Bill Read, Charleston, SC

Should I Use Google+

2012-01-30T20:09:00.001-05:00

If you have heard of Google+ and have an idea of what it is, you are probably a bit ahead of the curve with respect to the internet and social media technology. If not, you are probably a normal person who doesn't get very excited about new social media technology — maybe you don't even call it social media, since now-a-days that means FaceBook to most people, and Twitter to a few others.

Google+ is another social network, but the twist is that it is integrated directly into Google. This means that the searches you do and the things you post to Google+ are used to tailor your search results. Better yet, searches your friends do and the things your friends post to Google+ are used too. In addition, Google uses the +1 feature to enhance its search results — a +1 from a friend would increase the relevance of a website in your search results. All told, Google is out to learn more about you in order to do search better.

As you can see, Google is trying to do a lot more than mimic Facebook. Google already sells ads and has tons of traffic — competing with FaceBook on that level makes no sense. However, FaceBook, and Twitter, have been capturing something that Google has not: signals.

Oh, Google already gets lots of signals from your online behavior — they know what you search for and click on. What they don't know is what the people who influence you search for and click on. If they could know, by relationship, the people who help shape your opinions and choices, your online experience would be far more like shopping at the local boutique your friend owns, than shopping at Wal-mart. The signals your friends generate are an order of magnitude more useful in tailoring your online experience that just your own.

This is where FaceBook has been kicking Google's butt. They know your friends, and your friends friends — what they do, what they "like" and so on. The problem FaceBook has is that they don't have all of the internet — whereas Google pretty much has all of it. If Google can get some of the same signals and relationship information that FaceBook has and use it to tailor your search results and ads, well, you would like Google a lot better. Your entire online experience would get better.

If all this creeps you out, please close your computer now, reach around and unplug your network connection (or turn off your wireless router) and back away. Welcome to the internet. The promise of an interconnected web of data, where information flows freely and is easy to find and use, includes information about you, your friends, and family. It always has, its just that now most of the important players are finally figuring out that you are the product as well as the customer (ok, to be fair, they knew that all along, its just that it is now becoming obvious to more common-folk). But, in then end this is a good thing.

Our online signals plus our friends signals can be used to produce search results (and ads) that suit our taste. They make more sense. In the absence of these signals, every search produces the same results — and what you may mean by a certain search phrase likely will not be what someone else means. So it makes sense for our online services to incorporate this knowledge of our lives.

That leads to the privacy argument: collection of all of this data is somehow an invasion of our privacy. I say to that "poppy-cock." The internet is a public place. Even if you are no more than a consumer of information, you are requesting that information from companies, services, and finally servers owned by someone else. The way the internet works those servers MUST know at least your internet address to deliver the information. As a result you have no expectation of privacy with regard to your online behavior. Oh sure, you could take steps to protect your identity — but to do so you have to have excellent hacking skills (and potentially misuse someone else's systems) or use one of those anonymizing services (do you want to trust THEM with your info?). Face it, you step into the public sphere when you go online.

If you have read this far, you probably know where I'm going. In my opinion, the more info you give Google and other services, the better they are for you. You may have concerns about the kind of data they collect, and who gets to see it, but the reality is that you are far more likely to be the target of a random identity theft attack by using your credit card in a restaurant than you are from a data breach at Google or the like. (For that matter, your bank is probably not as secure, and certainly more of a target.)

The way I see it, the more people embrace the fact that they are leading public lives, and go with it, the better the internet will be for everyone. So, jump into Google+ with both feet.

eCommerce at a Phone Near You

2011-03-23T08:03:00.003-05:00

A while back I wrote about dropping our credit card processor. The fees and rules had gotten the best of me, and I decided to forgo the convenience. Online credit card handling has gotten much more expensive over the past couple of years.

Then along came Square. If you haven't heard of Square, it is a free App for your iPhone or iPad (and other smartphones) that allows you to accept credit cards anywhere you have an internet connection, including 3G or Edge. It even comes with a tiny, free, card swiper that plugs into the headset jack on your device. No more elaborate equipment required, just your phone and a 1" square reader.

Square requires that you sign up for an account, and pass a credit check. They are a real merchant account provider, and credit card processor all wrapped up in one, free App and service. They charge a very competitive 2.75% + $0.15 per transaction. Your money is deposited in 2-3 days.

To use Square, you open the App, fill in a description and amount, and swipe the customer's card. The customer can sign your screen using a finger. Receipts are emailed to you and your customer. The receipt includes a map with the GPS coordinates of where the transaction took place. You receive a follow-up email showing the exact amount that will be deposited to your account.

The coolest part? Not only can your business get this, but you can get a personal account too. So you can "Square Up" with your friends by credit card — no more excuses about not having cash.

Simultaneous to finding Square, I discovered AcceptPay, by American Express (AKA PaySimple.com). I am a huge fan of Amex, both as a customer and a vendor. If you accept credit cards online, Amex is often less expensive than Visa/Mastercard — ironic, I know, since the mainstream impression of Amex is that they charge more. Not true. Nominally, their rate is higher, but in reality, Visa/MC advertises the "Qualified" rate (as opposed to unqualified). The definition of unqualified, it turns out, is any card that has any kind of rewards or points plan — pretty much every card out there. In the case of unqualified, add as much as 1% to the rate.

AcceptPay allows you to accept payment online, against any invoice. It also allows you to create and send invoices via email. It costs $20/month if you are an Amex card holder (or $35/month for PaySimple, if not). They charge a little more than Square, but do not require that the card be present (swiped), so you can take payments over the phone. No more paper.

AcceptPay now offers an iPhone App, so you can use it at any time, and any place you have access to the internet. Two great ways to get paid, with little to no cost up-front, and reasonable rates long-term. We use both at Computer Consultants Group.

iCal Invites and Google Apps Accounts

2011-03-11T10:51:00.003-05:00

When iCal and Google Apps finally began to support multi-calendar syncing/access, I was excited. Finally I could sync my calendars over the air with my computer, iPhone and iPad. Also, I could share/sync with my staff, and more importantly, my wife. But the bloom quickly came off the rose the first time I tried to setup a meeting and invite another user.

Confusion set in when I was not able to send invites right from iCal. I discovered that this only worked when someone was in my same domain — which seemed mostly useless, since coordinating with my staff is already far easier than with clients. More confusion set in when I realized that my staff never got an email, but the appointment just showed up in their calendar. I don't know about you, but, for me, if something just shows up in my calendar, and I didn't put it there, I will probably miss it.

There is a quick and easy work-around. Simply setup your appointment as usual, but do NOT fill-out the attendees field. When you have completed the appointment, open a new email and drag the appointment from your iCal to your email. This will attach the appointment as an ics file. Then, go back to iCal, highlight the appointment and Copy it (Edit—>Copy), go back to Mail and Paste it into the body of the email. This will paste all of the relevant info into the body of the email, so the recipient will see what it is about, without having first to add the appointment to his calendar. Next address the email and send it. The recipient will receive an email with the appointment info, and be able to click on the attachment to add it to his iCal (or other calendar, such as Outlook).

You will not get notices back regarding the status of the attendees. For me, this is not a problem. Most people don't respond to these correctly anyway, so for me the whole attendee status is useless.

As an aside, good calendar etiquette is hard to come by. If you send a calendar invitation, please do not use the recipient's name or company, as the name of the appointment. If you are arranging an appointment with Joe Smith, don't make an appointment named "Joe Smith" and then send it to him. He will end up with an appointment in his calendar titled with his own name. If I see an appointment in my calendar that is my name or my company, I'm not really sure where I'm supposed to go — since I am automatically in attendance with me at all times.

Make the name of the appointment more descriptive. So, rather than "Joe Smith," make it "Website Planning, Joe Smith and Bill Read." It is longer, but there is no ambiguity as to whom is to be in attendance. Also, you will avoid the embarrassment of the other person forgetting your name. Additionally, include contact info in the "Notes" area — BOTH your and his phone numbers, at a minimum. I usually include an address in the notes area (or the location area). Use complete addresses, including zip code — this way, if one of you has his calendar on his cellphone, the address can be used as a map-link to give directions to the location.

Migrating Old Data

2011-02-10T16:24:00.003-05:00

Or, why we tech-geeks keep a bunch of old crap around even though our wives plead with us to dump it.

Ah, old hardware. <sarcasm>Fun Stuff</sarcasm>. You know that thing you threw away two months ago, the one you suddenly found you needed? I have a room full of stuff that would be like that — only I don't throw it away. 300 BAUD modem: got that; Newton battery charger: check; old SCSI enclosures: you bet; Mac OS 9 computers: yep. I even have an original floppy for Mac OS 1.0 — no joke, 1.0 was shipped for about 15 minutes before Finder 1.1 came out.

As an aside, if you want to be brought to tears, find an old Mac 128k (the original) and boot it up off of floppy: 10 seconds, I kid you not. Steve Jobs was said to scream at an engineer that he HAD to shave off 5 seconds from the boot time because lives were at stake. Because, with millions of reboots by millions of people per day, 5 seconds literally adds up to entire lifetimes. Oh, if only Apple cared that much about lifetimes now-a-days. Ok, I guess you could argue this to make a case that every Mac should have a solid state drive. But I digress. Back to (Ok, on to) migrating old data.

A client I hadn't heard from in OVER a decade called me the other day. He has a Mac G3, Beige, running Mac OS 8.1. He has upgraded to a new iMac with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and needs to migrate his data. Thinking I would be dealing with an old SCSI drive, I got out one of my PowerMac G4s, with SCSI, IDE and USB. I was actually getting excited about firing up an old SCSI drive and jury-rigging a way to migrate the data to 10.6.

Turns out that the Beige G3 had and IDE drive in it — a 4Gb one. So, I didn't need anything but an external case. Only, for whatever reason, the drive did NOT want to function in either one of two cases. So, we popped the drive into the G4 anyway, into one of the open IDE spots. Because the old G4 had only USB 1.1, we realized that it would take forever to migrate all of the data to an new drive via USB. Instead of using USB, we pushed the data over the network over to the new drive connected to another computer which had USB 2. Done in 14 minutes.

As my client put it, that's a year a minute (14 years worth of his data).

iPhone/iPad Text Editing Tip

2011-02-10T16:14:00.002-05:00

If you have had an iPhone/iPad for a while, this may be obvious to you. But since I have had both since each first came out, and only recently discovered this time-saving tip, it may help someone else out there.

When you are editing text, and you would like to move the insertion point to the beginning or end of a word, tap the word (not the space between words). No need to use the magnifying glass, just tap. Tap the beginning of a word if you want to move the insertion point in front of the word. Tap the end of a word if you want to move the insertion point to the end of the word. iOS will NOT put your insertion point within the word; rather, it will put it before or after the word based on where you tap the word.

If you want to put the insertion point within the word, you must tap and hold until the magnifying glass appears, then move your insertion point where you wish.

Old-School Troubleshooting

2011-02-10T16:03:00.005-05:00

If you have ever had to call a tech-support person, such as one of us, then you have been told to reboot your computer:

Macs: Apple Menu—>Restart
Windows: Start Menu—>Shutdown

This may seem like you are being told to click your heels, or jump though a hoop. But, trust me, the next time you need to call for help, save yourself some time and reboot your computer first. I can tell you, from more than 25 years of experience, this fixes almost half of the problems I am asked about.

In this day of very robust computer systems, rebooting seems optional. But if you are leaving your computer on most of the time (for backups, etc.), reboot it once a week. And if you are having a problem, whether it is trouble accessing the internet, not printing, or system slowness, reboot before calling for help. You might just find out that all of those little problems, that you try to ignore, go away with regular rebootings.

More Drobo Feedback

2011-02-10T15:09:00.005-05:00

http://www.drobo.com/

Believe it or not, this is actually going to be a POSITIVE post about Drobo. Bear with me. After my last Drobo post, if you read to the end, you will know that I think this technology is incredible, and I am really mainly disappointed in their lack of attention to customer details. I hold that same opinion, for the most part. However, I think the Drobo product is outstanding.

I have three complaints:

1) See this post regarding formatting Drobo on older Macs. Sadly, as of this date, this has not been fixed. I realize that Drobo can't go back and support every Mac -- but the 32/64 bit issue is one that should be addressed.

2) Drobo's warranty and return policy is lacking. I had a client's Drobo Pro die from a power supply failure at roughly 5 months of age. Because we had not purchased Drobo Care, our only return option was to ship the drive back, then wait for the return. The basic 1-year warranty only covers the hardware, and not shipping, etc. You get 90 days of shipping returns and premium support, but not for the remaining 9 months of warranty.

It's not that you need to buy Drobo Care to extend your warranty after the first year. I would be fine if that were the case. It is that you have to buy Drobo Care to get the SAME service during the first full year — this I object to. It changes after 90 days. Come on — give us the first year. Or, make the warranty only 90 days — I would find that more acceptable than having my warranty tarnish after 90 days.

3) Hard drives in the drive bays of a Drobo unseat too easily. I have a few clients who use pairs of Drobos as network backup. One is kept off-site, while the other is in use, and they are swapped weekly. When you pick up and move a Drobo, the drives can unseat quite easily — while seemingly still in place (ie: they all appear to be seated correctly on close inspection). This can happen even when the drive is handled with kid-glove care. I think the weight of the drives is too much for the design of the latches that hold them in place.

If this happens, when you next plug-in the Drobo, it will report one or more of the drives as missing. Firmly pushing the drive(s) back in corrects the problem — but the Drobo then needs to rebuild for many hours (as many as 40+). This is a vexing problem for one of my clients. So much so that now part of their routine is to re-seat each drive every time they have to change them out.

Now, on balance, I still love the Drobo product. There is room for improvement, but the technology is impressive. For example, despite having drives unseat, my clients have never lost data, nor had to erase and start over with a Drobo.

Now, on to my positive testimonial. For you tech people, this will be a little scary.

One of the cool things about the Drobo is that you can pop-out any drive at any time (assuming the system is working correctly, meaning that your drive status lights are all green). The Drobo will quietly go about rebuilding your data protection and you can go on using it as if nothing happened. I related this fact to client when making the recommendation to him for his backup.

My client purchased a Drobo S and five 2Tb hard drives. The Drobo and three drives arrived almost right away, while two of the drives were delayed a week. We decided to go ahead and deploy, because we had over-speced the storage needs by more than triple in order to provide room to grow. A week later, when the drives arrived, I advised my client that he could simply pop-in the new drives in the empty bays. As it turned out, the top bay of the Drobo wasn't working. Without going into detail, we carefully swaped the two new drives around to demonstrate that it was the Drobo bay, and not the drives, that was the problem. Data Robotics agreed to send out a new Drobo. It got interesting when the new Drobo arrive.

My client, taking me at my word (that you can pop-out any drive at any time), took it upon himself to pull out all four working drives from the old Drobo — without first shutting it down. HE then disconnect the old Drobo, connected the new one, put in the four drives and powered it up. It started blinking Red after it came online, but it came online and all of the data was intact. The red lights worried him, so he called me. I almost had a heart-attack when he told me what he had done. But before I completely panicked, he told me that it mounted and came up just fine. I advised him to wait a few hours to see if it would rebuild and the lights turn green. They did, so he inserted the last drive, it rebuilt itself again, and now his Drobo is fully populated and running like a well-oiled clock.

So, there you have it. This one Drobo recovered from a seemingly impossible event — losing EVERY drive. Granted, there was no data being moved to/from the drive at the time this was happening; plus, I seriously doubt that repeating this "experiment" would result in success; but, my confidence in their technology is high. Any other RAID system I know of, upon losing more than the requisite "safe" number of drives would be a total loss — or, at best, a nightmare to recover.

Life with iPad

2010-08-19T14:04:00.010-05:00

I have been living with an iPad (WiFi only, 32Gb) since April. My thoughts and feelings about it have gone through 3 stages:

Slight disappointment
I have a laptop?
Old friend

Disappointment

When the iPad first arrived, after the initial un-boxing and first-use rush was over, a twinge of disappointment set in. It took me a while to figure it out. This thing is just a big iPhone, right? So, I already knew how to use it. There was no sense of discovery of a new thing. (Non iPhone users would have a far more exciting first few days.)

With that realization, I was relieved. After all, if you have an iPhone, who doesn't want a bigger screen? The glory of the things I could do with a larger screen seeped back in. I actively re-compared it to the iPhone, and confirmed to myself that, yes, wow, this thing is great. I could see, and READ, all of a web page at once; I could use a full-screen remote access client and control client servers on it; I could type on a big keyboard; I could see screens FULL of info. Yes, it is wonderful.

I have a Laptop?

After a few weeks I realized that I was leaving my laptop on my upstairs desk for days at a time. What used to be a fixture on my downstairs desk over the weekends, was now leaving a dust-free print on my office desk. I began to have thoughts of leaving the laptop behind when I visited client's offices. Initially I didn't have quite enough confidence in the iPad to leave behind the laptop. But, after many client visits, where the laptop never got pulled out, I began leaving it behind for quick visits.

Wow, talk about traveling light! There is a huge difference between carrying a 1.5Lb iPad in one hand, and lugging a 7Lb laptop — in a bag, plus power cord, and other misc. junk.

Old Friend

Four months out, the love affair is over, and I have settled into a comfortable and rewarding pattern with the iPad. My laptop gets to come downstairs for photos and other editing/creation efforts. Email is still better on the real keyboard, and ALL of my email and file organization is still on the laptop. The iPad (and iPhone) serves as a convenient at-hand tool for quickly clearing my email deck. I check mail on both the iPad and iPhone far more often than on the laptop. However, I allow things to build up for later processing on the laptop.

The iPad has become my de-facto tool for reading, browsing and consuming on-line content. It is perfect for Google Reader, FaceBook, YouTube and Twitter — where I spend 90% of my non-working on-line time. Ok, 90% of my on-line time — hey, I work for myself, so I can't get fired for using Facebook during working hours.

Around the house, especially the kitchen and den, the iPad has made Google an integral and helpful part of my family's routine. During a typical day I carry the iPad from room to room. The larger screen and keyboard make it the perfect tool for looking up anything. From TV schedules to recipes, wikipedia to YouTube, we have instant and useful access to information. It has become such a normal item to have around, I can hardly imagine what things were like before having it.

As for WiFi vs. WiFi+3G, I regretted not getting 3G for the first week. After that, I have not run into a situation where truly the iPhone on 3G (and now the iPhone 4) didn't easily fill the gap. This is much to the disappointment of my wife, who was to get my first iPad as soon as I upgraded. That's on hold until the next generation iPad is out. I can't imagine the joy of an iPad with a retina display!

Backup to School

2010-08-19T13:24:00.008-05:00

So you sent your child off to college at the Citadel, College-of-Charleston, Charleston Southern, etc., with a brand-new computer. You did send them with an external hard drive for backup, right? Probably not. I know because I'm the one who gets their panicked calls after it's too late.

Do yourself and your child favor and get them a backup drive right now. Here's a great Western Digital external hard drive that can backup any laptop, and it's not too expensive. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Now that you have taken care of that, make sure they use it.

For Windows users, that drive has built-in software that will automate their backup. They just need to read the directions and make sure they plug it in — often.

For Mac users, of Macs within the past three years, they just need to plug-in the drive. The computer will automatically ask them if they wish to use the drive for backup. Confirm that, and they're good to go.

I recommend plugging-in the backup drive every time they have it at their desk in their room. I also recommend leaving it plugged in overnight — all that music and video can take its time backing-up.

Lastly, I recommend that they set their system sleep settings to leave their computer on when it is plugged in to power. This is so the computer won't go to sleep while backing up. But they should set it to turn off the display after a period of disuse, say 15 minutes. Windows users will find this setting under Control Panel Items > Power Options; Mac users find this under System Preferences > Energy Saver.

And, if the worst should happen, and their computer won't boot up, or they lose data, please call me, Bill Read at (843)722-7607, ext. 2. I may not be able to fix the computer or recover the drive, but I can assess the severity of the problem, fix it if possible, or direct them to a suitable data recovery company. The last thing they should do at this point is trust their data recovery to someone who might do more harm than good.

Macintosh Computer Technical Support and Repair, Charleston, SC

2010-03-25T13:18:00.004-05:00

I write about a lot of things on this blog that are Macintosh related. In case you didn't know it, Macintosh support is what I and my company have done since 1995. What you need to know is that my company, Computer Consultants Group, Inc. offers support for all kinds of Macintosh (and Windows) issues, including help with new purchases, setup and installation, and troubleshooting. We support individuals, small business and even larger companies that have their own IT departments.

What are your other options in Charleston? Here you go:

The Apple Store — well, not much to say here.

L2 Technologies — these guys are an Apple Authorized repair center, plus they can fix iPods. They do all kinds of hardware repairs, and they do sales of Macs too. If you have an in-warranty repair, they are a great choice. They are in Mt. Pleasant, but have offices in Beaufort and Columbia too.

Tech Plus — a small local firm in West Ashley (Outback Steak House Shopping Center), these guys are GREAT for OUT of warranty repair. Don't get me wrong, they are also Apple Authorized for in-warranty repair, but they have always been willing to go out of their way for my clients who have out of warranty equipment.

There you have it. If you want someone to come by and help you out, we are your guys. If you want to take your stuff in, try these other guys. Our phone is (843)722-7607, email@ccgnet.com

Oh, Drobo, How You Disappoint Me

2010-03-25T07:56:00.011-05:00

http://www.drobo.com/

I have been hearing about Drobos for over a year now. Many pundits I trust simply rave about them. The technology sure does seem appealing: a box that can hold multiple hard drives of different capacities, and wrap them all up in a better than RAID data protection scheme.

I have two clients who had Drobo-like storage needs at about the same time. I ordered two Drobo S models for one, and a Drobo S and a Drobo Pro for the other. I loaded all of them up with the maximum number of 2Tb (terabyte) hard drives. For those who don't know, that is 5 x 2Tb = 10Tb for each Drobo S, and 8 x 2Tb = 16Tb for the Drobo Pro. Because of the way Drobos use the drives to protect your data, that means that roughly 7.5Tb of data storage is available on the Drobo S models, and 14Tb is available on the Drobo Pro.

The S/Pro pair arrived first. I immediately ran into trouble formatting the drives. I followed the Drobo instructions exactly, but upon first attempted format, the Drobo software basically told me "try again." I had three consecutive failures, and almost gave up. But, instead I rebooted the computer (can't hurt, might help, but not something that the Drobo instructions suggested), and that worked for the first drive. So, on to the second.

The second drive did the same thing. Being a bit wiser, this time I just quit the Drobo Dashboard software, and tried again. That worked. Huh. "Oh well," I thought, "picky software, but stable hardware." The rest of the install went peachy, and I gave it no more thought.

The second pair of Drobo S models arrived a few days later. This time I was prepared for the formatting failure. However, no matter what I did, I could not get either drive to format. It was infuriating. I was using the client's server this time (an Xserve G5), and repeated reboots weren't going to be cool. So, I resorted to my laptop and was able successfully to format both drives, only after a couple of failures similar to above.

Then, after I reconnected the Drobos to the server, very strange things began to happen. At first they wouldn't show up, then they would disappear. I went through so many iterations of connecting them up to this or that port — changing cables, changing the order in which they connected, changing the configuration of the other drives connected to the server — so many that I finally gave up and told the office that the server was going to be down for the rest of the day.

Then I got on the phone with Drobo support and proceeded to spend a few hours doing the same thing with them. The server had gotten to the point that it would kernel panic with one of the drives. The upshot was I was told to upgrade my server software. Crud. The upside was that it did give me an excuse to do an upgrade that I wanted, but couldn't otherwise have justified — so I was Ok with that.

After installing Mac OS X 10.5 Server, and applying all the updates, the problems with the Drobos remained. By now the office was tired of no server, so I had to stop testing on the server, and resorted to testing exclusively on my MacBook Pro. I got back on the support site with Drobo, and eventually had a call with one of the techs. I had an idea that maybe my MacBook Pro, a Core Duo (NOT a Core 2 Duo) and my server (a G5) were too old for Drobos. The tech considered that for a moment, but assured me that this was not the case. He agreed to ship out a new unit to test. Upon arrival, it failed in similar ways.

At that point I began to cast around for other solutions. First, I rebooted my MacBook in Safe Mode. To my amazement, the Drobo worked without a hitch. So, something installed on the server and my computer was at fault. The only commonality between the two was the Drobo Software itself. Nah, couldn't be, right? I mean, if that were it, surely the Drobo tech would know about it, right?

I googled "uninstall drobo software" and the top article was from a site I read every day: MacOSXHints.com. Here: Fix a Drobo issue on non-64bit-capable Intel Macs. First, I literally slapped myself in the head for not going to google right away; second I kicked myself for not thinking of this site — it is one of my go-to sites, and I know I had scanned this specific article.

I found the uninstaller in /Library/Application Support/Data Robotics/Drobo Dashboard/. I used the uninstaller, instead of mucking around with deleting specific files. Bingo — everything worked flawlessly. So, my question remains: Surely the Drobo tech should know about it, right? Apparently not.

Moral of the story: don't think that just because your support tech is sharp and seems very knowledgeable, that he knows everything. Also, be suspicious of a tech who doesn't pursue a logical course of elimination when it involves his product.

I titled this "Oh Drobo, how you disappoint me" because I am disappointed that such a potentially cool company has totally missed what seems to me to be an obvious bug. Even cursory testing on some older hardware would demonstrate this issue. I have to assume that they have had tech calls on it as well. Note the date of the article above: November 2009.

Lastly, I sure do hope Drobo acts on this knowledge and fixes the software. I hate to say it, but I doubt it — it has apparently existed since November or before. After informing the tech of what happened, I never got a response. I did close the ticket, and left a note offering to help them troubleshoot if needed. So far, crickets...

I Ordered an iPad

2010-03-25T07:45:00.002-05:00

The outcome of my predictions about the Apple Tablet, which we now know as the iPad, were disappointing. No new method of data entry — just an onscreen keyboard. The novel way of viewing video was partially addressed by the incorporation of a stand into the standard iPad case — better than nothing, and I think probably smart in that there are no extras to carry around. The big surprise for me is that there is no HDTV output. There is VGA, which covers a lot of ground, but clearly this device is not being targeted at the living room entertainment market as a primary device.

All this leads me to believe that Apple has something new up their sleeve for the AppleTV. I'm thinking a beefed up version of it. Perhaps, and even better IMO, a Mac Mini Media edition. If they can ship a Mac Mini Server, why can't they ship a media edition? It would be a killer idea.

I have been learning how to write iPhone Apps, and have developed one and am working on another. The first one will probably never be put into the store, but it was a good exercise in learning. The second will follow the same fate, but only because the app I am stealing ideas from is improving at a rapid rate.

So, I ordered an iPad in order to be able to develop for that platform — or maybe I am learning to develop in order to have an iPad. No matter, mine arrives on April 3rd, right before spring break. So much for seeing the light of day. I ordered the 32Gb WiFi only model, plus the Apple case. I'll report back later.

On the Apple Tablet

2010-01-03T09:58:00.002-05:00

I have two thoughts about the rumored Apple tablet, both predictions of a sort, but neither based on anything but my own speculation.

Thought one: a tablet will have to be designed to be held by one hand and used with the other. This means a new way of keyboarding. I don't know what that would be, but standard keyboards are out, and two-thumb typing is out.

Thought two: along the same lines, a novel way of setting the tablet up for viewing video will be necessary. It can't lay flat, and a built-in picture-frame type stand wouldn't be flexible enough.

Other than that, I hope I want one.

Bye Bye eCommerce

2009-09-08T15:39:00.003-05:00

CCG has accepted credit cards for 10 years or more. Today we no longer accept them. The death blow came in two punches.

The first punch came months ago when our merchant account provider began to charge us an annual fee for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) compliance. We had to prove to our merchant provider that we handled our client data securely. The only problem is that we can't do that. The reason we can't do that is that we simply don't collect client credit card data in the first place.

Our system has always consisted of a login to access your invoices. If you chose to pay an invoice online, we redirected you to Authorize.net, who collected your credit card info securely, then returned a success or failure code and an email. Our system never handled any of the required data, and only received a pass/fail notice in order to update the status of the paid invoice.

Now, in order to show compliance, in essence, we would have to begin collecting all of this data. Then we would have to store it securely and demonstrate that our security is robust. On the face of it this is ridiculous. Isn't it more secure never to collect and store the data than to do so in the first place? Still, that is not an option on the checklist. The upshot is that our provider began to hit us with an annual compliance fee and a monthly non-compliance penalty. Talk about your catch-22.

We interviewed other providers and were told that, while we would get hit with a one-time fee to prove (or disprove) compliance, we would never be hit every year and certainly wouldn't be fined monthly. Great, sign us up! Things went back to normal shortly after we switched merchant account providers, and our other fees went down too.

The second punch came this week. We got a compliance letter from the new provider. They are now charging us annually so they can check our compliance. And they will fine us monthly until we can prove we comply. How can you prove a negative? How are we supposed to prove we protect data we don't collect or store?

Oh well, so long credit card companies. I do truly appreciate your efforts to protect our privacy, really I do. But until you go about it in a sane manner, I can't be your customer any longer. Sniff... oh well, I don't need to pay you to get paid any more anyway.

Gmail IMAP Password Error Web Login Required

2009-09-08T15:25:00.004-05:00

I have migrated approximately 500 accounts and 40 domains over to Google Apps for your Domain. Most of my clients use the IMAP protocol to access their email accounts. One of the issues that I have come across is an error on password that occurs after a few days, weeks or even months of use.

The user begins to get a password error on login. If the user reads the complete error, it will say something along the lines of "Error on Password; web login required." The cure is simple, log in to the gmail webmail site for your account. Once the user logs in, the problem goes away.

Most users have no idea how to do this, so we always setup their domain to have a simple webmail login using http://webmail.CLIENTDOMAIN.com, where CLIENTDOMAIN.com is their actual domain. But others have to use the standard Google login, which is http://www.google.com/a/CLIENTDOMAIN.com.

The other day I ran across this issue, but logging into the webmail didn't cure it. In fact, the problem persisted through logging-out, rebooting, logging in from another computer, and everything else we could think of to try. Finally I just reset the password on the account to a new password. That worked right away. It wasn't that we had the wrong password -- we couldn't have reset the password otherwise. Somehow Google just didn't like the old password.

Finding Missing Desktop Items

2009-07-09T12:36:00.004-05:00

For a few weeks my dad had been complaining about odd things happening on his computer. Some things were missing, downloads weren't findable, and he was getting a few odd error messages. He was also having problems opening some Quicken files, which is what prompted me to take action. He uses Mac OS X 10.4.x.

In the case of the Quicken file, when you tried to open it, it would prompt for the password, which we absolutely knew we had correct, then give an error about not having permission to view the file. It was NOT rejecting the password, just refusing to let us in. This was puzzling. Before I went off to restore from backup, I started poking around. A behavior that tipped me off to the problem was his not being able to download/read PDF files. I tried this, and after downloading a PDF, which should have gone onto the desktop, I still couldn't find it. I figured that maybe his download folder had gotten set to some other folder, but upon checking that, it was definitely pointed at the desktop.

Thinking disk corruption, I decided to take a quick look at the directory from the terminal before rebooting and running Disk Repair. I su'd to root (bad habit, I admit, but things would have gotten stranger had I not in this case) cd'd into the Desktop folder ( cd ~/Desktop ); it was a good thing that I use ls -la by habit (list files, long attributes, show hidden). I noticed that the permissions on the Desktop folder were d-wxr-xr--. Woah, how did his account, the owner, not have read access to his own Desktop folder, yet still had write access? I quickly changed permissions ( chmod 755 . ) and in an instant dozens of lost files appeared on his desktop.

Wrapping up, I rebooted from the OS X CD and ran Disk Utility, doing first a Disk Repair, then a Repair Permissions. No other trouble seemed to crop up, but it's good to do this after weirdness, just in case.

Google Apps for Your Domain Groups Problem

2009-03-27T13:58:00.003-05:00

I switched my company to Google Apps for Your Domain, Standard Edition, not quite a year ago. There are many reasons to love it. There are many who are very wary about it, some with legitimate complaints, others not so much. On the legitimate side are concerns about privacy and security, most of which I think border on the ultra-paranoid. Don't get me wrong, some people have genuine reasons to be paranoid, and not all of them are pornographers. Still, for me and my clients, those concerns are in the realm of the extreme. Overall I have enjoyed being a Google Apps user. In fact, when there have been downtimes (4 hours one time), I have actually been encouraged that I have not been the only one who has had issues with hosting email!

Now on to my cautionary tale. About two weeks ago my wife and I realized that we were no longer getting faxes via email. My office accepts faxes and sends them to an email group that consists of my wife's and my email addresses. I checked the folder where the computer stores new faxes, and sure enough, there were several faxes we had missed. (Now, I know, I know, why in the world are we still getting faxes? Well, SOMEONE has to get the junk vacation, timeshare and benefits faxes, right?) For all intents and purposes, it appeared that the group simply wasn't working. Test emails were not going through to it -- unless I emailed the group directly from my (member) address. The group settings indicated that anyone could send it email -- so I was stumped.

Today I figured it out. In researching this on the web, I saw some comments about Google spam filtering group email BEFORE delivery to group members. Where do those filtered emails go? Nowhere. This is a change Google made, probably about March 1st. Prior to that, my faxes would sometimes land in my junk folder, but after that they just went off into la la land.

What is worse, is that my brother's company new-leads email address, you know the one the website sends new leads to, started doing the same thing. That has resulted in three weeks of lost leads, which is potentially 4 a day, which is potentially 84 lost leads. He is a realtor, so even if one of those leads converted, you are talking a lot of lost revenue.

Now, both of these email addresses were being used by web servers. The sending addresses were "legit," but Google seems to be cracking down on non-mail servers sending mail. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I hate spam, on the other, it is unreasonable to expect the mail server of your own domain not to send email. There are DNS tools to indicate who are the legitimate senders of mail, and they are good things, but I won't go into that here, mainly because it doesn't address all of the potential troubles and won't until it is required for mail delivery, which isn't happening any time soon.

In the case of my fax problem, I simply have the fax computer send the faxes to our individual addresses. And we retrieved the "lost" faxes from the archive folder. In the case of my brother, well, he's hosed. I have converted his leads address to a nickname, so now it can only go to one person, but that's a lot better than going to no person.

The take-away here is that if you have emails going to a Google Apps group address, where those emails might come from your web servers, or they are mission critical, you need to have a backup. If nothing else, BCC the emails to a real account, as well as the group. You might get duplicates, but that is better than getting squat.

Chuck Norris

2009-03-17T09:43:00.001-05:00

Recently it was Chuck Norris's 69th birthday. In honor of this, here is a neat little piece of fun. Do the following:

1) Go to http://www.google.com/

2) Type in "Find Chuck Norris".

3) Click "I'm Feeling Lucky".

That's it. Courtesy Chuck Norris.

Ergotron LX Dual Desk Mount Arm Review

2009-02-23T17:09:00.006-05:00

I recently was offered an Ergotron LX Dual Desk Mount Arm for review. It was offered to me after I wrote my last blog entry, Sit Better, See Better. I have lived with the new setup now for a few weeks, and am ready to give an opinion. The short version is that the Ergotron has freed up a good deal of space on my desk, despite my unusual setup. It might free up even more space for you. If you find yourself with a desk crowded by a large display, consider one of the Ergotron Desk Mount Arm systems. Before I go further, some background on my setup is necessary.

For the past six years I have used an old Hamilton motorized drafting table (E-Sized) for my desk. It doesn't go up and down any more (needs a fan belt -- really), but it tilts and has a pen and pencil trough that is a great substitute for a drawer. I keep it tiled at about 10 degrees, which puts the keyboard of my laptop at a perfect level for typing.

I have a 17" MacBook Pro connected to a Dell 20" LCD Display (secondary display), and a Windows computer with a 17" Fujitsu LCD. The secondary display sits behind my MacBook Pro, both centered on my desk, with the display high enough so that the bottom is level with the top of the MacBook Pro display. The Windows display sits to the left of this.

My non-computer working area consists of the space to the right of my laptop in front of a file box, and to the left in front of the Fujitsu, about 3.5 sqft total out of 15+ available sqft. Most of the back of my desk is wasted space behind the displays. Clearly I am not making efficient use of my space.

My Mac desktop is set to span from the laptop upwards to the secondary display, so that the Mac menu bar is smack in the middle of the two displays. For Windows users who aren't familiar with the Mac menubar, it is a permanent fixture across the top of the screen. If I move my mouse above the menu bar, it pops up onto the secondary display which is sitting above my laptop display. This seemed odd at first, but makes for a compact working area.

The Mac controls the Windows computer via a VNC server. To control the PC, I move my Mac mouse pointer to the left of my Mac display, which kicks in the VNC software, and the mouse on the PC jumps to life at the corresponding location on the right of PC display. Thus, the PC acts as if it were a seamless part of the Mac Desktop (see this article for the setup). This setup makes the three displays seem like one oddly-shaped large display, and two computers seem like one.

When I am working on web programming projects, I drag my browser windows and other visuals up to the secondary display, and leave my email and text editing windows on my laptop display. I use the PC for testing my code against additional web browsers. In this way, each display serves its own purpose, and they all need to remain clustered together in order for my workflow to go smoothly.

Lastly, I am an oddball in that I prefer the keyboard of the Macbook Pro to other keyboards, and I prefer to use the trackpad over a mouse. This is not a good fit for Ergotron, in that most of their solutions seem to be targeted at getting your displays up off of your desk, including your laptop, freeing the space underneath. Such an arrangement would hang my laptop above my desk, and take away my favorite keyboard. The assumption they have made is that most people with laptops will want a separate keyboard and mouse on their desktop, taking up valuable extra space. I don't fit in that pigeon hole, but most of my clients with laptops do, and all users of desktop computers fit there too.

Ok, now that you have the picture of my setup, how has the Ergotron changed my working space? For the better? I have a dual-arm model from their many offerings. One of the arms has a VESA mount, and the other has a laptop tray. One of my displays, the Dell, supports the VESA standard mount, whereas the Fujitsu does not. So I decided to see if the laptop tray would support the Fujitsu, and put the Dell on the VESA mount.

While unboxing the Ergotron, the first thing I noticed was the build-quality. These are no plastic arms, but heavy, metal, arms with very strong springs to help them hold their position. The number of parts in the box is pretty daunting, but as you pull them out, it becomes obvious how most things will fit together.

The kit I received had three separate sets of instructions. I was confused at first as to which set I should use -- I still am, actually. Two sets provided English language instructions, plus some other languages, with one set of completely non-English language instructions. The two English sets appeared to offer identical instruction, but were also obviously different documents. A clearly marked "Start Here" booklet would have been nice. I guess I am too used to Apple who goes out of their way to make things clear, even at the opening of boxes level. At any rate, I picked one set using Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Moe and forged ahead.

It was fairly easy to put the whole setup together. The main parts of the arms simply slide one on another, and on to the base. Almost no tools are required, except for the supplied allen wrenches, which are used to tighten joints and fix the heights of the arms on the base. If you are not mechanically inclined, I could see how putting these together may be frustrating, because the arms are relatively heavy. But overall I found it straightforward, if time consuming.

If I had one comment about the assembly process, it would be to plan ahead where you will mount the base. Think about how the arms will articulate, and where the displays will go. And think about it for a while. In my case, shortly after assembling the entire thing, I realized that I needed to move one display to the other side, and move the entire assembly two feet to the right. I made the mistake of simply trying to duplicate my existing setup, which I assumed was optimal. I was wrong. By using these arms, I had possibilities that I had never considered. So I had to partially disassemble, move and reassemble the whole setup. Had I thought about it in advance, I could have saved some time. Total assembly time (first time): just over an hour. Add 15 minutes to re-do it.

I was successful in using the laptop mount for the Fujitsu display. It is not optimal, and I had to use the laptop stabilizers in a way they are not intended, but it is secure. This novel setup allowed for me to move the Fujitsu over to the right, instead of to the left, and off of the side of my desk.

The end result is that the Fujistu is now suspended partially over my trashcan, and not directly above my desk. This allowed me to shift my laptop and secondary display to the right, so that they are both to the right of center, leaving almost half of my desk totally clear. That's right: almost half of my desk is totally clear of gear.

So now my working area consists of two main areas. 1x2' (2 sqft) to the right of my laptop, where I now keep my coffee warmer, misc pads of paper and a photo desk accessory. It's perfect for misc items, including mail. I now have 2.5x3.5' (8.75 sqft) of area to the left of my laptop free and clear. I moved my filebox from the right back corner to the left back corner, which consumes 1.25 sqft of space.

I know, I spent way too much time measuring this stuff. But having a huge area of your desk free and clear is great. Of course, I promptly filled it with pads and junk, but at least it all can move. And speaking of moving, the two arms have a great range of motion. I can swing either of them up and totally out of the way, and the space behind my laptop, where the secondary display stand sat, is empty. It can now hold those items I like to keep on my desk, but don't use often.

Overall the Ergotron system is versatile and strong. The arms articulate easily, but stay put when you need them to. You can tweak away at display position with little effort. They do get things up off of your desk, but the space below is just that: space below something else. The usefulness of that space will largely depend on what you want to put under there. With a little creative thought, though, moving a display or laptop off of the side of your desk, instead of over it, will greatly increase your useful square footage.

Final thought: If I were the type of person who used a separate keyboard and mouse with my laptop, these arms would give me back much more space. As I said in the beginning, it might free much more space for you. Either way, if space is at a premium on your desk, and whose isn't, these arms are for you.

Sit Better, See Better

2009-01-07T09:12:00.005-05:00

I often hear complaints about neck, shoulder and back pain from my clients. Typically, they will have a very large computer display that is sitting on top of a stack of books or some item on their desk -- with the center (top to bottom) of their display even with their eyes. This is trouble. My advice is: the top of your display, not the center, should be level with your eyes, so that you are slightly looking down as you use your computer. If you have to look straight ahead, or worse, up, to see your menu bar, you will have constant neck and shoulder tension, which could result in long-term neck and back issues.

Don't take my word for it, here is a great tool to figure out how you should setup your workstation:

Ergonomic Workstation Planner from Ergotron.

This is not an endorsement of their products, and I really do not know much about this company. However, on first site of this tool I instantly recognized it as fitting within everything I have learned about ergonomics in my 20+ years of computer consulting.

Clients also complain about difficulties seeing their displays, or blurry vision after extended use. My advice to those using computer screens for long periods of time is to take hourly breaks where you stare off into the distance. Your eyes were not designed to remain focused at short distances for long periods of time. Just like trying to hold your arm out straight without moving it, keeping your eyes focused at the same distance causes tremendous fatigue. This results in eye strain and blurred vision, and can even cause harmful long term effects.

In addition to taking breaks once each hour, where you focus your eyes well beyond 10 feet or more, computer glasses are a great option. Reading glasses DO NOT substitute for computer glasses. Reading glasses are designed for reading books you are holding, which is a distance of about 18". Most computer displays are just outside of this boundary at 20" to 30" away -- some farther. The result of using reading glasses (and, yes, bifocals) is that you cause minor strain on your eyes in the opposite direction you are trying to correct.

Computer glasses are designed for use in the intermediate zone of vision -- right where your computer display is. It is a good idea to measure the distance first, so that your doctor can make the prescription for the right range of distance. Again, don't take just my word for it, here is a site that discusses this issue:

Computer Glasses for [correction of] Blurred Vision.

Again, I don't know this company, nor endorse them or their products. Their information falls within what I have learned over the years, and know to be true.

Disk Utility Bit Me

2009-01-02T12:48:00.002-05:00

I know you have had one of those days where everything went wrong. Even if you haven't you have probably had an experience where exactly the wrong thing happened. Mine happened yesterday (1/1/2009 -- doesn't bode well for the new year).

I was cloning a drive in a PowerBook G4 to a larger drive. I had booted from CD and was using Disk Utility to Restore the internal drive to the new hard drive, connected via an external FireWire case -- I do this type of restore all the time. For whatever reason it failed.

As a normal course of action, I erased the external drive using the Zero All Data option. After trying again, it failed again, but with a different error. I thought that maybe I should have rebooted between tries, so I did, then re-erased the drive. At that point the new drive had the same name as the old drive. They appeared under different device profiles, so I know I selected the correct one (FireWire), but I noticed that both drives disappeared when the erase began. The upshot is that Disk Utility erased the internal drive. All I can imagine is that somehow the clone worked well enough to make Disk Utility confuse the two volumes -- for that matter, it may have been one of the earlier erases (when I hadn't rebooted) that did it.

Either way, I was hosed -- total loss of data. At least we had backups to go back to. Still, it is a TON more work to rebuild from scratch rather than clone.

Moral of the Story: if you run into issues cloning a drive, do not go back and erase the new drive using the same machine. In the future I will remove the drive and use a different computer to erase the drive (booted from the internal HD and not a CD so that Disk Utility CAN'T erase the boot volume). Better to be safe than sorry.

Timezone Setting Won't Stick

2008-12-17T09:47:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I ran into a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard computer that would not keep its timezone setting. The usual zap-pram trick didn't help, and a repair permissions didn't help. However, during the repair permissions I noticed an entry for a file/folder named localtime. I don't have the exact entry, but it looked something like this:

permissions on /etc/localtime drwxr-xr-x should be lrwxr-xr-x

The initial d vs. l jumped out at me. After the repair, when the setting still didn't stick, I went into the terminal to have a look. I found a directory in etc named localtime and it had a file named Eastern in it -- not knowing how the data should actually be stored, this seemed reasonable to me. I deleted the file named Eastern, but that didn't fix it. Then I deleted the entire localtime directory. That worked.

I assume that some time in the past Apple stored the timezone in a file in this directory, and whenever this system was updated, the updater failed to remove the directory.

The moral of the story: pay attention to the items that Repair Permissions throws at you.

iTunes Genius

2008-09-12T10:17:00.001-05:00

Ok, so Apple calls its new iTunes feature Genius. When this was first announced, I thought they would be doing a recommendation based on who was buying what. Or I thought they would be using a Pandora-like (or even Pandora) analysis of the music.

Having used Genius for almost three days now, I know it is something more. I don't know what they are doing, but it seems to me that they must be analyzing the iTunes playback data itself. Specifically, I think that they are using the last-played date/time data to compare what songs you have played next to other songs.

I say this because I setup unusual playlists, where the genre of songs can be quite different. In my playlists, I might have the Propellerheads along-side Nicola Conte. Then I might switch over to a playlist with Devo and Kraftwerk.

So, what does the Genius playlist include when I choose a Nicola Conte song as the basis? Here is the list of artists:

Bill Laswell
David Byrne
Jean-Michel Jarre
Kraftwerk
Nicola Conte
Out Back
Propellerheads
Thievery Corporation
Trio

Now, I have no playlists in my present library with these specific artists together. I can't tell you how Genius knows how to put them together, but I can tell you that the styles range far enough apart that there is no way a Pandora-only style playlist would do this.

And you know what? I like the mix!

3D Optical Illustion

2008-09-11T07:45:00.002-05:00

I meant to post this back in May, after we visited Washington, DC. This is a cool illusion that can only be understood when in motion.

Rolex and Interwatches Part III

2008-07-03T10:00:00.003-05:00

My wife's Rolex fogged again a couple of weeks ago. In my last post about Interwatches I describe their disingenuousness with respect to their water-proof test and warranty. Well, after having had the watch "serviced" by them, presumably fixing whatever water-proof issue there was, it has happened again. Clearly their service is a sham. Be warned to avoid their guarantees.

Now, understand that they sold us a genuine Rolex -- there is no question about that. We just sent it directly to Rolex to deal with the latest fogging issue. Rolex verifies that it is genuine. However, in addition to the $600 to service the watch and fix the water-proof issues, Rolex wants another $500 or so to replace the face, hands and crystal. Ok, so the crystal might need to be replaced to fix the water issue, but that is not what they are saying. They are saying that they refuse to service the watch at all, unless they can deal with every issue. The face, hands and crystal, according to Rolex, are not "perfect." Uh, ok, the watch is a 1985 watch, of course it's not perfect. Let me say it again: they refuse to service the watch unless they can deal with every issue, including cosmetic ones. Refuse.

That's like taking your car in for a timing belt replacement, and their refusing to do it unless you get new tires and have it painted.

So, we're are not having the watch serviced by Rolex, and instead will send it to yet another service center. This time, however, the service center is one we trust on the recommendation of a local dealer we know personally.

The next time we buy a Rolex we'll buy from a reputable dealer. Oh, wait, next time we won't buy a Rolex. We're taking recommendations on decent water-proof watches that are serviceable.

Leopard iCal Publishing Bug

2008-03-11T16:21:00.003-05:00

If you have an iCal calendar published to A Private Server (webDAV), AND you have a .Mac account, you may find that your calendar stops publishing to the webDAV server, and starts publishing to your .Mac account.

What is worse, if you DO NOT have a .Mac account, but you DO have the .Mac account info filled-out (say, you used the trial and let it expire), this can happen too you as well. Only, in this event, the calendar will no longer be published anywhere, since .Mac won't accept invalid credentials.

I discovered this at a client's office where, literally years ago, everyone signed up for trial .Mac accounts. They found it not to be useful, and so let everything expire. Due to the very wonderful Migration Assistant, all of that account info has moved forward throughout the years.

Last year we installed an Xserve and have used it ever since as a webDAV iCal server. After upgrading everyone to Leopard last month, many people's calendars stopped updating. The common thread has been that every one of the problem calendars suddenly showed that they were being published to .Mac. Those clients where, at some point, I had gone in and cleared out their .Mac into, were not affected.

Repartitioning to Upgrade

2008-03-11T15:53:00.003-05:00

Recently I have had to do several Mac OS X system upgrades (to Leopard) where the hard drive had to be repartitioned first. The previous system administrator had partitioned the drives into three parts: one for system and apps, one for data, and one for archive. He must not have realized that the Users home folder would be on the System Partition, and would slowly grow, or he would have given this partition the largest share. The upshot was that these systems had only about 3Gb of available space on the system partition.

The big problem was that these drives had more data than would fit on my 100Gb portable drive -- the one I use for this kind of thing. The client had a server, though, so I decided to use this to backup the hard drives. My plan was to create a disk image of each of the three partitions, then restore the primary image back to a single partition on the drive, verify that it was bootable, then perform the upgrade on the newly expanded drive. As an aside, you might think that backing up over the network would be slower than using an external drive. Nope. This network was gigabit ethernet, and it was actually faster.

I ran into trouble right away. While the Leopard Installer DVD allows you to browse the network, it will not allow you to authenticate to a resource. So, I had to setup a public folder on the server that was accessible to guests. Then I used Disk Utility to make a Disk Image of each partition, and saved it into the public folder.

The next problem I ran into came when I went to restore the system disk image to the newly partitioned hard drive. Disk Utility gave me the error "Restore Failure: Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to be imagescanned/scanned for restore." My heart sunk because I though the disk image was somehow corrupt. The fix, however, was simple. I poked around the menus in Disk Utility, and under Images was "Scan Image for Restore..." Thinking that it couldn't be that easy, I gave it a shot, chose the disk image, and bingo, it appeared in the left column, ready to be restored.

After that, the install went flawlessly -- well, almost. See my next post.

Back to My Mac on Bellsouth

2008-02-10T22:39:00.001-05:00

According to Apple's documentation, in order to support the .Mac "Back to my Mac" features, your router must be an Apple router, or be able to support UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). It's not quite that simple, at least not with Bellsouth.

This assumes you have more than one Mac, and that you have paid for .Mac, and that you have configured .Mac on each Mac.

The short version is this: your Bellsouth Modem/Router doesn't support UPnP, but you can buy a second router that will work with it to do this. I use a Linksys WRT54G.

The trick is to setup the Bellsouth modem/router NOT to do it's own PPPoE. Instead, you configure your second router to do the PPPoE. Then you can configure the second router to enable UPnP and it works. If you want an overview, keep reading.

This requires a bit of TCP/IP knowledge, so this is not for novices. You will also need to have a second router in hand -- brand new out of the box is fine. If you don't have a passing familiarity with configuring basic home routers, stop and call the 11-year-old next door to help you.You will need your Bellsouth login and password, so do not proceed without this. Here are the basic steps:

1) Your Bellsouth router should already be configured and working. Make sure you can get to its config page (check your TCP/IP settings to find the router address, and plug that into your browser address bar). Note this address.

2) Now, disconnect your computer from the Bellsouth router and Plug the WAN port on your second router into the LAN port on the Bellsouth router. Then plug your computer into a LAN port on the second router (or access it wirelessly). If your Bellsouth router was configured properly, you should be able to get on the internet after you do this.

a) If you can access the internet, go on to step 3.

b) If you can't access the internet, unplug the second router from the Bellsouth router, but leave your computer plugged in to the second router. Power cycle the second router. Now access the router config page (check your TCP/IP settings to find the router address). On the main page, change the third number in the "Local IP address" to 10 (actually, any number from 0 to 254 will do, so long as it is different from the current number). Save the change, then connect it all back up and try again.

3) Now you should be able to access the internet. Check to see that you can access the Bellsouth Router's config page (the one your noted in step 1). Also check that you can access your second router's config page (check your TCP/IP settings, AGAIN because they have now changed, to find the router address). If you can access them both, you're ready for the next step. If you can't, you've got something else going on I can't cover here.

4) Log in to your Bellsouth router config page. Go into the advanced configuration. Look around for the passthrough-mode, or the bridging mode (varies). Enable this mode, choosing to pass through to your second router (it should be the only available device). Save the change. After you do this, you will probably not be able to get back on to the Bellsouth router config page. Don't worry, move on to step 5.

5) Access the config page for your second router. Configure the internet connection type to be PPPoE, and plug in your Bellsouth login and password. Save the settings.

6) After the router restarts, your will probably NOT be able to get online. Disconnect the ethernet cable from your computer (or turn off your wireless), wait a few seconds, then plug it back in (turn it back on). Now you should be able to connect to the internet.

7) Go back to the config page for your second router, and find the Admin page (Linksys Administration). Poke around until you find the UPnP setting -- enable it and save the settings.

That's it (that's enough!)! Now, when you leave your household and get on a normal internet connected network, you should be able to see your other, home, Back to My Mac computers under "Shared" in your Finder Sidebar. I said "normal" because some public networks block this. Have fun.

AT&T Kudos

2008-02-10T22:01:00.001-05:00

Ok, so my last entry was about my problems with AT&T Rebate Debit cards. That was resolved to my satisfaction, but it did take the wind out of my overall good experience with them. Still, I really must say something good about AT&T. I know, I know, they are the Death Star... still.

When I got the iPhone, I expected to be paying more per month than I had been doing for years. I decided that it would be worth it. Then I discovered the Unity Plan.

The AT&T agent told me about the Unity Plan when I went in to get my wife and an employee's phone numbers ported to AT&T. He explained that the pricing for the Unity Plan was the same as the regular pricing, but it required that you put your wireless phone on the same bill as your home phone -- of course, that means you must have an AT&T home phone, which we do.

The real kicker, though, is that the Unity Plan makes all calls to AT&T phones free. This includes wireless AND wireline phones. A quick mental survey, and I figured this would cut my minutes in half. So I jumped on the plan. It was easy to port the two phones, and I got all of the paperwork and purchases completed in under an hour.

After I got my first phone bill, I wasn't sure what minutes were what. So I let a couple of more phone bills come. Then I took a good look at just how many plan minutes the three of us were using. It was definitely half of what we used to use. In fact, less than half.

I called up AT&T to reduce the total number of shared minutes on the plan. My target should be about 1,800 minutes per month. But AT&T only offers 1,400 or 2,100 minutes. Since I had a BUNCH of rollover minutes accumulated, I opted for the 1,400 minute plan. When, if, we burn through the rollover minutes, I'll flip to the 2,100 minute plan.

The good news is that my phone bill has actually gone down. On SunCom I used to pay for four phones. Now, with three phones, my bill works out to be less than the amount I would have paid for three phones on SunCom.

AT&T Rebate Complaint

2008-02-10T21:44:00.001-05:00

Shortly after I got my iPhone, I flipped my wife's and an employee's phones over to AT&T. I got them both Motorola RAZR phones, each with $100 rebates ($200). After a few weeks, I got four (4) AT&T Rebate Debit cards, each worth $50. I thought, wow, cool, this will be easy to spend.

The first time I used a card, all went well. Then I realized that, in order to spend all of the money, I would have to track the amount spent for each card. So I put each card in an envelope and kept track of the balance on the front. I looked like a dweeb pulling them out, but I was determined to spend every penny.

The first time I tried to use two cards to cover a transaction was at the grocery store. I was successful at spending down to the penny the first card, but the second card, which had more than enough remaining balance, was rejected. I had to use a third card to cover the bill. Then I had two partially spent cards, which really bugged me.

The next time I tried to use a card was at a restaurant. The card had about $5 more available balance than the tab -- but it was rejected. I had to use my debit card because they could not let me use two cards to cover the bill. At a gas station, I tried to use a card, but it was rejected. Next I tried to use a card to pay for chinese take-out, and it was rejected. In five attempts, four rejections. By now I was totally put-out.

So I called up AT&T customer support. I got a very nice gentleman on the line. I promptly chewed him out, stopping to apologize and explain that, while I thought he was great as a person, I was completely pissed with AT&T. Nothing personal. BTW: I think this is a very important thing to do -- tell them you aren't pissed at them. It diffuses the situation, and helps them to want to help you.

He explained to me that many businesses, especially restaurants, have to authorize more than the total of the bill in order to accommodate tips, etc. I knew this, but this still didn't explain the first rejection at the grocery store. I asked him to give me a credit for the remaining balance and just be done with it. He told me he could not do that. I read the riot act again, and again I explained that it was AT&T, not he, that was the target of my wrath. Then he said a very smart thing.

He suggested that I just use the cards to pay my bill. Oooo, I was completely defanged. I thought "what an elegant solution, why didn't I think of that?" I thanked him and hung up.

When my next bill came, I called up the pay-by-phone line and explained what I wanted to do. After hearing me out, the customer service rep explained to me that there would be a $5 service charge FOR EACH CREDIT CARD TRANSACTION. That would be $20! What!? If I pay my bill with AT&T's own debit card, they charge me for every transaction?

I immediately asked her to close out my account. I told her that if they had such a ridiculous rebate system, and an equally punitive set of fees to use their own cards, I simply couldn't remain a customer. No way was I going to pay $5 per transaction. After all, it was their own card paying their own bill.

Thankfully, she decided it would be better to waive the $5 fees and just take the cards. So, one by one, I depleted the balances of my three remaining cards, and stuck the total remaining balance on my company credit card.

So, the next time you see a rebate offer, beware that you may be receiving a debit card, and not a check. Avoid trying to use the card at restaurants and gas stations, and ask other types of vendors up front if they will have to authorize for more than the exact value of the transaction.

Wall Street Journal Mac Ad (sort of)

2008-02-05T16:00:00.001-05:00

Send by a friend who subscribes to The Wall Street Journal.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T12:01:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year!
Originally uploaded by billread

The photo says it all. I wish you and yours a great year!

iPhone Mail and Calendar Integration

2007-12-06T14:20:00.001-05:00

Of course, I installed Mac OS X Leopard the day it came out. I was really hoping for a bunch of new goodness and integration with the iPhone, but was pretty disappointed that no new secret stuff appeared. Over time I have discovered a few nuggets that have proved to be useful-- especially if you are an iPhone using GTD fanboy.

Everyone knows:
- that iCal syncs to your iPhone
- that there are no To Dos on the iPhone-- not even an app
- that the iPhone notes app doesn't have a Mac counterpart

Everyone (that means me) really hoped that Leopard would miraculously incorporate all of these things. But it didn't. At least not totally. However, THERE IS A WAY.

If you use IMAP for your Mac and your iPhone mail, you can can get both Notes and To Dos from your computer on your iPhone. The implementation still needs work, and I think that Apple will eventually get around to this. But for now, it is very useful for your GTD system.

Under Leopard in Apple Mac, you now have a button for Note and a button for To Do. If you are working inside one of your IMAP mailboxes, such as your inbox, and you click one of these, the item is automatically added to that mailbox on the IMAP server. This means the iPhone will see it.

To view the notes on your iPhone, just look through your mailboxes. Notes will appear as emails "From" you, but with subjects being the first line of the note, and the body being the whole note. Pretty cool.

To Dos show up differently. In Apple Mail, when you create your first To Do (within Mail, while in an IMAP folder), a new IMAP folder will appear, titled Apple Mail To Do. This folder will now appear on your iPhone. There is no real interaction with To Dos on the iPhone, other than reading the To Do, or deleting it. But this is great for those of us who need to get our To Dos on our iPhone. I don't actually use the To Dos, just the notes, but I plan to play with them.

Currently I am using Vitalist to manage my projects and actions. My plans are to create a set of IMAP note folders, organized by context, and migrate my GTD system into it. Now, if Mail just had tagging....

Interwatches on eBay

2007-11-18T16:17:00.000-05:00

Ok, so I'm generally not one who complains, leaves negative comments, or rants about a company after a bad experience. Yes, there are some exceptions. Well, Interwatches is one of them. Earlier this year I bought my wife a Ladies Rolex from Interwatches via eBay. We have been very happy with the watch, but Interwatches was odd to deal with.

For an added $120 Interwatches offered a water resistance test, along with a water resistance guarantee. I bought this because my wife wanted to swim with the watch. Once I won the bid, I got an automatic invoice from Interwatches. I wrote them to ask for the water proof test, and went back and forth before finally getting an email from them telling me to just add the extra $120 to my payment, which I did.

The watch arrived, but did not include the certificate. Also, it arrived a little earlier than the delay that "water proof test" should have added. I called and they assured me the test had been done, and they promptly sent me a certificate. It left me wondering.

As it turned out, my wife didn't swim with the watch for several months. Then, when we were up on a lake in the SC mountains, she went swimming. When she got out of the water, the face of the watch was completely fogged. Annoyed (and, yes, suspicious that it was somehow her fault-- a fault of my own), I checked the screw-down crown, which was firmly in place. I unscrewed it to see if the seal might be visibly damaged, but couldn't really tell. I secured it again, and told her not to swim with it again until we could return it.

When we returned home, I called Interwatches. They acknowledged that we had a guarantee. They told me to ship the watch to them right away, and they would take care of it.

A few days later I received a call from them. The agent, clearly foreign and with halting English, told me that their jeweler determined that the crown had not been screwed down completely, and this was the cause of the water breach. He explained that it was therefore not covered, and would cost me $85 to be serviced. Now, I am 100% certain that this is not true. I'm not 99.9% certain, but 100%. I checked that thing. I've owned a Rolex with a screw-down crown for 20 years, and I know how it works-- this is why I checked the thing when it happened (because I wasn't so sure she knew it).

I went ballistic. I explained to him the events, and told him that I had in fact checked the watch immediately upon discovering the problem. I insisted that there was NO WAY this was true, and that he needed to fix my watch under the $120 guarantee. We went round and round for 20 minutes, and he finally told me he would speak with his manager, who was conveniently "out."

When he called back the next day, I stood my ground. In fact, I insisted that if he refused to fix my watch under the warranty, that he should refund the $120 to me. He could take the $85 out of the refund. Again, he had to call me back.

Then I began to think: they've got my watch held hostage; it's only $85 to get it back, fixed. Standing on principle at that point might just cost me the watch. Then I hatched a plan: pay for the repair via American Express, then dispute the payment when the watch arrives. I called Amex to ask them about the situation. They explained to me that, even if I disagreed with the $85 extortion fee, so long as I agreed to pay it initially, I couldn't really dispute it-- not without lying about it.

The upshot is that I wasn't going to lie about the situation-- that was what they were doing, and I wasn't going to stoop to their level. I decided to pay the $85 just to get the watch back. I've chalked it up to experience, and I'll never do business with Interwatches again. Feel free to let me know if you have had a different experience.

A Little Help from My Friends

2007-11-17T09:34:00.000-05:00

It's nice to know that once-in-a-while you can provide someone with a little help. This email came from a post of mine about the VoicePro VP206, VP208, VP412 Programming Manual PDF download.

Here it is almost 2008 and the link still comes in handy for some of us. Our NEC DS2000 system is acting up amd it requires a professional programmer with special software to troubleshoot and do it justice. I've had a VP408 on standby for years. Can't find the manual, can't find the power supply. So, I hacked a computer power supply to get 24 volts (it wrks fine though the box says it needs 28 --- I'll buy a 28V regulated later).

Then I hit Google and kept coming up with the adverts for that printed manual. After a few search word changes your BlogSpot page popped up in 8th place on page 1. (Searching on "voicepro programming manual".)

Thank you!!

Love it!

Beware Expiring Product Links

2007-10-05T18:43:00.001-05:00

So I needed to recommend a replacement hard drive for a client's laptop. It needed to be a 2.5" ATA hard drive (not SATA). I did the research, and found a great deal on a 160Gb ATA hard drive. I sent the client the link to the product info page where he could just click "buy." I double-checked the link before I emailed it, as I often do, by copying and pasting it into another browser (not another window, but another browser altogether, in this case Firefox).

The client followed up on my email about 3 days later. He duly bought the drive, and called me when it arrived. When I opened the box and took out the drive, the drive was an SATA model!?! It was otherwise identical to what I had spec'd, but it was SATA and not ATA. Initially I thought they had just shipped the wrong thing, so I checked my original email to follow the same link. The link took me to the same drive he received-- I immediately thought I must have made a mistake. But I knew I had checked and double checked on this one.

I decided to investigate further. I looked for the same drive on the website by following a search on the site (rather than following my own link). Sure enough, I found the same drive-- but with a different link URL. I compared the two URLs to find that they were both using the manufacturer part number for the drive. The only difference between the two part numbers was that the SATA version had a "C" at the beginning.

The upshot is that the seller had run out of the desired model, and when their website responded to the link with the part number in it, it found a match in the newer model drive. Granted it was a partial match, but a match none-the-less. I plan to contact the webmaster to explain the error. But I don't expect to get very far.

Apple Repairs in Charleston, SC

2007-10-01T14:18:00.001-05:00

Charleston, South Carolina, now has two Apple Authorized Repair centers. While my company does just about all kinds of Macintosh troubleshooting, support and consulting, we don't do "repairs" (defined as repairing hardware components under warranty). For years Charleston has languished without an Apple Authorized Repair center, the closest one being Savannah, Georgia, or Columbia, South Carolina. Earlier this year L2 Technologies, from Beaufort, SC, moved into the Charleston area, near Red Top (why there?!?). I've blogged about them before.

Now in addition to L2 Technologies, we have Tech Plus. Tech Plus (Tech +?) has been around a long time, and I have referred many clients to them to get Mac repairs when out of warranty. I am ecstatic to report that they are now and Apple Authorized Repair Center, and can to repairs of Macintosh computers under Apple Warranty, or Apple Care.

In addition to repairs, both companies offer the full line of Apple Macintosh products for sale. Finally Charleston has a reasonable alternative to driving two hours for repairs. Plus, people can actually go somewhere and see Apple Products for sale here in town.

Recover from a dragging issue in Disk Utility

2007-09-13T18:41:00.001-05:00

I think this is an issue with Intel Macs, but it may be all Macs with a 10.4 Installer DVD. Apple has a support document, Unable to drag and drop in Disk Utility while started from install DVD, that explains a bug in Disk Utility found on some 10.4 Install DVDs (including my MacBook Pro's). I ran into this when my hard drive failed, and I needed to clone it to send it off to Apple for replacment -- and now again that I want to upgrade to a new 200Gb 7200/16Mb internal hard drive.

There is a workaround beyond those provided by Apple, assuming your internal hard drive has Disk Utility on it, it's in the normal place, and you are willing to use Terminal. After you boot from the Installer DVD, and are on the first installer screen (just past the language screen), go to the Utilities menu and choose Terminal. In Terminal, type:

cd "/Volumes/YourInternalHD/Applications/Utilities/
Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/"

Replace YourInternalHD with the actual name of your internal hard drive. Press Return, then type:

./Disk Utility

That's it. Disk Utility will launch off of your internal hard drive, and now you can drag within the Restore portion of the program.

IMAP Lesson

2007-09-03T09:57:00.000-05:00

I blogged earlier about using IMAP on your computer and iPhone, and there is one more lesson to add. I have now set this up on a couple of other people's iPhones and in their Apple Mail. You may have problems in Apple Mail with one of the folders you are saving to the server. The error will be something like "error - cannot save message." If this is with your drafts, you can't then save your drafts. If it is with something else, say, sent mail, this is a big problem.

The cure is simple. First, make sure that you are using an IMAP setup (see link above). If so, then select the IMAP (Drafts or whatever) folder in the Mailboxes column. Then, in the Menu bar, choose "Use this mailbox for..." from the Mailbox menu, and select accordingly. That's it. Mail just needed to be told which folder to use. This works for Trash, Sent, Drafts, or whatever, and you can use any folder name on the IMAP server you wish.

iCal and Address Book

2007-08-23T15:58:00.000-05:00

If you use iCal, you are probably familiar with the ability to invite others to events, and send yourself email reminders of events. If you aren't familiar with these features, you should get to know them. First, check your Address Book (Blue or Brown book icon with an @ on it), and find your "My Card" entry (under Card-->Go to My Card, or Make this My Card). Make sure you have filled out your email address here, or none of this works.

Today my wife asked me to set up an email reminder for her, in my iCal. I have an event every three weeks that she doesn't need on her calendar, but needs a heads up reminder a couple of days in advance. Well, you can't do this. iCal will send reminders only to email addresses on your My Card entry.

So, being the clever guy that I am, I decided to add my wife's email address to my card, and mark it spouse. That did the trick. I was able to set up an email reminder for her after that. Then she changed her mind, and wanted the event on her calendar-- she asked me to invite her to the event instead, and she'd just set up the reminder herself. Fine, so I removed the reminder and stuck her name in the Attendees field.

Only problem was, iCal no longer allowed me to send her invitations. This puzzled me. It was showing her name when I brought up the attendees. After staring at it, quitting iCal and tinkering for a few minutes, it dawned on me that iCal was thinking that the invite was to myself, since the email address was on my card. Sure enough, I removed her email from my card, and immediately afterwards, I was able to invite her to the event.

One last thing. She won't be able to set up reminders on the event I invited her to, since I control the event. What she will have to do is accept the event, and add it to her calendar. Then she will need to copy the event, and paste it a second time into the calendar. Then she will have to delete the original event (and choose do not notify back to me). Now she will be able to edit the event and add a reminder.

Sure would be nice if Apple allowed you to set a reminder on any event that appears in your iCal, regardless of how it got there.

Whose iPhone is That?

2007-08-15T07:36:00.001-05:00

I was reading through these iPhone tips over at O'Reilly when I remembered one of my own. Even if you use the "ICE" contact book entry, it does you no good if you lock your phone with a passcode.

However, the Desktop picture for the iPhone appears behind the passcode screen-- so anybody who turns on your phone sees that. Use your favorite image editing app (Photoshop, Gimp, etc.), and stick your name and emergency contact numbers (not your iPhone, of course) on it. Sync that image to your iPhone and set it as your desktop.

Apple Please give Me Text Selection

2007-08-11T10:26:00.000-05:00

The list of things people want on the iPhone is l o n g, but most of them are things that I really can live without. For instance, no voice-dialing; I only ever used this for primary contacts, and the Favorites feature more than makes up for this for me.

However, not being able to select text and copy-and-paste is killing me. There are a number of times when I am composing an email, and need to delete entire blocks of text, or at least rearrange blocks of text. This is normal stuff people. Give us text selection.

The other place I find the lack of text selection annoying is surfing. Often I'll come across a comment entry on a website where they put a URL in the text, but it's not a link. Normally I would just select this, then copy and paste it into the address bar. But I can't do this on the iPhone.

I hope Apple is hearing this one, because it is a huge productivity killer, and a gap that must be filled on the iPhone.

L2 Technologies

2007-08-11T10:21:00.001-05:00

I noticed a few people visiting this site were searching for L2 Technologies, a local Apple Dealer, and Apple Authorized Repair Center for both warranty service, and out-of-warranty service. Here is their contact information:

L2 Technologies
(843)573-2202
3874 Savannah Hwy, Unit 8
Johns Island, SC 29455

If you are looking for them, you must head down Highway 17 South, and pass Bee's Ferry Road. They will be on the right in a small strip mall about 500 yards past Bee's Ferry Road as you head south.

Use them if you need repairs, or are looking to buy new Apple computers and accessories.

My Own Plug: If you are looking for troubleshooting help, or advice without the pressure of sales, you can contact my company, Computer Consultants Group, Inc. We specialize in supporting Macintosh computers, Mac OS X, Windows and Unix; and we do not sell products, so our advice is unbiased by vendor relationships.

Computer Consultants Group, Inc.
(843) 722-7607
email at ccgnet.com

iPhone Mail Issue Recovery

2007-07-30T16:39:00.001-05:00

Ok, so in my last post I mentioned that syncing your Mail accounts to your iPhone could burn you if you tweak those settings. Specifically, if the locations of your Sent, Trash and Drafts change, you can end up with mail filed away on your iPhone, with no practical way of retrieving it. If you change your settings back to filing these folders on your IMAP server, you apparently lose the mail altogether-- the iPhone versions of those folders just disappear.

The fix is a simple one, although it takes a few steps. First, on the iPhone, change your settings back so that you are filing the mail on your iPhone. Now you can get to the "lost" folders. Since the IMAP versions of these folders will also be available to your iPhone mail, you can now move your mail into the correct location (one-at-a-time, ugh). Once you are done, change your settings back, make sure you UNCHECK syncing the settings for your mail account, and you're now safe.

iPhone Mail App

2007-07-30T15:37:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow will be three weeks of living with an iPhone. It is every bit as delicious today as it was when I first fired it up. I am using it a ton for browsing the internets. I do most of my mail on it. And I have found a new must-have app, Google Maps; how did I live without this before? Of course, all this instant, at-hand, digital wonder means I'm online more. Not sure if that's a good thing.

Today I want to talk about Mail. I mentioned using IMAP previously, and this is really the deal-maker if you want to use the same account on your iPhone and computer. Let me go over my setup.

If you setup your mail account(s) via the sync feature, you're in trouble if you play with your settings. You will soon discover that after a sync the settings will revert. This should be no surprise if you give it thought, but it caught me out. This can wreak havoc on your Sent, Drafts and Trash folders. Don't do this, instead setup the mail account manually on the phone. Trust me on this-- there is no real benefit to syncing the account that I can see. Let me tell you my setup so you can get the picture.

I want my computer to be my primary location for archived and filed email. I want my iPhone to have access to my primary email, and email that is in my GTD system, but no more. With that in mind, this is how I set up my IMAP in Apple Mail on my MacBook Pro.

Drafts: Under "Mailbox Behaviors" I checked "Store draft messages on the server" so I can start a message either on my iPhone or computer, and finish it on the other. Sent: I unchecked "Store sent messages on the server" because I also set "Delete sent messages when: Never." I keep over 6 months of sent mail at all times, not including what I've filed away. This would put me WAY over quota on the server, so I have Mail file it away on my hard drive. Junk: Next, I uncheck "Store junk messages on the server" and have junk nuked after 1 day (I review it daily). Trash: Lastly I check "Move deleted message to the Trash mailbox" but uncheck "Store deleted messages on the server." I like to keep 6 months of trash (history as far as I'm concerned), and it is surprising how often that is not enough. So that's my Mail setup on my Computer.

In setting up the IMAP on the iPhone, under advanced, I had to specify the IMAP Path Prefix as "INBOX" (YMMV, so check with your ISP). Then when I checked Mail, the iPhone showed all of the folders that had been created by Apple Mail. Good so far. But I still needed to give the iPhone a way to store Drafts, Sent mail, Trash and processed Junk. These folders (except Drafts) had not been created by the Mail App on my computer, because it wasn't using them. So, in Mail on my computer, I manually created three new IMAP folders, Sent, Trash and Junk by selecting the IMAP inbox, and just clicking the + to make a new folder. After having successfully verified my folders were found by the iPhone Mail app, I popped back into the iPhone Mail Settings, under Advanced, and pointed the Drafts, Sent and Trash to the corresponding folders on the server.

Now, the way I use these folders is important, because they are different folders than my computer is using. So, as I use the iPhone, it accumulates Sent mail and Trash in the IMAP folders. On my computer, I have to file the Sent mail away into my computers Sent folder. I do this at least daily. Also on my computer I open the IMAP Trash folder, select-all and press delete -- they go to the right place. As for Junk, since the iPhone has no junk mail filtering, and I still want my computer Mail app to learn the junk, I file junk mail into the Junk folder. Later on my computer I open the IMAP Junk folder and mark the mail as Junk (some will actually already be, and I just move those).

One very cool thing is that I can leave Mail open on my computer, and it will busily mark and move a lot of my Junk mail out of the way as it checks mail. Eventually I hope to have an AppleScript working with a Rule that will move the Sent, other Junk and Trash. Working on that.

iPhone Break

2007-07-21T17:38:00.000-05:00

Ok, I have had my iPhone for almost two weeks, time for an update. First, if you have an email account that supports IMAP, you really need to use IMAP for both your computer and your iPhone. Mail was of no real use to me until I did this. IMAP let's you create and use folders that are stored on your mail server- so you can keep some mail on the server and have access to it at all times. I set up all of my GTD related folders in IMAP, leaving the rest of my filed mail in Apple Mail on my MacBook Pro. This increased the usefulness of mail on my iPhone by an order of magnitude.

Safari on the iPhone is clearly version one. It quits on me frequently. Mind you, not as frequently as Netscape or Internet Explorer used to back in the day, but that ain't saying much. Still, my iPhone has definitely replaced my MacBook Pro as my casual surfing tool. For reading blogs and generally exploring the web for news and fun, it is a pleasure.

I am now a frequent user of SMS, something that before was limited to the occasional quick note. Twitter is largely responsible for this. I am now a twitter addict. It is a great excuse to get to know the keyboard.

The keyboard is still tripping me up. I am a pretty good touch typist, and learning to thumb type is difficult for me. A recent surprise was that I am better using the smaller version of the keyboard (the one you get with the screen in portrait) than the larger version. I think this is because the keys are closer, ironically.

I do not use the iPhone as an iPod much, mostly for podcasts. But today I was trying to listen to some Talking Heads and the iPod function just plain quit on me, twice. I have found that when this happens with Safari, it is best to turn the iPhone off and back on (reboot). This seems to cure the quits for both Safari and the iPod application.

Overall, I am far more pleased with iPhone than I expected. The keyboard is my greatest challenge, and I am eagerly anticipating the day when I finally "get it."

iPhone Update and Impressions

2007-07-14T11:22:00.001-05:00

About a week after I wrote my last note about the iPhone, my father offered to buy one for me "for services rendered" (Dad often stokes me some cash after I've resolved some issue on his computer). Anyway, after debating it for a day, I knew I couldn't resist that offer. Of course, I despaired of getting one because there is no Apple Store in South Carolina, and by all accounts the AT&T stores were sold out.

On a whim, and with 1/2 hour to kill, I swung by the AT&T store near Town Centre in Mt. Pleasant, SC, to see if they might have a phone or two. They had just gotten a whole shipment. 15 minutes later, I walked out with my 8Gb iPhone. Of course, I had an extra long appointment right after that, so the shrink-wrap didn't come off for another 4 hours.

I've had it now for a little over three days. It's great, but has definite room for improvement. Everyone is blogging about their iPhone now, so I'll keep my impressions short.

First, Wi-fi rules. Edge is Ok, and certainly tolerable on normal web pages in a pinch, but no match for Wi-fi. For the built-in services, such as SMS, Stocks, Maps, and Weather, Edge is just fine-- fast even.

Second, Safari is great on this thing. Apple has made the small screen highly usable for this. No Flash is a bit of a drawback. But then, I'm not a Flash fan, tending to develop using open standards, so that part of me actually cheers this decision. Form data-entry needs a bit of work, though.

As a phone, it is great. This is the first phone I've had where I could actually decipher and use the call handling features. I used to drop people all the time, and now I don't.

Visual voice mail is almost how it should be. Voice mails are actually downloaded to your device, so no connection is necessary to review voice mails. The downside is that you cannot do anything else while listening to voicemail-- not even take notes. That is a problem for me.

Mail is usable. But it needs to be able to rotate so you can use the larger keyboard. I assume that will come in an update.

Maps rock. I'm sure Treo users will think it old-hat, but Apple's implementation is stunning, and it works great over Edge.

Lastly, the keyboard is hard to use at first. Everyone says this, and they also say after a week you are cruising. I'm already light-years better with it than day-one, but with a ways to go. The technology behind the keyboard is nothing short of astonishing. Check out the keyboard video.

Got an iPhone Yet?

2007-06-30T10:07:00.000-05:00

I'm on the fence on the iPhone at this point. This is mainly because AT&T will charge me $119/month for a service plan that will give me the number of minutes per month that I currently get at SunCom for $60/month. Ouch, that's $720 more per year for the privilege.

That said, I'm also waiting to figure out how to integrate it into a GTD system. It won't be very useful to me unless I can take my Projects list and Contextual next-actions list with me. I'm currently working on a web-based GTD widget, and that may suffice, but for now I'm stuck with my laptop.

So, to rub things in, my buddy calls me at 3pm Friday to tell me that he's 8th in line at the store in Atlanta. Well, his KIDS were 8th in line-- he was off running errands. Then I get the first email about how awesome the phone is-- from the phone, of course. Still, $1,320 for my first year of service, including the phone, is steep. In fact, it's as steep as the three phones I and my employees now have.

AppleCare Redux

2007-06-09T16:19:00.000-05:00

A while back I wrote an entry about getting AppleCare. My main premise was that, in Charleston, SC, at least, it was the only way to get local hardware repairs. And it was onsite too boot. Not any more. Charleston finally has it's own Apple Authorized Repair center, L2 Technologies. No more onsite repair— you have to carry it in now. Darn. But at least we have someone local. If I ever find a website for them, I'll link it.

Getting Things Done

2007-06-09T16:04:00.000-05:00

I'm definitely not a self-help book reader. Being a Christian, I have a healthy suspicion of things under my own power— but that is a different blog. Anyway, being a non-self-help book reader, I have avoided the whole "Getting Things Done" genre of things. But, a friend of mine gave me a copy of kGTD. Not knowing what the initials meant whatsoever, I took a trip to the kGDT website.

Upon arriving, I decided to view the intro video, linked from the page (above). What I witnessed left me in awe. Not that the software excited me, it did not. In fact, it looked more cumbersome than I would have hoped. No, what excited me was the very simple concept of making Tasks Lists based on the Context in which the task can be done— then doing items grouped by context, not project. Since that is mainly how my life operates already, except my model is based on interruptions more than anything else, it was a profound moment.

It was profound enough for me immediately to look at and buy (on Amazon) David Allen's Getting Things Done. I finished the book today, and it has already changed my outlook. Will I transform my world by it? I'm not sure for how long, but I can say that I have already cleared my desk and set down the road toward a more directed method of handling my day.

The key concept that brought me here, the one of organizing by context, is not the one that will keep me here. It is nice, but I found when I tried to implement it in my own way, it fell short. So I determined to read the whole book before I tried to re-order my world. Right away Allen introduces a concept that I know will work for me. That is one of keeping your head entirely clear of the tasks of the day/week/month/year/life— and at that point he promises the rest of the book will teach you how. He had me at "clear."

I have spent the last several years trying to get my inbox in front of me, or "in my way," so that I will deal with it. I knew that 1) I would never remember to do things on time, and 2) as many times as I tried, I never looked at "To Do Lists." Those two problems pretty much shot-down the whole idea of generalized organizational tools— such as my unused Palm Pilot and software. Oh sure, I use a calendar, and that has been sacrosanct, but it never successfully incorporated a list of things to be done that didn't have specific dates and times.

So, I put things in my way. That means physically placing things where I would trip over them, or have to move them. It also meant directing things to my email inbox. My inbox is the one place I consistently review, and I somehow developed the habit years ago of keeping my inbox down to a single screen. I constantly tell people "you can't tell me anything, email it to me." Even my wife caught on. If it lands in my inbox, I deal with it— eventually, anyway.

Allen sets out the concept that you have to have an inbox (or inboxes, but not many) that you process regularly. Then you either define projects from items, file items away or trash these items as you process your inbox. This is very similar to how I already handled email— I just needed to think about paper and other things in a similar fashion.

Allen's premise is that you must get all of these inbox items into an external system that you trust in order to get them out of your head. If you haven't gotten them out of your head, your head will constantly remind you of them (at all the wrong times) and your conscience will create a growing, non-specific, burden upon you. Sound familiar? No more for me. I knew that if what he was teaching would help me clear my head, and trust my external system, I would do it.

So, I set up an Outliner program with my Projects Lists, assigning a Next Action to each item, and a Context to each Next Action. Then I expanded the concept of my Projects Lists to incorporate everything in all aspects of my life. Ok, not everything, not yet, but everything that has occurred to me so far. I treated my entire desk as an inbox, and processed everything into my lists, or filing, or trash. I still have to tackle my bookshelves and countertop, but all of the stuff that is related to current things in my life has been touched.

You won't believe how freeing it is.

128Bg is Enough

2007-05-07T16:03:00.000-05:00

A client had a failing hard drive, on a PowerMac G4 Mirrored-Drive Doors. He bought a 300Gb replacement drive, and I went over to install it. Upon trying to format the drive, the drive appeared in the Disk Utility as a 128Gb drive. Huh. Odd. The last time I saw something like this had to do with a boot disk not supporting a bus in the system— but this was a newer installer DVD and should not have had the problem.

So I decided to call the HD manufacturer, Seagate, to see about returning the "defective" HD. I mentioned my concerns about the computer itself maybe being the problem, and he did some research. Turns out that the computer simply didn't support drive sizes larger than 128Gb, and it would be Ok to use the drive if we were willing to live with the smaller partition size. Turns out that still gave us 3 times the storage as before, so no worries.

Are You a Photographer?

2007-05-05T10:32:00.005-05:00

I'm an enthusiastic amateur photographer. A fellow photographer and friend pointed out Strobist.com, written by David Hobby, back in January. After perusing the site a bit, I started reading his Lighting 101 section. Boy, was that ever an eye-opener. I am a sucker for stuff that is written by people in my demographic (Hobby and I are about the same age, born in the mid-'60s), and Hobby's style and know-how gripped me from the start.

Starting June 4th is Hobby's Lighting 102. This gives you fellow photogs enough time to read up on Lighting 101, get your Flickr Account and join the fun. I can guarantee you that you won't read another blog and join another group that will be more informative than these. You will learn more, even if you are an advanced pro, from this great group of people, than you will learn anywhere else.

Oh, and while you're at it, check out my Flickr pages.

Browse the Network

2007-05-05T10:32:00.003-05:00

I had a user with a brand-new MacPro who could not browse her local LAN. She had all other services, email, web, ftp, printing, etc. But when it came to using the Network icon to browse, all she got was a list showing Applications, Library and Users. This had been going on for weeks, and persisted through a reboot. Hmmm... I looked at the top-level of the HD in the terminal, and noticed that the date on the folder named Network was over a year old. So, I nuked it using the sudo rm command. After a reboot, all was fine again. Yay!

Reboot D@&nit

2007-05-05T10:32:00.001-05:00

So I get a panicked voicemail from a user who can't print. When she tries to print, it's spitting out the correct number of pages, only they're blank. Her project is so urgent that she's grabbed her files and gone to another computer to print, not waiting on a return call-- good idea, btw.

What she didn't try before calling was a reboot. These, of course, are the first words out of my mouth: let's try rebooting. Guess what?

It worked.

Google is Serious

2007-05-05T10:31:00.003-05:00

Webmasters: Have you ever read Google's Webmaster Guidelines? Have you ever thought that, "Hey, they're just guidelines and that bit about being removed from their index is just to scare me?" Think no more: one of my own sites got removed for using so-called hidden text.

The front page of my company site was created way too long ago, and violates all kinds of rules I preach about every day. The primary one is that there was no content on the page, just a picture and image links to inside pages-- horrible for any kind of search engine optimization. So, because we did have a little bit of content inside the site, we stuck a blurb of sorts on the front page in tiny black-on-black text. And it worked; search engines, including Google, found it and us. That was literally years ago.

Today it came back to bite me. I got a form letter from Google informing me that the site was being removed, and it quoted the actual hidden text. At first I thought it was a hoax, or possibly a scam. But the mail headers proved the mail originated at Google. I had no choice but to take it seriously.

Fortunately, it was no big deal, as the text was perfectly Ok to appear on our home page-- we just decided to hide it years ago because we liked the photo-only look. I updated the text, which hadn't been touched for years, gave it some space so it would appear below the scroll, and made it visible.

We can now say we practice what we preach. Well, mostly.

Mac OS X Rules

2007-05-05T10:31:00.001-05:00

My laptop has been needing repair for a while. I'm writing this on my kids iMac because my MacBook is at Apple right now, waiting on parts (a new DVD drive). While I am tethered to a desktop/keyboard/mouse, I feel rudderless. When you get used to having all of your info, email, documents, software, everything, in a bag with you everywhere you go, having it all sit on a desk is quite limiting.

That said, Mac OS X simply rocks. Before my laptop got shipped off, I copied my user folder over to an external hard drive I keep handy for just such operations (actually, I just xeroxed the complete hard drive using Disk Utility). Then I created a new user on the Kids iMac, performed a tiny bit of magic in Netinfo Manager, mapping my user folder over to the external drive (don't do this at home), and bingo, I am able to log in to my own desktop-- email, calendar, address book, everything in one fell-swoop. And what's even better is that with the data on the external, portable, drive, I can perform this same operation on any other Mac OS X computer in about 2 minutes-- almost as good as having the laptop with me.

Thanks Apple for making it so easy, even for us IT guys.

Low Tech Solutions Rule

2007-05-05T10:30:00.001-05:00

Ok, so the name of this blog is LowTechHiTech.com. Why? Because often us IT guys take the long way around to solve a problem, when it could be more easily solved (and cheaply) by other means. After all, why use a small word when a diminutive one will do?

Case in point: a client had need of a more reliable internet connection for managing their own website. Their internal LAN connection has a horribly slow firewall that restarts all the time, but the IT department won't rid themselves of it because it does, after all, protect the Windows PCs. But marketing uses Macs, and so can get away with a separate connection not behind the firewall. The only problem is that the internal Lotus Notes mail server must be gotten to on the LAN.

No problem, Macs can effortlessly support multiple simultaneous connections on different (or the same) network interfaces. Enter a second internet connection on an Airport network. So now the Mac users are connected to both the wired LAN, and a much faster wireless internet connection via an Airport base station.

Of course, every solution introduces another problem, and, in this case, their backup became the new problem. We use Retrospect, and it seems to have a problem when two networks are available-- often not "seeing" the backup clients which are clearly available. The solution was for the users to turn off their wireless network before leaving at night. Of course, this meant they had to remember to turn off their Airport.

Enter Radio Shack. I bought a simple "coffee timer" for $10 at Radio Shack, and plugged the Airport base station into it. I set it to turn off at 7pm (before the backups begin), and on at 7am (before anyone arrives). Problem solved for $10. In retrospect it seems so obvious, but consider that I had spent 30 minutes writing an Applescript to turn off/on their individual connections before realizing that there was a much easier way.

More on Backups

2006-09-04T12:20:00.000-05:00

A well thought-out contingency plan (for disaster, emergency, fire, theft, employee sabotage) can be summed up in one word: backup. If you have a good backup system in place, one which includes rotating your backup media off-site, you are pretty much covered for disaster. This includes hurricanes, fire, and theft. Here are a few of my thoughts on this:

1) Software. I prefer Retrospect. I know there are plenty of detractors of this software, but I have been using it for over 15 years (yep) and it has never failed me. Oh, I have had plenty of backups that failed-- but it has never been the software that caused it. Failures are caused by inattention, bad media (which, if you are attentive, you catch), and procrastination.

2) Automation. One of the reasons I love Retrospect is that, once set up, it does everything but switch out the backup media. My experience is that fewer than 1 in 20 clients, if left to determine when the backups should be run, will actually do it. This is why I design backup scripts to backup every day. For Mac OS X users, I have Retrospect backup "User folder and Prefs." With Windows, it's not quite as easy, but documents, desktop and the email files are easy enough to define for the backup. Plus I use "Backup Server" mode. This is a feature of Retrospect that allows it to backup 24/7, use any available backup media, and track what files need to be backed up to which backup set. Leave it to the user, and you'll never have as good of a backup.

3) Redundancy. A single backup is not, in and of itself, sufficient. Firstly, what happens if you have a fire? But, more to the point, many times I have to go to a backup not to restore a failed hard drive, but because a user screwed something up. With only one backup, often enough, the "good" file is gone, replaced by the screw-up (even with incremental backup, when you backup to external hard drives, you have to start over periodically). Having 2 or even 3 drives in some kind of regular rotation gives you the grace to choose from many different versions of files when you restore.

4) Off-site storage by a principal of the company. If you want to be safe from disaster, then you simply must have one of your backups stored off site. Don't make the mistake of giving it to some employee to do, because s/he won't have the investment in safety that you, a principal, will have. Yes, I have had a client get burned because an employee he had to terminate just so happened to be the keeper of backups. Due to stupidity, he gave her a chance to "copy" some of her files before making her leave. She trashed their entire project folder, then went home and cut the ribbon cables on the backup drive. We were blown away-- no one expected this person to respond this way. But people are seldom what they appear to be.

5) Don't be too ambitious. Yep, you heard it. I am paranoid when it comes to backup, plus a cynic. Paranoid in that I think about disaster. I've seen theft, sabotage, failure, lightening.... pretty much everything. But I'm also a student of human nature, and understand business dynamics, thus I'm a cynic. People are the least attentive when they are under pressure, and what causes pressure in businesses is being busy. When you are the busiest, you generate the most work, you push your equipment the most, and you have the least amount of time. If backups require too much of your precious time, you won't do them. Although it may cost more to setup in terms of hardware, I always recommend a dedicated backup system-- an entire computer devoted to this. If a user's workstation is the backup computer, backup will get blown off when the company is the busiest; and if you backup too much (systems and apps for instance), the backups require too much storage, and therefore more maintenance, and eventually become a nuisance. So balance is achieved by not being too ambitious.

6) Backup to hard disk. Tape and CD/DVD media are a nuisance. In the case of a server with over 1Tb (terabyte) of storage, you have no choice. But most small companies won't face that kind of storage requirement. External hard drives, from 250Gb up to 1Tb are ideal. They are portable, and easily swappable. Buy two, and swap them out once a week (not daily, see #5). Assuming you keep one off-site (see #4), even in the worst disaster, you can't lose more than 1 week of data-- acceptable by most standards. If you can't stand to loose that much, you can do other things (daily swapping, etc.), but then, you're not the target for this entry.

So, the contingency plan for your computer systems becomes this: when the storm comes, leave town with the backup drive in your possession. That's it. You may think that you need to plan/prepare to protect computers, etc., but in reality, this is folly. If you have plenty of time, and won't risk life or limb, go get the other backup drive too.

In the event of a truly devastating event, such as a Katrina (or a Hugo, more dear to us in the Lowcountry), there isn't much you can do to protect the hardware. And the idea of taking hardware with you is foolishness. Also, the idea that you should make employees do the same is even worse. Abandon the hardware (except the backup drive(s), of course). Take your family, your photo albums and heirlooms; let your employees do the same. Since you haven't burdened your employees with anything but their own worries, you'll have more loyal employees, because they know you have a plan to put it all back together-- a plan that doesn't encumber them with your problems.

The idea is that computers and software are covered by insurance (if not, you should look in to your insurance), and are easily replaced (sometimes preferably replaced, as in older hardware). If your backup is done right, and you lose everything at the office, you can be back up and running in the time it takes to get new hardware (usually days), and restore the data (another day or two). The assumption here is that if you are facing total devastation, this timeframe is more than sufficient because of all the other stuff you are facing (new location, no power, etc.).

Now, this is not to say that you should not take steps to secure your computers and building. Of course you should. You don't want minor damage needlessly taking out your systems. Shut things down, unplug them, move them to safer locations in your building. Do this under the advisement of your computer support provider (you don't want to be dismantling RAID drives, or other things that might literally be damaged by your acts of protection). Bear in mind that I am not addressing non-computer related files and paperwork-- you're on your own for those. (But it's all digital now-a-days, right? A real argument for digital document storage, in my opinion.)

I won't go in to all of the potential ins-and-outs here, because every company will be slightly different. But I'll leave you with this advice: think about the reality of total loss. Consider having no building, no computers, and no power for a few weeks, and people scattered around while their personal affairs are dealt with (because it is just as likely that their homes will be similarly affected). How does a small business cope with this? If you have your data, and loyal employees, all else can be put back together.

More on Power

2006-09-01T12:19:00.000-05:00

We had a little storm blow by, Ernesto, a tropical depression/storm/hurricane wannabe, on Thursday. I have a love/hate relationship with storms like this. On the one hand, they are a nuisance / menace, on the other hand, they can be good for business. Many people go around in a panic right before such a storm, doing things they otherwise wouldn't do. This can be totally avoided with a simple, well thought-out contingency plan. More on that later.

Anyway, on Friday I got a call from a user who had unplugged her iMac on Wednesday in preparation for the storm. She came in to find it wouldn't start up. I see enough computers that spend their lives always plugged in, and left on, to know that many of them are temperamental if they have been left unplugged for a day or so. I told her to be sure that it wasn't the outlet, and to have a bit of patience. In other words, keep trying what she was doing-- in this case, unplugging it, giving it a rest, plugging it back in, holding down the power for a few second, etc., etc.

A couple of hours later, she called back, and had given up. So I swung by. 30 seconds later her computer was merrily booting up. I wish I could have told her the "trick" I used. But, really, it was just a tiny bit of patience. All I did was what I told her to do, which was try a different outlet, and hold down the power button for just a couple of seconds. She was flabbergasted.

Most of the time, when I perform a bit of "magic" for a client, it has nothing to do with expertise or knowledge. It's just a bit of patience and clear-headedness. I'm constantly telling people to plug and unplug, wait a bit, look at their watch to make sure they have waited 60 seconds (or 5 minutes, whatever). And I am astonished at the number of people who just won't do this. I guess I should be happy-- after all, I make a ton of money from people like this. Still, I hate to make money this way, and I the more I help people like this, the more dependent they are upon me. I have a family-- I don't need any more dependents.

See my next entry for more on backup.

Power Adapters Matter

2006-08-18T10:25:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine had been having a terrible time with his internet connection and his Airport Express Airtunes/iTunes setup. It all started when he got hit by lightening and had to replace his router.

The setup was like this (--> means wired connection):

Config 1
Cable Modem--> Linksys router (4-port switch)
Linksys router --> iMac
Linksys router --> Airport Express
Linksys router --> Airport Extreme

After reconnecting, and finally getting the internet working again, he could no longer "see" either of his Airports from his iMac. We beat our heads against the wall for quite a while over this, but I eventually had him go buy an ethernet switch to use in place of the switch in the router. So, the new setup looked like this:

Config 2
Cable Modem--> Linksys router (4-port switch)
Linksys router --> Ethernet switch
Ethernet switch --> iMac
Ethernet switch --> Airport Express
Ethernet switch --> Airport Extreme

This solved the problem. I'm still trying to figure out if the router switch was just plain bad, or somehow was filtering the Airport connections.

But then he got hit by lightening again, and blew out the second router. This time he bought a Linksys Wireless router to replace it. He plugged it all back in just the way it was in Config 2, but could never get it to work. He could plug the iMac into the cable modem, and that worked, but no other setup seemed to work. So, he sent me out to his house to have a look.

The first thing I noticed was that he had laid out all three routers (the two dead ones which were identical, and the wireless one) for me to look over. Upon examining these, I realized that there were only two power adapters-- one connected to the second dead router, and one connected to the wireless router-- with one still in the box. The power adapters were, to the casual eye, identical.

I checked the voltages on the power adapters, and sure enough, two were 9 volt, and one was 12 volt. The wireless router had a 9-volt power adapter plugged in to it. I couldn't find the spec on the router itself, but guessed that it must be 12 volt, based on process of elimination. My friend had left the old power adapter in place, and just plugged the new router in to it.

So, I plugged in the 12 volt power adapter to the new router and that solved the problem. Moral of the story: replace it ALL when you have to replace something.

I still don't know why the the Linksys router somehow blocked or filtered the connection to his Airports. If you know of a reason, I'd love to hear from you at "bill at metatation dot com."

My Friend's Blog

2006-07-04T13:09:00.000-05:00

Jim Belton, a friend of mine and a relative www novice, has jumped both-feet into the blogosphere. The title of his blog is Abortion, Choice and Reason. I can't think of a more incendiary topic. He has written quite a long essay on the matter, and is inviting comment. Have fun.

MTR (Matt's Traceroute)

2006-06-03T13:26:00.000-05:00

Matt's Traceroute is one of the best traceroute/ping utilities I've ever found. But I couldn't install it on my new MacBook Pro :-(

I scoured their website http://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/ Matt's Tracereroute MTR and found a simple fix that worked. It was listed as a fix for version 0.56 on Mac OS X 10.3, but I took a shot and it fixed the install problem.

Download the latest mtr (as of now 0.71) from their site, and before you run configure, edit the dns.c file. Add the following line at the top of the #includes:

#include <nameser8_compat.h>

Then do your ./compile, then make, then make install (I used sudo for all of mine, but you may not have to).

Now you have your mtr compiled on your nice new Intel Mac.

LG LST-3410a Troubleshooting

2006-06-03T12:25:00.000-05:00

I noticed a bunch of searches in my web logs for the title of this entry, so I figured I'd share my experiences.

My PVR is an LG LST-3410a, sporting an ATSC digital tuner and HDTV from a rooftop antenna. It gets its TV Guide info over the air, which allows you easily to record upcoming shows. It also allows you to schedule regular timed recordings for stations that might not be on the guide.

TV Guide
The first thing to know is that TV Guide is ANALOG-- not digital. This means that your recorder must have one or more of your local analog stations in the channel lineup in order to receive TV Guide. Those stations must be ones that carry the TV Guide signal-- which you may not be able to determine without contacting TV Guide (which I had to do). In my area, Charleston, SC, the only reliable source is the local channel 4. This happens also to be the weakest of the stations I receive.

So, do NOT do what I did and remove all of the analog stations from your channel lineup. I did this because in my town all of the analog stations also broadcast in digital, so I never have a reason to watch the analog version (except in rainstorms, bah). If you do this, you will discover that within a few days you will lose much of your TV Guide information.

Also, although your guide setup allows you to change the channel for a particular station (in my case analog 4 could be changed to digital 4-1), do NOT change the one that your TV Guide comes in on. Because if you do this it will cause your tuner NOT to search the analog signal for the TV Guide. If you do this, you can lose all of your guide info.

Grab TV Guide Manually
Sort of. Ordinarily, the LG will download the TV Guide data only when it is off. This is because the tuner must switch to the analog channel for your guide-- which it can't do if you have the unit on and in use. If you know the analog station that locally broadcasts your TV Guide, and you happen to want to watch it, tune to that station and your unit will immediately begin downloading TV Guide data while it is on. This is a great way to jump-start the download process. You can even do this while watching a recorded show.

Invalid Channel for Scheduled Recording
Because the recording of programs relies on date and time info, if your LG date gets out of whack due to a power interrupt or something else, you can get this error. Sometimes, a regularly scheduled recording of a weekly program can cause this. I suspect it happens with the program drops off the schedule for a week because it was preempted. But, this can just happen for no apparent reason.

When this happens, the TV Guide will no longer come up, and you'll get this error every time you turn on your unit. In my experience, it will not cure itself, and you won't get your guide back without intervention.

The fix is to turn off your unit, then unplug it for 15 seconds or so (long enough for it to lose the time). Then, when you turn it back on, as soon as you can, go to the TV Guide. If you can't get in, unplug it again and start over. Once in the TV Guide, go in to your scheduled recordings and delete everything. After you've done that, power off the unit, then power it back on and set the time manually (or tune it to your TV Guide analog channel and let it set it's own time).

Box.net

2006-05-26T11:45:00.000-05:00

Just found a free online storage site (1Gb of storage for free) that works with WebDAV on your Mac.

Once you have your account setup, go to your Finder and choose Go-->Connect to Server... and enter the following:

https://www.box.net/dav

Enter your login and password and your Box.net files appear on your desktop in a volume named Dav. Pretty cool.

The Dav features are a little buggy, but they work and can only get better over time. I'm using it to store installers and stuff that I often need at clients, but don't always have with me.

Voice Pro VP206, VP208, VP412 PDF Manual

2006-05-18T21:41:00.000-05:00

[7/12/2006, Since writing this I have been contacted by the publisher of the printed manual I refer to below. Apparently they have updated the manual a bit, correcting some problems people have had with this original manual. He wasn't specific, so I don't know what those issues may be. If I get another update, I'll add that too. So, $20 might not be a bad deal after all; also, last I checked, the price was $15.]

My Voice Logic Voice Pro VP206 is a great voice mail and office attendant. I use it as an announce only system which transfers calls directly to my employees cellphones. It's great. Too bad the company that makes it is gone.

My system needed to be reprogrammed after a power failure earlier this week (the internal battery is dead), and I needed access to the manual. My manual was at home, a 40 minute round trip away, so I figured I could Google it to get a copy.

All of the Google results point to this website that wants to sell you a print version for about $20. That's just wrong. After frustrating myself for a few minutes trying to find another version, I realized that I had a PDF version of the Voice Pro manual stowed away in my documentation folder. I had downloaded it when I was investigating purchasing the unit several years ago.

So, here it is in all it's FREE glory, visit my real blog to download the Voice Logic Voice Pro Installation Programming Manual for models VP206, VP208, and VP412 (PDF, zipped, 3.8Mb). This also includes the Quick Start Guide and the Voice Pro Addendum SWV 2.02. Enjoy. Oh, and if you grab this, shoot me a quick note using the email link at the very bottom of this page to tell me how you found me.

MacBook Pro and Photoshop CS2

2006-05-18T21:40:00.000-05:00

If you have a MacBook Pro (mine is the 17") and want to install Adobe Photoshop CS2, you'd better do it before you install the Security Update 2006-003 (Intel). If you try to install it after this update, it will lockup you entire computer right after the install begins.

Installing Adobe Photoshop CS2 on a MacBook Pro
If this happens to you, reinstall Mac OS X 10.4.5 from the installer disk that came with your computer. Then, before you do anything else, install your Photoshop software. After that, update Photoshop completely. Then update Mac OS X. I hope this saves you some time. This probably is the same for Adobe Creative Suite CS2, although I haven't tried that.

Apple Does NOT Mean Business

2006-04-06T12:45:00.000-05:00

If Apple really cared to compete in the business world, it would act as though its computers were the mission-critical tools of business that most of their customers require. The average business user can no more function without his computer for 2 days than he can function without a telephone. Ok, maybe that's a bit too harsh, but think about this: what if you could not access any computer for a week? I don't mean while you're on vacation, but I mean during the normal business week. I don't know about you, but I would effectively be out of business by the end of the week.

Why am I on about this? AppleCare. While other top-tier computer makers all offer on-site warranty, Apple has a half-assed version. At best. AppleCare offers on-site repair only if you are outside of a certain radius of an Apple Service center— I think it's 50 miles. But even then, you have to meet certain criteria in order to get the support. Dell just sends someone out. Yes, you jump through a few hoops, but they send someone. Why? Because they understand that if you are without your computer, you are losing revenue. Apple? Well, since everyone who uses Apple must be a raving fan, it's a privilege to have one, and if it breaks, well, it's no trouble at all to wait a week, or 2 or 3 to get it repaired. Or not a problem to drive 2 hours to get it repaired.

Bunk.

I live in Charleston, SC. The nearest Apple Authorized AppleCare or Warranty service center is in Savannah, Ga. That's 2 hours away. If I have to truck a computer down there for repair, that's a total of 8 hours in a car (4 down and back to take it, 4 down and back to get it). I could FedEx it, too. So, warranty repair costs either $150 round-trip, give-or-take, or 8 hours in a car.

Now, to Apple's credit, you can get on-site repair, if you jump through the right hoops. I have done it for a number of clients, on G5s, iMacs, and others. I typically have to spend 3-4 hours total on the phone to get this to happen. (See my blog entry Enroll Your AppleCare for more on how to make it harder.) But today I really discovered just how hard Apple can make it.

Here are the facts: iMac G5, purchased 4/29/2005 that has AppleCare on it. It began to Kernel Panic for the user last week. I did all of the normal troubleshooting, the short version: swapped out the RAM with an identical twin iMac's RAM, erased the hard drive and zeroed-all-data and reinstalled from scratch. The thing still Kernel Panics, sometimes even trying to boot from the install CD (which works flawlessly in the twin). There's much more, but suffice it to say that I and the Apple Tech agree it has to be the logic board.

Here's the rub: the RAM is not Apple original, we replaced the original (upon purchase) with 2 x 1-GB chips— and threw away the 256Mb chips (from it and the twin). Ok, fine. We swapped the RAM from the twin, which works fine with either set of RAM. So it's clearly not the RAM. But since we don't have the original chips to put in, even though clearly it's not the RAM at fault, Apple refuses to dispatch a repair person. We must carry it in for service. If we had the 256Mb chip, they'd send someone out. Oh, and Apple no longer sells 256Mb chips for the iMac G5.

The upshot is that the Apple Tech was very nice and is shipping me a "replacement" 256Mb chip to use. Of course, it will cost me $150 if I don't send it back. With that in the iMac, I will be able to call back. Assuming it fails— is there any doubt?— they will then send out a repair person.

Let's summarize: I called yesterday, 4/5/2006 with the issue; I had to call back today after swapping the RAM (which didn't help my situation). Now, it will be 4/12/2006 (earliest) when I get the dispatched RAM; then I'll call back; it will be 4/14/2006 (again, earliest) that a dispatch comes out. In reality, it will be 4/19/2006 before the system is repaired. That's 2 weeks. That's 2 weeks for a computer with an extended warranty which is supposed to be on-site.

Now, I ask you, does this make you think Apple cares about the needs of a business user? Not me. AppleCare is meaningless, and in this case worthless. The 2 weeks of downtime for the user is FAR more than the value of the computer— maybe as much as 10 times. Yes, we actually have another computer to use in the meantime; after all, we actually care about our business, and that of our customers, unlike Apple.

Update: 4/19/2006 Got the 256Mb chip and the Mac does not fail. But it fails with any of the 4 (3rd party) 1Gb chips, all of which work in the other identical iMac G5. Apple said no dice, it is the RAM at fault. So we bought a 1Gb RAM chip from the Apple Store. 5/3/2006: When we finally got it, It failed in the iMac G5. So, IT WAS NOT THE RAM. Finally, Apple relented and sent someone out, who replaced the logic board. He was nice enough to put the 2 3rd party 1Gb chips in for us. Now all is working perfectly.

Bellsouth Email Issues

2006-01-24T11:47:00.000-05:00

Bellsouth has been having worse and worse problems with the sending of email over the past few weeks/months. I finally had a chat with their online support. Here is the transcript.

me : We send via mail.bellsouth.net

me : This happens to everyone I know. Is there something wrong with the bellsouth mail servers?

BellSouth eAgent : Hello. You have reached BellSouth FastAccess DSL eChat Agent Beverly. I am happy to assist you with this issue. May I please have your DSL phone number to access your account information?

me : (my)phonenumber

BellSouth eAgent : Thanks

BellSouth eAgent : We have had issue with the email servers the past few weeks.

me : Any ETA on a solution?

BellSouth eAgent : We have also upgraded the email servers which did encounter a few issues.

BellSouth eAgent : Everything should be complete later today.

me : So all will be well sometime later today, and you've put in new servers in the recent past. Got it. Thanks.

BellSouth eAgent : Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

me : No, that's it. Thanks

BellSouth eAgent : Please visit our online resources at http://help.bellsouth.net/bellsouth/asp/home.asp.

Yeah, right. Well, hopefully their problems will actually go away. We'll see.

Buy the Extended Warranty

2005-12-28T16:26:00.000-05:00

I have always been against extended warranties. Always. My theory is that, like gambling, the odds are loaded in favor of the house. And they are. The analogy falls apart though when you consider that the price of the warranty is a fixed cost, and not a black hole like a casino is.

But my thinking was this: not only was the cost, in the long run, more expensive, but by the time something did break (out of warranty), you'd want to replace it. Right? After all, technology progresses so fast that a 2-year-old computer ought to be replaced anyway, right? A computer dying just gives you a very good excuse for a new one. So extending the warranty simply enforces old technology on to you. Not good in my (old) opinion.

My previous post about AppleCare was one in a long string of recent incidents where warranty service was required by a client of mine. In every case, having the extended warranty was a God Send. And in every case the unit would have still been under warranty. So, the extended warranty was good not because the repair was covered cost-wise, but because the level of service offered was much greater. Think about it: there is a huge difference between obtaining service from a service provider, and obtaining service from an entity who thinks of you as a long-term customer. Add to that the fact that AppleCare gives you on-site coverage, and you've changed my mind.

Now, not every extended warranty will be the same, so you have to use your judgement here. But when it comes to computers, any warranty plan that includes on-site service will get my dollars from here on out. So Apple and Dell will both get my warranty business, and any other significant purchases from vendors offering extended, on-site warranty, will get my dollars too.

As a related anecdote, my father bought me a Nikon Coolpix 5700 camera for Christmas in 2003. This camera is a great pro-sumer camera. I found him a "deal" online for $200 below list price ($899, it cost $699). Dad, being a retired real estate broker, was a sucker for the add-ons. (He always told me that a sales person was the easiest to sell to, and he is proof.) So, he bought an extra generic memory card, a set of lens filters, a carry case, a spare battery and the extended warranty. He spent as much on the extras as he did on the camera: $700 worth of extras that, separately, could have been bought for $200.

But, the warranty was a smart deal. It is a 5-year warranty. He bought two of everything because he bought one for himself. His camera went back for repair last year. This year, just before my 4-year-old daughter's Christmas program, my camera died. It worked in all respects except that the CCD must have blown up, click on the previous link for examples. So that's two cameras repaired in less than a year, with 3 years left on the warranty. That's a good buy.

Enroll Your AppleCare

2005-12-28T15:43:00.000-05:00

Wow, sometimes the hardest part about obtaining service is the paperwork. I'll give you the short version first: if you buy AppleCare, you must enroll it to obtain service. And God forbid that you should throw away your AppleCare box. This is exactly what one of my clients didn't and did (respectively) do.

The PowerMac G5, dual 2Ghz had always been quirky (this PowerMac G5), and I'd always suspected hardware problems. The main symptoms were that the fans would run hard when the G5 was barely working. If you did something really challenging, it sounded like it was going to take off. Often it would kernel-panic, and many mornings we found it with the fans running full-blast, but a dead screen. Plus a myriad of other problems (some of which are discussed in the above link). At any rate, the G5 had been through every software fix possible (archive install, reformatting, etc.). So, it needed fixing.

The trouble with this, though, is that the G5 was a production machine, and always in use. A few crashes a week were more tolerable than a few days of downtime. So all of my previous repair attempts had to be completed within a fairly narrow window. As luck would have it, we finally got a real server (Xserve) installed for this client and the G5 was replaced with the old server (an identical G5).

With the G5 now "spare" I had the luxury of bringing it down for extensive testing. We took the hard drive out of this G5 and put it into the old server, putting the server HD into this G5. Since they were "twins" this was a great troubleshooting step. In one move we eliminated any possibility of software problems, versions, etc. But the machine still crashed, even when doing nothing. Gotta be hardware. Of course, the Apple Hardware Test (AHT) turned up no errors; darn.

Since the G5 had AppleCare, I knew that Apple would be much more helpful and more ready to listen to my complaints. The thing you have to know is that Charleston is 2 hours from any authorized service provider. Without AppleCare you are driving to Savannah, GA, or Columbia, SC. With AppleCare, you miraculously find out that there is a local warranty repair company who will come out to service your Mac.

Well, it had AppleCare, and I had an invoice to prove it, but the box was nowhere to be found, and it had never been enrolled at Apple. This would have been a total loss had we not bought it directly from Apple. Since they had records of the purchase, they were willing to work with me. Of course, it took 3 hours on the phone to get all of the paperwork found and the product enrolled. After that nightmare (4 total hours on the phone over a 5 hour period in two phone calls), I finally got a dispatch for a technician to come out an service it. Yea!

Vacation Blog

2005-12-28T15:24:00.000-05:00

Ok, I've gone back to blogging the Big Trip Out West. The trip blog is here: http://blogatrip.blogspot.com - Blog-a-trip. Links to pictures are there as well, but the full-bore photo album is on my Flickr.com site: Bill Read's Flickr.com Page

It's a Small Blogsphere

2005-10-29T12:07:00.000-05:00

I read a handful of blogs, and sometimes send items in that I think are of interest to the blogger. I did that a while back at one of my favorite sites, Gizmodo. I sent in an entry for Playmotion having to do with interactive displays (in this case, walls). Well, today I get an email from a high-school classmate, who is an owner in Playmotion. She got a new lead and they told her they found her website on Turbulence.org, credited to me. Turbulence.org went so far as to link my reference to Computer Consultants Group, my main business website.

What I think is so interesting is that I submitted the info to Gizmodo, but somehow it ended up over at Turbulence. At least they credited me with the info and provided a link. That's mighty nice of them.

Grand Canyon, Here We Come

2005-06-22T19:53:00.000-05:00

Tom & Billy, originally uploaded by wsdr.

It's been 35 years since I went to the Grand Canyon as a kid— August of 1970. It was one of those ......long...... road trips with the parents and 4 kids in a station wagon, plus a camper in tow. I remember my brother walking me piggy-back up to the edge of the canyon. That must be shortly after this picture since in it I'm not screaming in terror.

Even though I was only 5, that trip is burned into my memory. We travelled by car from South Carolina zigzagging across the nation. We made stops in Texas, New Mexico (the Painted Desert was cool), Arizona and on to California (yea Disneyland). We turned north and met my grandparents in Seattle, WA, visited Canada and zoomed back through Yellowstone Park and the Grand Tetons. It was one hell of a trip.

And now my family of 5, plus my parents, so 7 total, are doing something similar. This weekend we're flying into Phoenix, AZ, and picking up a minivan (or van, I guess) and heading North. We're going to see Sedona, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, Mesa Verde, Natural Bridges, Dinosaur National Park, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. And we're doing this all in two weeks and three days, in the van. All seven of us, ages 3 to 75.

Yep, I'm playing dad— or my wife is playing mom, depending on your perspective. Tons of photos, and probably video when we return.

I'm liking Flickr more and more.

Blogspot

2005-06-11T09:09:00.000-05:00

Finally decided to give Blogger a try. It works well. I'm going to keep my old blog, and double-post to here from now on.

Analogies

2005-04-27T08:54:00.000-05:00

I love using analogies for computers and technology. One that I particularly like— enough that it is one of my sigs— is attributed to Albert Einstein as follows: You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

When asked by a client to describe how DSL can be provided by the phone company over the same phone line as his home phone, yet not use up his dial-tone, I came up with the following.

DSL is like a string between two buildings. You can tug on the string on either end and use Morse Code to communicate. But you can also attach a can at each end of the string and use the cans to speak between buildings. The tugs are your phone, and the cans are DSL.

Ok, so I'm not as clever as I think.

Please Keep Your Fonts

2005-04-04T08:54:00.000-05:00

I had to reformat and reinstall everything on a PowerMac G5 a couple of weeks ago, and was nervous that all of the problems were hardware related, even though Apple Hardware Test turned up nothing. On Friday the user complained that her Suitcase software was quitting for no apparent reason. I troubleshot it a bit remotely, but being late in the day, I told her I would take care of it on Monday. All the time I'm thinking, this thing is toast and going in to the shop.

When I walked in Monday, it had gone from bad to worse-- damn. It was booting up to a blue screen with a flashing menubar at the top, but nothing else. I went in to Single User Mode (command line) and disabled autologin. Upon reboot I never got the login screen; rather, it progressed to the point just before the login screen, then bailed to a command-line login. What?!? I could log in to the command line as the user-- very odd. I spent two hours trashing prefs, caches, and various other things to no avail.

So, then I was definitely thinking it was hardware failure. Double-damn, and it had been working prefectly for over a week. Finally, after all that, I did an archive and install of Mac OS X 10.3.4, then proceeded to do all of the updates-- fully expecting it to go belly-up in the process, signaling the trip to the shop.

In the middle of all of this, the user casually mentioned that in the process of trying to troubleshoot it herself (!), she had removed all of her fonts-- the thinking being that Suitcase was crashing because of a bad font. Nice idea-- only she had removed ALL fonts, including the ones in her user folder, plus the main System and Library! .... "Um, and you didn't think to mention this to me -- the VERY LAST THING YOU DID BEFORE THE WHOLE THING CRASHED?"

Well, I kept calm. Really, I did. She didn't know any better, after all. And I learned to look for one more thing when troubleshooting bizzare behaviour (missing fonts). Also it more-or-less meant that the hardware isn't a problem, so that is good.

Oh, and now I have a really good excuse to give her a hard time.

Mail Message Not Downloaded Error

2005-01-29T09:53:00.000-05:00

Apple's Mail program keeps each inbox or folder in a separate MBOX format file on your hard drive. If you are one of those people who leaves everything in your inbox (as opposed to filing it or deleting it), you will eventually begin to get the following error:

The message 'xxx' has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.

What is going on is that your inbox has gotten larger than the RAM available to Mail for handling it. You must quit Mail, re-open it, then proceed to delete as much email as you can bear, and file into other folders as much email as you can.

Regular filing of email into other folders, and regular clean-out of your sent mail (file or delete these as needed), and trash, will give you a faster, more responsive, Mail program.

Address Book and iSync

2005-01-21T09:53:00.000-05:00

I was setting up iSync and the iSync Palm Conduit on an iMac running 10.2.8. When it came time to set up the sync preferences in iSync, I clicked on the Palm icon, but the iSync window would not expand to show the settings. The odd thing was that if I then clicked on the .Mac icon, the Palm settings would briefly appear, only to be replaced with the .Mac settings screen. Clicking back on the Palm brought up a blank screen.

After nuking every preference I could find, I resorted to moving the user's entire ~/Library to the desktop. After that, it worked, although the user now had no data. I migrated all of the newly created preferences into the old Library and then put it all back in place. After a logout/login, the problem came right back. That pretty much narrowed it down to the Calendar or Address Book files.

A quick look at the Calendar revealed nothing amiss. When I looked at the Address Book, I noticed a Group in the list that had no name— it was blank. I renamed it and deleted two other groups that had no members. That worked.

iSync opened the Palm prefs just fine. I was able to choose the calendars that needed to be synced, and perform a sync with no troubles.

HDTV on DVD

2005-01-10T09:51:00.000-05:00

No, it can't be done. DVD is strictly a 4:3 format. Those "anamorphic widescreen" DVDs you see in the store, and play on your player, are really just stretched 4:3.

Not content with my HDTV PVR and its 120Gb of storage (only 12 hours of HD after all), I investigated throwing the content onto my PowerBook. After a couple of Googles, I found out that in my Developer folder I already had what I needed: Virtual DVHS. This handy little program can record HDTV onto your hard drive right from the FireWire feed, and play it right back out.

My LST-3410a has FireWire out. So I plugged it in to my PowerBook, fired up Virtual DVHS, and fiddled for a few minutes trying to figure it all out. It worked, but after attempting to record an hour onto the HD, it turns out that it craps out after about 3 minutes. Damn. I fiddled for hours, but nothing. I would get 3.5 minutes of stuff from the hard drive, but then it would either flip off, or record whatever station it was currently tuned to (but it recorded that).

I called LG and got a very unhelpful support person. I dropped them a note off of their website, and got a very helpful response about how to return the unit. I called and couldn't believe it when they offered to cross-ship (it worked otherwise, after all).

The new unit did the exact same thing. Turns out that there was a buffering problem in Virtual DVHS. Oops; sorry for the shipping costs, LG. They were real champs. A simple pref setting later and I got my recording. Holy Moly, HDTV on my PowerBook HD. I could play it back to the PVR, and play it on my screen, but it was agonizingly slow to open the file using MPEG2Stream.

And it turns out you have to convert the video to get it to a DVD. Let me save you some time (hours, days even): don't bother. Converting takes forever — and what you end up with is pretty worthless anyway. It will have bad interlacing at best, or not work at all at worst.

Instead, I plugged in my Sony Media Converter (s-video/composite to FireWire) and recorded into iMovie. I used letterbox format before realizing that the PVR would play back in "squeezed" mode (Anamorphic Widescreen). Recording in squeezed mode and burning to DVD gave me a playable disk that scaled properly to the full-width of my HDTV screen, with the correct ratio, but with a lower resolution-- it is still beautiful, though, compared to the original.

One irony is that DV video, even though far lower resolution than HDTV, is a larger file size. One hour of HDTV was roughly 7Gb on disk, whereas one hour of DV recording was 11 to 12Gb (or more).

Privileges Are Nice

2004-12-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

A client was having a strange problem in Safari. As soon as she tried to type into any text field on a website, such as a search field, Safari would abruptly quit. I suspected auto-fill, but it was all off except for using her address card. I took a peek at her address book, and it abruptly quit as well. I thought major corruption, and so did a quick Disk First Aid. No problems. Hmmm... let's go look at the address book files, found in ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book. To my surprise, her ~/Library/Application Support/ folder was empty. A quick check of the permissions in the Get Info box revealed that the folder was owned by "system." I changed that, and everything worked just fine after that.

HDTV PVR

2004-10-11T08:50:00.000-05:00

Ok, so for my 40th birthday my wife decided to pander to my maleness. She teamed up with my parents and bought me a Sony 30" Wega HDTV, Sony 6.1 Surround Sound Receiver, and an LG LST-3510A HDTV Tuner/DVD Player.

Being the luddite that I am, I refuse to get satellite TV or cable TV. Actually, I'd LOVE to have either, or both, but I don't leave the house enough as it is. So, we had to have a terrestrial tuner (using an antenna, not cable or satellite).

The LG is an awesome unit that allows you to receive HDTV programming over-the-air using a standard UHF Antenna. I use a $50 Radio Shack antenna in my attic and get GREAT reception in my area. A little known fact about Digital TV is that many TV Stations already broadcast Digital TV for free over-the-air-- right now. Many of these stations also offer HDTV programming as well. In my market (Charleston, SC), the stations that carry ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Fox and UPN all broadcast Digital TV over-the-air right now. Plus, ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS all offer HDTV content during prime-time. And Fox broadcasts NFL in HDTV too.

But in under a week of use, I developed an urgent need to have Tivo capability as well. You know, the ability to pause live TV, record it, fast forward or rewind-- also known as Timeshift TV. As I scanned the offerings from Tivo, my heart sunk as I learned that none of their offerings support HDTV (except one that is tied to a satellite service).

So, I began to look in to building my own unit, based on Linux, of course. These are known as DVRs or PVRs (Digital Video Recorders or Personal Video Recorders). After spending the better part of a day doing this, I came to the conclusion that I'd spend about $1,000 on the hardware, plus probably about 10-20 hours getting it all set up. Quite a lot of work. Daunting even.

So I googled PVR HDTV one last time. And I found this: LG LST-3410A. Holy airwaves Batman, it's my tuner with PVR built-in.

It arrived Friday. It's awesome. Here's the list:

Over the air Digital TV; HDTV
Supports regular TV
Supports Cable TV, and can control your cable box
120Gb Hard Drive
Timeshift
Record 120 hours normal TV
Record 12 hours HDTV
Built in TV Guide; 7-day schedule; free
Firewire input and output; so you can archive recordings to tape, or record to HD/watch DV footage

My LG LST-3510A is now up on eBay.

Retrospect Server/Timed Scripts

2004-09-24T08:49:00.000-05:00

It never ceases to amaze me how much I don't know about stuff I work with every day. I'm sure my clients don't want to hear that, but it's true.

I've used Retrospect for over ten years, both personally and professionally for my clients. The past few years we have been leaning heavily on the Backup Server mode of operation (where Retrospect is on 24/7, and backs up individual network clients when they need it as they are available-- it pretty much rules).

Today I learned that you can have Retrospect both act as a backup server and run timed scripts. Additionally, you can have a timed script always back up to whatever device is available (something that is basic stuff for the Backup Server Mode, but you do have to tolerate errors). Here's how:

Set up your backup server script as you need it, with it's sources, multiple destinations, criteria and on/off timings. Then create whatever specific timed scripts you need as well, and schedule them. It just works.

Now, if you want your timed scripts to run on whatever available media there is, set up your schedule as normal, except, for every scheduled execution, create an entry (at the same date/time) for each destination you have.

For example, we have a server that backs up 10 workstations plus itself. The workstations are a mix of desktops and laptops, so availability is unpredictable. The server must shut-down a particular process in order to backup successfully-- this happens at 2AM. So , I have two scripts.

Script 1 is a Backup Server script, and it backs up the Network Clients Container to Backup HD A and Backup HD B. I'm using pretty much the default settings, which means each client gets backed up as soon as they are available, any time after 24 hours after the last time they were backed up. We set Retrospect to back-up only folders and files that are Labeled Green.

Script 2 is a normal Backup script, and it backs up only the Local Desktop Container to Backup HD A or Backup HD B. It is scheduled twice each day at 2:05am, right after the server process shut-down, once to Backup HD A and once to Backup HD B. Since only one backup HD is available at a time (the other one being taken off-site), only one of the scheduled executions will execute successfully, the other will fail. But the data does get backed up, and on schedule without fail. A bit difficult to comprehend at first, but flawless.

Playing Around with VNC

2004-09-22T08:47:00.000-05:00

So I've been spending a lot of time working from home, doing web projects and generally messing around. My latest obsession is VNC. This is old-hat to many *nix geeks out there, but I've been stuck in a world of Timbuktu. If you haven't used it, you should. Find your flavor here: sourceforge.net.

I've been playing with GMail, and I like it. It has a long way to go, but the idea of a 1-Gb of online storage is pretty awesome (think emailing yourself critical software and keeping it stored on a Google website). And the way it threads is second to none.

I've got a couple of GMail invites, so if you want one, send an email to the address at the bottom of the page. Oh, and be polite and give me your name (required). No, I won't spam you.

I learned a very cool thing about iDVD: how to make a DVD auto-start and auto-loop. Just click on the Map and drag your MooV directly to "Menu" and click on the little loop icon on it. Burn it and you're done.

(Turned 40 today.)

Mac OS X Combo Fixer

2004-08-16T08:47:00.000-05:00

Some people just have crappy luck. A client switched from a Dell laptop to a 15" PowerBook (Aluminum) a few weeks back. Things went swimmingly for 48 hours, until some punk broke out his passenger window and sprinted off with it. The thief just got lucky, since his car windows were blacked-out tinted— no way Mr. Thief knew what was in there.

So the new replacement arrives and we did the data-migration from the Dell to the Mac one-more-time. The very last thing we did before leaving for the evening was run Software Update to do the multi-meg upgrades that were waiting. The next morning Mr. Client returned to a kernel-panic. Uh oh. It was hosed— fsck and Disk First Aid failed to help; so did Disk Warrior. An Archive Install didn't bring it back.

So, a reformat and zero-all-data was done, and we started all over. It lasted a couple of weeks until this morning, after running the 10.3.5 and associated Software Updates, which all ran just fine, then the client rebooted. The PowerBook booted up to the Login Window, but then dumped him out to a command-line console login. fsck reported no errors. Poking around in the system.log and nuking the com.apple.loginwidow.plist and com.apple.windowserver.plist didn't bring it back.

On a hunch we booted in FireWire Target Disk mode and plugged it in to another Mac. Then we downloaded and installed the Mac OS X 10.3.5 Combined Installer. It didn't boot, but hung right away. So we booted from a 10.3 Installer CD and ran a Repair Permissions. Then it booted up

After logging-in, it threw an error from the AppleSlewClock.kext. So we just copied one over from another 10.3.5 install, changed ownership and permission to match the rest of the extension. We were back in business.

Automatic Migration

2004-08-10T08:46:00.000-05:00

Moving an OS X user from his old Mac to a new one is pretty easy, if the user has stuck to his home folder. All you have to do is copy/install any software and copy his data over to the new home folder (assuming you matched the short names).

But Apple has made our lives even easier now. Booting up a brand-new eMac, the first question it asked was whether I had an older Mac from which I wanted to move my data. I answered "yes" and it walked me through booting the old Mac in FireWire Target Disk mode and connecting it up. Then the eMac asked me what data I wanted (User folders, installed Apps, other data), and it did the rest. I was done with the migration in 15 minutes, as opposed to the typical 1 to 3 hours. Brilliant!

Two Heads, One Set of Hands

2004-07-23T08:45:00.000-05:00

I've discovered the coolest way to work with both my PowerBook and Dell on my Desktop. The fact that I'm late to the game is beside the point (others have done the same thing for quite some time), it's still very cool.

I'm using TightVNC on the Dell (VNC is an open standards protocol for controlling one computer from another, like the commercial PC Anywhere or Timbuktu) and osx2x on the PowerBook. TightVNC is great open-source software, and is dead-easy to install and configure. osx2x does both VNC and X-Windows connections, and is embarrassingly simple to setup and use as well.

What is so cool about osx2x is that instead of bringing up the remote PC in a window on your local computer, it "attaches" the display of the remote PC to one of the edges of the local display. So the remote PC screen sits to one side of your local display. Which means that the "remote" PC can't really be remote because you need to see its display. To control the PC, you simply move your mouse to the edge of your local display... and keep moving... the mouse will appear to popup on the remote PC. At that point all mouse movements, clicks and keyboard strokes are sent to the remove PC. It is so smooth it is as if the remote PC display is a seamless part of your local display— you can move between the two with a flick of the mouse.

One mouse, one keyboard, two computers, two displays and your hands never have to move! Beautiful!

And the best part is that I can use my PowerBook trackpad (or Mouse) with all of Apple's glorious smooth-motion algorithms on my Dell! (Sorry, but Windows mice, even the best of them, simply suck at their acceleration and movement around the screen— Apple is the indisputable champ there).

Troubleshooting Order Matters

2004-07-13T08:43:00.000-05:00

Many of our clients, both home and business, have cable or DSL internet connections that are shared via a router, wireless or otherwise. We see many problems where a connection is lost, seemingly permanently. While we can never know what happened prior to our arrival, all too often it seems that lack of patience has turned what should have been a temporary problem into a permanent one. This is my theory of how this happens.

You see a network, while it uses wires to connect you (ok, sometimes they are wireless), does not behave like an on/off circuit. Just because it's all connected doesn't mean it's going to work.

The flawed analogy I like to use is one of a chain-of-command. Each person in the chain gets his orders from the person above him. If one of the people fails to get his orders, then everyone in the chain below is also left out. Now suppose an underling calls for his orders, but is told there are none. Now also suppose that right after this call, his subordinates call him for their orders; he'll tell them there are none. Now further suppose that he calls again and this time he gets his orders, but his subordinates have given up, assuming that there are no orders. They're going to fail at their task because they aren't aware of it (Ok, the superior should call them, but I said this was flawed). The orders are there, but no one knows it.

Now where this parallels networking is that each piece of the connection is like a person. There's the ISP, the Cable or DSL Modem, the Router and finally the computer(s). If the ISP has a problem, the Modem will fail to give it's info to the Router, which in turn fails to give it to the computer. The user goes in and fiddles with devices, turning them on and off and generally trying to Make It Work. The user gives up, and 30 seconds later the ISP comes back on line. But now the Router has bad/wrong info, and so does the computer. The router doesn't know to ask for the "orders" again, and neither does the computer. But while the problem has been solved, the user has given up trying, and in the process of trying made things worse.

So, how do you approach this type of trouble? While troubleshooting, always proceed down the chain-of-command. If you reset the modem, then you need to reset your router and reboot your computer as well (Ok, OS X and Win XP should "get it" but they don't always, so you really have to reboot to be sure). By "reset" I generally mean turn-off/turn-on. Otherwise, your modem might begin to work, but your router won't ask and therefore can't tell your computer. Make sense?

Lightening Strikes

2004-07-12T08:38:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy week today.... we had the typical over-the-weekend lightening storms that are so common along the East Coast during the summer. On Monday the phone began to ring with various complaints of dead or damaged computers. One poor customer (Victim A) who got struck this weekend had also been hit a year ago — almost to the day. Another client's (Victim B) practically new G5 appeared to get burned.

Victim A was almost in a complete panic and depression — can't say I blame her. Poor dear is supposed to be on vacation this week. An iMac and a G4 lost their network connections after the storm. I asked her to try a different, known-working, network port before we wrote-off the NIC. She called back and said she had ordered a new NIC for the G4 (the iMac was a lost cause, since the NIC is built-in, so back for repair it went). My technician went out, installed the NIC card and it failed. He moved the cable and it worked. Hmmm... so he tried the built-in NIC and it worked too. So much for her bothering to try a different network port. Now she is the proud owner of a new network card and has a bill for an on-site visit — both of which could have been avoided by plugging a cable in to a different port in the wall. I hate it when that happens.

Moral: When we ask you to do something that seems stupid or redundant to you, it's because we want to save you money, not because we enjoy making you do things you don't want to do (which we DO enjoy, but only on our dime).

Victim B arrived in his office Monday to see the white light on his G5 on, but no other sign of life. He turned off the surge protector, and turned it back on and the white light went off and right back on. Pulled the plug, same thing. Don't lose hope, I said, there should be a reset button on the logic board that just might fix it. Since I haven't yet had to find the reset on a G5, I asked him to call Apple. Sure enough, he emailed me a couple of hours later from his working G5. Apple walked him through finding the switch and that fixed it (but he let me in on the secret of where it is, dad-gummit).

Moral: There really ARE magic buttons inside your computer we can press to make things work (or fail?).

Gotta Cruise

2004-07-05T08:38:00.000-05:00

Just got back from a 7-day cruise in the Eastern Caribbean. What a great time! I won't call it a blast because it was so relaxing. If you have never cruised, you simply must do it. Where else can you go places yet never leave your bedroom behind? Where else can you see new things, but not have to worry about how good/bad the food will be? Where else can you go and walk from a Las Vegas show to a movie, then to a piano bar, then a casino, then a nightclub, then stroll back to the Privacy of Your Room and always have a roof over your head? You gotta do it.

Formal Dinner Pictures from the Cruise

Zap the PRAM

2004-05-11T08:36:00.000-05:00

Sometimes old tricks just do the job. If you've got a PowerMac G5 that seems to power up, but the screen never turns on, zap the PRAM. Do this by holding down the APPLE-OPTION-P-R keys right after you turn the computer on (at about the time you hear the bong, not too long after), and keep them held down until you hear a SECOND bong. Let go and you just may get your screen back.

Hub Schmub

2004-05-04T08:35:00.000-05:00

A client called me out to help migrate his data from his old PowerMac G3 to his brand new PowerMac G5. As I reached down to grab an ethernet cable, he said he didn't have two cables that would reach to the hub; "that's ok," I said, as I plugged one end of the cable into the G3 and the other in to the G5. The G5 has a built-in crossover switch (I think the G3 does too, but you only need one and I'm not so sure about the G3).

Next I took a trip to the Network Preferences Panel on the G5 and made sure it was still set to "Automatic." (Actually, I made sure that TCP/IP was configured to use a DHCP Server). This insured that the G5 would create a "Self Assigned" IP address, which I noted from the TCP/IP settings screen. I did the same thing in the TCP/IP Control Panel on the G3 (which will also self-assign an address). Then I made sure that Personal File Sharing was turned on on the G5.

Next I took a trip to the old Chooser on the G3, typed in the IP address of the G5, plugged in his login name and password and up popped the G5 hard disk and his user folder. I'll leave the copy of the data to your imagination.

You might be asking "Why not use Firewire Target Disk Mode?" Well, the G5 and the G3 both support this mode (hold down the T key when you turn on the computer, you'll get a huge Firewire icon on the screen, and you can then plug it in to another computer as if it were an external Firewire hard drive). However, 100-Base-T Ethernet using AFP over TCP/IP is actually much faster.

"Faster than Firewire, no Way" you might respond. Well, maybe when the computer(s) are accessing a real external Firewire HD it's faster, but my experience is that Firewire Target Disk Mode is quite slow, much slower in fact than AFP over Ethernet either with or without a hub. I don't know why, but my guess is that in Target Disk Mode the data travels a different path than otherwise. This has been my experience with quite a few PowerMac G4s and PowerMac G3s.

Black iMac Screen

2004-05-04T08:34:00.000-05:00

If you've got an iMac "DV" and your screen dies, you can use the (hidden) built-in video-out to use the iMac to get your data back. To tell if you have one of the ones with a video port out of the back, just look for an oval-shaped removable plastic grill on the bottom rear of the iMac— if you don't have this removable grill, you don't have one. Under this grill you will find a standard VGA port.

My client's iMac (running Mac OS 9) was working great when I had to shut it down to plug and move some external hard drives. When I turned it back on, it made all of the right noises, but the screen stayed black. It even showed up on the network. Zapping the PRAM didn't work. So I grabbed a VGA monitor and plugged it in to the rear video-port. Bingo, there was the iMac screen patiently waiting to be seen.

The iMac is pretty much worthless as a workstation now, but as a small fileserver it's fine. So we installed Timbuktu on it and can use that to do minor updates and maintenance as needed.

Find the Culprit

2004-04-19T08:32:00.000-05:00

Sometimes computers are just possessed. The third time a client's PowerBook came back to me because the HD was corrupt, I was ready to give up. The last time, a week ago, I reformatted the whole thing and installed a brand-new copy of Mac OS X 10.3, ran all of the updates and migrated his data back into a fresh user. Is the HD bad? No, I'm actually suspecting his midnight raids on the net with Limewire, but I won't go any further on that one.

Two days later he calls because Word is crashing, but a reboot fixes that one. Four more days later he calls because he is getting the BSOD-Mac on boot. Dadgummit. He has to leave town, so I pick it up a couple of days later.

It won't boot in single-user mode. Disk First Aid reports it can't fix it. DiskWarrior boots it, but hangs trying to build a directory after reporting an insane number of cross-linked files. Disk First Aid lists an actual file-name (instead of an obscure number), and I take notice. I hunt down and delete this file and try DiskWarrior again. Wow, it worked. Thing begin to work very well.

Remembering the Word crash, I dutifully go download every little Microsoft Office update (who can count that high, have these guys ever heard of a unified installer?) and install them. Can't hurt, might help. Haven't heard from the client for almost two weeks now (now that I've written this, today's the day, huh?).

Moral: most of the time a cross-linked file problem is the result of ONE errant file. Find the most likely suspect and just delete it and you might find your problem goes away. I've seen this dozens of times.

"My mail won't send..."

2004-04-12T08:31:00.000-05:00

A client brought a brand new PowerBook to me to have his data migrated onto. After hunting down and copying over various data files, etc., and performing the installs and tweaks necessary, I gave a perfectly working PowerBook back to my client.

Two hours later the phone rings and my client tells me he can't send email out. A quick check of his SMTP server seems Ok. The message itself seems Ok. He says he can receive mail just fine. Since I can't get over there again that day, we leave it for the next. I secretly hope it will go away.

The next day, no dice. We tinker with settings some more, but no good. Oh, and now his incoming email seems to be jammed up. Bah. I head over there and the first thing I notice is that everything is slow. I look at the network cable, and it appears to be a bit kinked. So I pull the network cable, and put it back in, but no real change. I move the laptop to another location and the outgoing mail immediately goes; but the incoming mail is still slower than it seems it should be.

Meanwhile, another user is having problems printing. Hmmm.... we did have thunderstorms over the weekend. So I took a quick trip to the wiring closet and powered down and up the network switches. Bingo, everything worked fine. The kinked cable still needed to be replaced, but after that things went back to normal speeds.

Two lessons: 1) never underestimate the power of a simple solution; 2) just because you've found one problem, doesn't mean that you've found them all.

MP3Concept (MP3Virus.Gen)

2004-04-08T08:31:00.000-05:00

I don't think this is a serious threat, but it appears we've got our first Mac trojan horse.

http://www.macminute.com/2004/04/08/trojanhorse

Ok folks, someone is using a bit of social engineering and a bit of cleverness to exploit Mac OS X users. Basically, the deal is this: a file is emailed to you, or you download it; its icon appears to be an mp3 file, and it is named something.mp3. If you open it, you end up launching an application instead of an mp3 file and you're potentially infected. Now, you can't get this by reading an email, but if you open the attachment, you're done.

To be sure, before opening any file:

1) Drag the file in question on to your Desktop.
2) Click ONCE to highlight the file (don't double-click!!!).
3) Go to the File menu and choose "Get Info...".
4) Look at the top next to "Kind" -- if it says Application, you're looking at a trojan horse instead of an mp3 file. If it says something else, particularly the file type you're looking for, it's ok.

The moral of the story, as always, is to trust the person sending the file. If in doubt, take the time to find out.

Do I think you need to go out and get anti-virus software? No. Like I've always said, just use caution with any file of dubious origin.

User Folder Follies

2004-03-24T09:30:00.000-05:00

Panther is great. Some of its Finder features are a big improvement over previous Finders, especially the Sidebar in the Finder. Having said that, the Sidebar creates a potentially dangerous point-of-confusion for users who are either less than attentive (many) or complete OS X novices.

The problem comes in that the Sidebar can seem like just another column when you are in column view. A user was having troubles with finding his "Home" folder. I was helping him over the phone— we were trying to find something in his home folder (in his Library, actually). He didn't see any icons that looked like a little house. Even though I had put his home folder in the dock, he must have removed it at some point (another peeve of mine, no confirmation on removing something from the Dock). So, we went the manual route: "double-click on your hard drive on the desktop, click on the column view icon, click on Users, bang, there it is."

After we got done what we needed to get done, I decided that we needed to put his home folder back in the Sidebar. So I asked him to get back to where he could see the home folder icon. I told him to drag it into the leftmost column in the Finder window and put it in the lower half. He confirmed that he did this, and we hung up.

2 hours later I got a frantic phone call that his computer was dead (brand new G5). He got a solid blue screen on boot except the menu bar at the top blinked on and off. Uh oh. Because it was already late in the day, we picked up the computer from him. After 2 minutes in Single User Mode I realized that he had not put his home folder in the Sidebar. Instead, he had moved it up to the root level of his hard drive. Suddenly, I felt very stupid. This was my fault. During our phone call he must have collapsed the toolbars in the Finder by clicking the little white lozenge in the upper right corner of the window. So when I asked him to move his home folder to the Sidebar, he had nowhere to put it except the leftmost column, which must have been the top level of his hard drive.

Two quick mv commands later, and he was back in business.

The computer proved to have other troubles which required a reinstall of Panther, but these we unrelated to the home folder (and were what we were chasing down in the first place).

Quark Preferences

2004-03-23T09:29:00.000-05:00

If you've got QuarkXPress quitting on you with this error: The application preference file is damaged. Please remove it and relaunch QuarkXPress [296], you might think that you need to remove:

~/Library/Preferences/com.quark.QuarkXPress.plist

But you would be wrong. Instead remove:

~/Library/Preferences/Quark/XPress Preferences.prf

DiskWarrior Rules!

2004-03-20T09:28:00.000-05:00

DiskWarrior is one of those gems of a program that I discovered in a time of dire need. I had to repair an HD that fsck wouldn't fix, and I was skeptical of Norton's capability. I needed something immediately, and Alsoft offered a download of DiskWarrior that I could use to build a boot disk. It's been my favorite ever since.

The thing I like most about it is that it doesn't attempt to repair the existing HD, at least not right away. It creates a virtual disk of sorts, performs repairs on the preview, and rebuilds the disk's directory based on real data that it finds on the real disk. At least this is my assessment of how it works; my experiences bear this out. Their approach seems to me to be more reliable than Norton's fix-it-on-the-fly approach, since you don't touch the original data until you're sure you've got a valid directory. I've used it to repair disks that I would not have thought Norton stood a chance against.

On this particular occasion the HD in question wasn't being recognized by Disk Utility or Disk First Aid (OS 9.2.1). I pulled it and put it into a Firewire external case and plugged it in to my laptop. Disk Utility saw it, but couldn't repair it. TIme to pull out DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior gave me a preview rebuild of the directory, and put the "Preview" of the hard drive on my desktop. While DiskWarrior stated that it could not repair the volume because it was too damaged, the preview gave me an error-free way to back up the volume. Once backed up, I erased the drive and restored all the data.

ATA Bus Wierdness

2004-03-20T09:27:00.000-05:00

After doing a data recovery and restore to a hard drive in a Power Mac G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors 2003) 1.2Ghz, I put the drive back in the unit and booted up from a 9.2.1 Universal disk I make a while back. The drive was not recognized when booted from CD, and Drive Setup didn't even know it was there. I pulled it out again and plugged it back in. The drive was plugged in to the IDE connector nearest the processor, and I noticed that there was an ATA/66 connector available next to where the CD/DVD plugged in. It still didn't work. Hmmm....

I plugged the drive in to the ATA/66 and it showed up. I was getting ready to tell the client that the logic board would need repair when it occurred to me that maybe my "Universal" boot CD wasn't so universal. After verifying that the System Folder on the HD was blessed, I booted from the hard drive itself. Since it worked fine in ATA/66 slot, I decided to give it one last go in the other slot— an Ultra ATA/100 slot. It booted right up.

So, just because a CD boots a computer, doesn't mean it supports all of its components. Just because you've found a problem, doesn't mean you really know what it is, or that it is the only problem you have. In my case my "Universal" boot CD didn't support the Ultra ATA/100 hard drive bus, and what appeared to me to be a bad logic board, was simply lack of support for the bus in question. Don't jump to conclusions, always find more than one way to verify your suspicions.