ve been using two identical ones for a while without fail. In fact, these are my favorite FireWire 3.5” enclosures, and I highly recommend them. You can get them here:
Other World Computing

I’ll describe how I fixed the problem below by manually changing the FireWire ID. I spent most of the time trying to isolate the problem, and then reading detailed specifications about the Oxford FireWire bridge chipsets (thanks to Oxford making their information available for download in PDF format!). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First of all, this applies to enclosures that use the Oxford FireWire chipsets. I believe it applies to 911, 911+, 912, and 922 chipsets. Although I specifically was working with 911+ and 912. If you have an enclosure that uses a different chipset, such as Prolific, I don’t know how to help you. I’ve worked with enough enclosures to know that when you are shopping, you want to make sure you get one that has an Oxford chipset in it. All other brands have received reports of bugs and data corruption issues, that I ignored, until I lost data that I was able to trace back to a problem with the Prolific chipset. Since then, I will only buy Oxford (I should write another entry just covering that experience!) There are probably ways to do this for the other chipsets, I just don’t know what it is. I believe Prolific, and Initio are the other FireWire chipsets. Not sure of any other brands.

Second, flashing or modifying firmware can toast your enclosure. For some reason while following the instructions that worked previously and using the same flash software, I erased a 911+ chipset, and was never able to upload a new firmware to it, rendering the enclosure unusable. If anyone knows how to revive a 911+ that claims it’s ready to be flashed, but just seems to ignore the flash, contact me. So standard disclaimer…you do this at your own risk.

This should apply to Windows as well as Mac or Linux and other supported Unix computers. The flash software I’m going to discuss is Java based, so it’s cross platform. How Oxford got a Java app to access FireWire hardware is beyond me, unless they are imbedding some OS specific binaries in there. If someone from Oxford Semiconductors wants to contact me, I’d love to chat!

Ok, so let’s assume, you’ve purchased two new identical model enclosures for those two new drives you just got. And you’ve found, like I did, that whenever both of them were connected and powered on, your computer had a terrible time talking to them. Some of the symptoms were:
Incomplete directory listings
Long pauses when accessing either drive
One drive never mounting/showing up on the desktop
And occasionally, when I told one drive (a DVD drive) to eject, it would eject the other drive. It was at that point I realized that the computer wasn’t able to tell the drives apart.

Basically there are two reasons to muck with your firmware. You can upgrade to the latest version (which was my goal at first, although that didn’t solve my problems) and you can also edit some of the “advanced settings” of the drives, which are stored in the flash memory as well. It’s worth noting, that you can update the settings in flash memory without actually flashing a new firmware, which makes changing the settings a bit less risky than uploading new firmware.

Now that you’ve identified the problematic enclosures, and verified that they are running Oxford chipsets, it’s time to start getting some software that lets us mess around with the internals. I found the software by searching in many places, and was able to verify the latest version, at this time 1.64, was here:
Cool Drives FireWire Info
Specifically, the 1.64 Java updater/uploader/cloner apps for Mac OS X:
uploader_164.zip
Since it’s Java you would think that would work on Windows too, however they list a separate Windows version here:
windows_uploader.zip

Ok, if you want to get some more recent firmware you can get it from links I supply below. When I download the flash apps, they didn’t usually include the firmware files, although they had directories where you could put your own.

Anyway, they recommend that you disconnect all other FireWire devices except the one you want to work with. I just powered them down, so the only things that were active were my FireWire hub and the drive I wanted to mess with.

Then I launched the uploadergui.jar file.

Right away this found my Oxford based drive, and brought up the firmware information on it. It looked like this:

I then clicked the Modify Configuration button. If that button is grayed out, make sure you launched uploadergui.jar and NOT updatergui.jar. You should see something like this after clicking the Modify Configuration button:

Note the all important Chip ID Hi and Chip ID Lo fields. The reason I even thought to start messing with them, is because the other app that came with the uploader is called the clonergui.jar. It’s designed to take the already flashed firmware from one device and propagate it to other identical devices. It stresses that every time it uploads a clone, that it will increment the chip id by 1 for every device it flashes. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it clear to me if it only changed the Chip ID Hi or Lo or both fields. I’m guessing it simply added 1 to the hex value in the Chip ID Lo field. To be safe, I modified the values in both fields, just changing a number in each position and incrementing it by a value of one. So for example, I think Chip ID Hi, was 02, so I changed it to 03. If someone wants to clarify the usage of the Hi and Lo values, feel free to contact me. Anyway, after changing both values, I simply clicked the Upload Changes button. After that, everything started working. Obviously I only had to change that value for one of the drives, and could keep the other drive at its factory default.

While this sounds pretty simple now, it took me a lot of research to find all this information. None of it was sitting in one place. Hopefully this entry will help someone else out in the same situation. And maybe more importantly, Plumax will start making their Chip IDs unique.

Links that helped me solve the puzzle:

Thank you for the latest 1.64 updater utility.
Cool Drives

Latest firmware files, and some good info.
FireWire Depot

Thanks for making the awesome Oxford FireWire chipsets.
Oxford Semiconductor

Detailed guide on using the flash uploaded app.
Uploader Guide in PDF

I think this is the same guide as I listed before with some other chipset documents.
More docs at Oxford

Firmware 1.02 for 912 chipset:
912_v1_02.bin

Firmware 4.00 for the 911 chipset (I believe this includes the 911+ chipset):
911_v4_00.bin

Firmware 1.07 for the 922 chipset:
922_v1_07.bin.zip

Borland Together Software Bugs and Fixes

2005-04-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

Ok, I've ran into a lot of issues with Borland's Together Architect and Control Center 6.1 software. (Architect 6.2 is the successor of Control Center 6.1, however, I've been using both, as there are some incompatibilities between them.)

Did your model stop working?
I ended up with a model, that once it was open, hardly any menus in Together would work. The menus would appear, but selecting an item, had no affect. For example, selecting Project->Properties, never displayed the property dialog. The behavior occurred right after adding some Favorites. If you get into a situation where no menu or buttons actually have any affect (even selecting Exit doesn't close the application) try opening your .tws file in a text editor and removing the favorites entries. They should look something like this:


favorites.root.0 = <oiref:cpp#Class#ClassName1:cpp>
favorites.root.1 = <oiref:cpp#Class#ClassName2:cpp>

I simply deleted all the lines in that file with favorites entries, and reloaded the project, and now Together started working again. This was in version 6.1.

Incompatibilities Between Together
Architect 6.2, and Together Control Center 6.1
Together Architect defaults to using the old (non XML) model
format to maintain backwards compatibility with previous
versions. That's great, in theory, however I've come across some
problems. I'll try to list them here as I discover and verify
them:

Sequence diagrams created in 6.2 are not seen/ignored by 6.1

I've seen instances where Favorites added in 6.1 are not seen
when loaded into 6.2 although this doesn't always occur.

That's it for now. I'll keep coming back and updating this list
as I find issues.