Archive.
Thursday, October 30, 2003 Link
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Ok, here's a stumper. Our creative team runs on Macs, natch. But we rely on the services of a Windows 2000-based file server to transfer our working documents and as a backup repository for our workstations. Small transfers rarely give us the berries, but backups have become a painful bubble in the intestinal tract. We constantly get smacked with long file name-related errors, like the one shown below.
Can anyone explain why the same folder full of files will copy to our file server from OS 9, but not from OS X? Both OS X and Windows 2000 handle long file names, right? So why do we get this error message when transferring files with names longer than 31 characters? We're using AppleShare (AFP) rather than Samba (SMB) protocol since we need to maintain the information embedded in the resource forks of the Mac-based files, particularly legacy Classic applications and the like. I'm guessing that since OS 9 does not support long file names, the system takes care of the translation automatically. That's why the transfer works under those conditions. Is this a limitation with Appleshare file services under Windows? Is there a trick to getting this to work? We cannot even rename a file already existing on the server to use more than 31 characters. Like I said, I'm stumped.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003 Link
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People need to be aware of the dangers of unsupervised corporate presentations. Yes, the available domain name of the week is powerpointedstick.com
Saturday, October 25, 2003 Link
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No matter how careful you are or how skillful you profess to be, there is absolutely no way to eat a pomegranate (Punica granatum) with any degree of grace and couth. I suppose I'd better go change my shirt before I leave the house this afternoon.
Friday, October 24, 2003 Link
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A crisp fall evening, the public release of an eagerly anticipated operating system update, and the bullshitless Mark Pilgrim to walk us briskly through the new and improved bits of Mac OS X Panther. What more could a Mac-head ask for except more time to play. I guess I'll be staying up a little bit later tonight, won't I? A nod of the nightcap to Jason Perkins, who's apparently depriving himself of his sleep this evening as well.
Received this morning. An email announcing the our upcoming company Christmas holiday year-end party. Spot the typo.
Quick note to say Veer's Holiday Party
will be on Thursday, November 27th.
Details to follow.
Should be good fun.
Significant others included.
Mark your colanders.
I wonder if I should I bring a salad?
Monday, October 20, 2003 Link
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Please be aware that the web site operated by the affable Mr Sixto and previously occupying the saintcaffeine.com domain (now squatted), has been officially relocated to it's new, permanent home at saintcaffeine.ca. I would also like all of you to take careful note of the fact that not once did I mention that the reason for the change in venue was because the aforementioned individual forgot to renew his domain in the first place. Oops.
Seeing as I can hardly control myself, I've been nosing around Panther a bit more. Although it's not the most significant change in this update, I thought the following redesign of the AppleScript Script Editor interface was - at the very least - worth a comparison with the Jaguar version. I'm not prepared to offer any extended commentary at this point, but I do like the use of the new tabbed view for the description, result window and event log. I also appreciate the use of a picture of a hammer for the Compile icon. There's nothing like bashing the liver out of compilation errors with a substantial hand tool.
AppleScript Script Editor in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)
AppleScript Script Editor in Mac OS X 10.2.x (Jaguar)
Saturday, October 18, 2003 Link
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Since my site gets about twenty-fold as many daily visitors as his does, I thought I'd help Jon out by mentioning that he's looking at finding a good home for his G4-upgraded and very well maintanined Blue & White Power Mac. It's vaccinations are up to date. Pretty much only driven on Sundays. Lots of extras. Pay in Canadian dollars!
Friday, October 17, 2003 Link
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Rear end of whippet and lawn. Calgary.
Since it's Friday and most of you are probably killing time surfing anyway, I thought I'd share a tidy little list of various utilities and system add-ons I've discovered I simply cannot live without. These bits of software continually make my OS X experience more efficient (and less likely to cause yearning pangs for OS 9). Honest.
- iKey by Script Software : Hands down, the best OS X replacement for the indispensable (but sadly, OS 9 only) KeyQuencer. iKey is easily as powerful as the venerable QuicKeys. In some cases, it surpasses it with a simple interface and logical control flow. And it'd be a bargain at twice the current price of twenty bucks.
- More Internet by Monkeyfood : This overwhelmingly simple System Preference pane brings back the ability to specify and edit various internet protocol handlers besides the basis email and web settings that the existing Internet pane allows. Hat tip to the irrepressible Mr Dominey for the pointer.
- Cocktail by Kristofer Szymanski : It fixes a lot things that break more often than they should. It tweaks a lot of things that you probably wish you could change. It makes your system happier and shinier. What more could you possibly want from a $12 shareware utility? If you haven't used Cocktail before, you'll probably kick yourself for not trying it sooner. As an added bonus, a new Panther-savvy version was just released today, sporting several new tricks up it's freshly-compiled sleeve.
- Delocalizer by Bombich Software : How many languages do your applications really need to understand if the mother tongue is the Queen's (or President's) English. Probably just one. Maybe two, if you're living in an officially bilingual nation. Delocalizer scans and effectively turfs all non-essential localization resource files, thus saving voluminous chunks of valuable hard drive space. And it's click 'n' go easy to use.
Winners, all of them. But that's enough for now. Perhaps I'll add a few more this afternoon. Update: Done like dinner.
Thursday, October 16, 2003 Link
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With a tip of the noggin' topper to Jason Perkins and his handy-dandy RSS feed, the available domain name of the week just happens to be stinter.com
Wednesday, October 15, 2003 Link
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I love it when software vendors actually manage to label an updater or patch so that you can tell what the heck it does by simply looking at the file name. So, what do you do? You say you fix an error where InDesign version 2.0.2 unexpectedly quits? And what's your name? Ah. Why, thank you. That was very helpful indeed.
Hey smart people, I need your help. I am looking for answers to two relatively minor OS X issues. First of all, does anyone know of a way to increase the number of concurrent connections in Safari? More often than not I am finding that the default number of four is a bit limiting. The maximum number of connections is something you can set via a simple pop-up menu in Internet Explorer, but no other browser seems to want to touched in such a manner. I've poked around the various Safari plist files, but haven't discovered anything yet. Secondly, is there any way to limit the number of application choices that appear in the Open With... contextual submenu? This issue is the painful when I am command-clicking on several text (or JPEG and GIF) files at once. There are so many applications available for opening files (including numerous Classic programs) in the submenu, that it often takes ten seconds or more to display it. The more files I select, the longer it takes for the submenu to pop open. I would dearly love to be able to set a maximum number of applications to appear in this menu, as well as preset my default application. Any ideas?
Tuesday, October 14, 2003 Link
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Jason Perkins just made my life easier. Maybe too easy. He's just released an experimental RSS feed of recently expired single word domain names. How cool is that? Well, it might just make the dot-compound domain passé. Single, simple words kick it. And it's well known that the regularity of my domain name of the week could use a swift kick in the default index file. Tip of the geek topper to Mr Neil Lee over at BeatnikPad
It wasn't that long after midnight on Friday that we heard the dog get up. He shook himself vigorously, jingling his pair of dog tags (which in the middle of the night, quite frankly sound like several dozen pieces of cutlery thrashing around in a tumble dryer), and then proceeded to galoomp down the stairs as per his style. Since the alternative to following him down the stairs and letting him out is the prospect of stepping into a tepid puddle on the kitchen floor the next morning - I bounded out of my own bed as fast as my barely coherent system would allow. Once downstairs, I let Indy out the back door and then scooted into the 'little pet owner's room' for my own pressing constitutional. I was feeling a bit woozy at this point, but couldn't decide whether it was my current semi-conscious state or the glasses of rather heavy red wine from earlier that evening. From this point onward, the events are a bit fuzzy. I recall standing up, flushing, feeling another wave of wooze, and then realizing that I was lying on the cold slate floor. Coming to, I also remember deciding that this was a rather odd place to be. Looking back, I'm glad I also had the foresight (or the automatous behaviour) to pull my pants up after taking my leave of the loo. Lying unconscious on the floor is one thing, but doing so with your lower half in its altogether is quite another issue. I rose to my feet, glanced out the back door (noting that the dog was in mid-excretion and thinking that this was good) and promptly collapsed again. Apparently the first time I fainted, I took out a wire-framed, wicker magazine basket with my face and chest in the process. This time, I must of whacked my head on the wooden bench which faces the back door. Because when I heard my name being called, the first thing I noticed after my whereabouts was that my neck was very sore. My wife noticed the blood on my face from its meeting with the basket. She had heard the both crashes and came downstairs not knowing whether to find me, the dog, some intruder, or all three of us in some unimaginable predicament. Fortunately, this misadventure turned out all right. My wife talked me back to reality, made sure I wasn't overly damaged and hustled me back to bed. I was a bit scraped up and stiff of head the next morning, but no worse for wear. I still think it was somehow the dog's fault.
Thursday, October 09, 2003 Link
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It was probably a presumptuous notion, but I believed I was still the only person hanging about online using the splorp moniker. Well, I was wrong. I assure you that this is not me. For one, I don't post to slashdot. Secondly, I'm damn sure never to have a section of my site dedicated to freeware Windows registry editors. Additionally, even though we do have pair of melopsittacus undulatus amidst the inhabitants of our home, our budgies are not prone to vampirism as is this so-called Drusilla. Legally, I could probably make some point that there is the potential for undue consumer confusion by associating the splorp brand name with two distinct sites. Fortunately, there's enough cosmetic and content-related distinctions between my site and his to eliminate any disorientation of the casual viewer. And there's no real point to a cease and desist mentality. The internet is certainly big enough for the both of us. Besides, I've been at it this game a heck of a lot longer than this harmless charlatan and his fine feathered friend. I have tenure.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003 Link
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Electrical transformer and mountain ash berries. Granville Island, Vancouver.
Good old Apple is on top of things, by golly. They have kindly published a series of developer articles (an overview, practical code samples and a FAQ) to help web developers make sure that sites with embedded content (QuickTime or otherwise) will still work as intended after Microsoft modifies Windows Internet Explorer next year. I like being slightly ahead of this sort of thing rather than having it drop on my head a few months down the road. There's no time like now to make simple changes like the ones in the examples. If you're like me, you'd probably rather avoid having all your blood, sweat and tears turned into bile, dung and other nasty browser excretions. Thanks again to Apple for cleaning up another slick that Microsoft has left on the beach.
As can be expected, Mr Dominey adds a few choice elucidations regarding the imminent kerfuffle. And while you're strolling about town, be sure to peruse the viewer comments. Always entertaining.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003 Link
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The available domain name of the week is shakydog.com
This week we confirmed that Indigo, our Whippet-shaped hound, has mild canine epilepsy. Last week, my wife noticed that Indy was sitting on the floor in our home office shaking his head, almost as if he was shivering. Visually, it looked like a simple muscle spasm, but it lasted several minutes. She ran him over the vet, by which time the tremor had subsided, and they put him up on the hoist for a thorough once-over. There apparently wasn't anything physically wrong - a picture of health really - but the doctor said to keep an eye on him in case it happened again. It did. We phoned. The vet didn't seem concerned. We stopped worrying a little bit. We didn't notice anything again for a full week. He had started shaking again. Now we were getting freaked out. This time, the doctor told us what was happening. Three is the magic number when it comes to seizures. A subsequent round of blood work confirmed that there wasn't anything physical or fluidic or otherwise functionally wrong with our dog. It was all in his brain. As with most forms of epilepsy, it's not curable, but treatable. Indy will be enjoying twice daily dosages of Phenobarbital nestled in chunks of cheese for the rest of his doggy days. And the vet figures he has at least 13 or 14 more years worth of those ahead of him. We're still a bit freaked out. We're still a bit worried. But at least now we know what's wrong with our smelly little friend.
Once every year or so, I get asked by one of the local Girl Guide units to come in and talk shop. More specifically, I chat about computers, how they work, and what they get used for. My techno-blabbering in meant to help fulfill part of the requirements for their Computer Skills badge. Out of the group of twenty odd girls at the meeting, only one didn't have a computer at home, and two more were not connected to the internet. That was a much higher percentage than the last time I had given a similar presentation a couple years ago, but I suppose not that surprising. The entire group, including the leaders, were savvy enough for me to skip over a lot of really basic introductory stuff. That was pretty refreshing, actually. I like to think that I can come away from this type of experience having learned a little bit of something or other. In fact, there were a couple of incidental morsels that stuck between my synapses after saying my good-byes. Filed under 'computer care and maintenance', I learned that you should never throw your computer out the window, put your cat on top of the monitor, or try to eat the keyboard. Sage advice, my friends. Secondly, if part of the computer hardware containing stuff is called the hard drive, why isn't the disc containing the software called a soft drive? Honestly, I couldn't come up with a reasonable answer for that one.
[ Update ] Gentle reader Don Jennings let me know that he just happened to stumble across a definition for 'soft drive' over at Low End Mac. It's not quite the same animal, but the coincidental timing of my post and this new article is uncanny.
Saturday, October 04, 2003 Link
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Don't get me wrong, I'm quite happy actually. But there are these dozens of niggly little annoyances that I've discovered whilst traversing the gap between OS 9 and OS X. Most of them I can deal with. It's usually just a matter of changing the way a certain navigational action or keyboard command is performed. Not so bad. But there are other things. Things that make no sense to me whatsoever. Things that eat up my time and patience - all because some bit of functionality I became used to in OS 9, is now dead-straight busted in OS X. An issue of particular annoyance happens to be in Fetch, my FTP client of habit. In the 3.x version of Fetch, a list of all previously visited server directories was stored in a cache file. Every time you accessed a new directory, it was added to the Directories menu. This made moving up and down through the directory structure of a relatively large web site pretty much a snap. I didn't need to back-step through the hierarchy of subdirectories and up again, because my entire history was available in a single menu.
When Fetch turned 4.x and all OS-exy, the Directories menu was still there, but it severely crippled. The contents of the list was now stored in a very limited internal 64KB cache instead of a separate file. This meant that you could only have a certain number of directories available in the menu at any given time. And the list wasn't static. Items dropped off the list as new directories were accessed. More directories would appear in the menu if the paths were short. Less directories if the paths were longer. And less still if you happened to have multiple FTP sessions on the go, since all windows shared the same 64KB buffer. Aarrgh. Well, apparently I wasn't the only finding this behaviour a bit aggravating. I stumbled across several threads on the Fetch Softworks Message Boards where folks were singing a similar tune, but one thread in particular proved invaluable. Jim Matthews - the author of Fetch - admitted that something had slipped a cog and offered a slick AppleScript solution to bumping the size of the internal cache.
tell application "Fetch 4.0.3"
set «property pMCS» to 1000000
end tell
To check whether the modification took, use this second script:
tell application "Fetch 4.0.3"
get «property pMCS»
end tell
That's it. The dog is fixed. My cache is capacious. The menu is brimming with path names from here to there and back again. Productivity is soaring through the roof. What more can I say? Thanks Jim. One less annoyance in my day goes a long way.
Friday, October 03, 2003 Link
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The available domain name of the week is wallbored.com
Furthermore.
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