Outlook: Gregorian vs. Lunar - the rematch

Weirdest error message of the year, from Microsoft Outlook 2003

Cannot import vCalendar file.

This error can appear if you have attempted to save a recurring Lunar appointment in iCalendar format.
To avoid this error, set the appointment option to Gregorian instead of Lunar.
More information about this error message online.

Wow.

How a firewall works

MacDevCenter.com: Exploring the Mac OS X Firewall

Ejecting a stuck CD in OS X

OSXFAQ - Technical News and Support for Mac OS X

There are several odd OS X weaknesses. One of them is trouble ejecting CDs or DVDs. In some states, esp. with fast user switching, a CD fails to mount and it cannot be ejected through standard means. The CD is "stuck" in limbo.

This page has a number of tricks. The one that recently worked for me was to fire up Disk Utility. There, and only there, I could see the CD. Then I was able to select it and eject it.

StickyBrain

StickyBrain is a pretty active OS X personal information manager. I'm interested because it syncs with Palm, so it might work with my Samsung i600 phone. I also read on Macintouch that it supports some kind of iPhoto browsing. I'll update this post if I try it out.

O'Reilly: Turn Your Mac into an Audio Transcriber

O'Reilly: Turn Your Mac into an Audio Transcriber

AppleScript solution.

Recovering data from a corrupted os x image file

MacInTouch Home Page: "Steve Cooper managed to recover a lost FileVault image with some extra effort:

I had a FileVault image that was corrupted in such a way that I couldn't get access to its contents. The solution finally was to mount the image using Disk Utility (which was the only thing able to mount it, though even then it didn't appear on the desktop) then use Data Rescue to retrieve the files from it."

DCOM 10021 - one answer, but it's not free!

Windows XP: dcom error on xp after upgrade

My WinXP SP2 event monitor shows regular occurences of DCOM 10021 error. I figured this would be easy to track down on the net, but the ONLY possible answer is at the Experts-Exchange site. That site used to be free, but it costs money now.

Wow.

The public net has failed me!

The only clue is that it may be related to upgrading a Win2K Pro machine to XP Pro.

Update: I should have scrolled down below the ads. Looks like Experts-Exchange does post the answers after a while. The link referred me to www.eventid.net. Looks like this will be a pain to hunt down. Of course Microsoft's support site had nothing -- hmph.

Update 2: This is looking better. The EventID site is very useful, unfortunately it's part of the "invisible net" (not accessible to search engines). I don't have McAfee installed, but these descriptions are interesting:

If you have a McAfee product installed and you have recently applied Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, then see the link to "McAfee Support Solution ID: KB37954" for information on how to resolve this problem.

Eric Ritchie (Last update 12/15/2004):
I found this error to be a DCOM issue resulting from improper Launch and Activation permissions for the McAfee Framework Service in DCOM configuration. To resolve the issue, I searched for the registry key mentioned in the event description (which turned out to be McAfee's Framework Service). I then opened the Component Services Administrative Tool, and opened the properties of DCOM Config.\Framework Service under Computers\My Computer. Under the Security Tab, I found that the Administrators Group was missing from the Launch and Activation Permissions (Custom Tab). Giving the Administrators group full access corrected the issue.

Phil Bradley's functional guide to search engines

Phil Bradley: Finding what you need with the best search engines

Phil is a librarian with a special interest in search. His blog has been quite interesting lately, this is one of his most recent subjects. It's a functional guide to search engine selection. Based on a classification of purposes he suggests seach engines to use.

Blogger was a mess today!

Blogger has had good and bad days over the past 8 months, but the past few days were the worst ever. One of my postings was replicated six times; after the sixth occurence Blogger went down completely for about 18 hours. Their status site, status.blogger.com, had no report on any part of the outage.

I wish I were paying for Blogger so they'd be in fear of losing my business. Another disadvantage of a free service!

Guide to buying a Dell display for a Mac

Cinema Displays (Part 6)

Nice review and guide. Dell seems to be capturing the flat panel computer display market.

MetaFilter profiles infamous London Underground Map(s)

Stand clear of the closing doors | MetaFilter

I've given a lecture on computational visualization at the U of MN for the past two years. It's a fun talk. The London Underground map features in my lecture, thanks to this collection of links I'll have a better story next year.

NYPL Digital Gallery: 275,000 images and counting

NYPL Digital Gallery

Bookofjoe pointed out that the New York Public Library now provides public access to their digital image repository:

NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.

Wow. It's been a while since such a large repository has been connected to the web. It reminds me again how far we've come since Paul Kleeberg first showed me the minutes of a city council meeting in Australia using a Gopher client back around 1994. Even so, we're only at the start of this journey.

Launchers for Mac OS X: LaunchBar, Butler, Quicksilver and more

MacDevCenter.com: Launchers for Mac OS X

This was published 4/04 but I just came across it. Quicksilver has since gone into general release. Great discussion.

Google Desktop Search lays down another card

Google Desktop Search Plug-ins

When I tested out various desktop search tools Google Desktop search looked pretty feeble. I use Yahoo's relabeled X1 product -- it's not perfect but it's pretty acceptable on reasonably modern hardware.

But now Google has laid down another card - GDS plugins that extend its functionality:

This plugin is a web spider ('Kongulo' is Icelandic for spider) that crawls websites you specify and makes them searchable via GDS.

Kongulo follows links in HTML frame, image and anchor tags. It obeys robots.txt and knows basic and digest HTTP authentication. It can be run continuously, checking for updates to previously crawled pages, and uses the If-Modified-Since HTTP header to minimize transfers when doing so.

You can provide a regexp to limit crawls to e.g. your intranet domain.

This version does not have a graphical user interface and can be run from the command-line only.

Note my emphasis. This is a personal version of a corporate indexing tool. I'd guess it wouldn't scale to a large corporation, but who knows? In the meantime I'd use it to index my blogs so I can find stuff in them.

The product itself is interesting, but it emphasizes two things:

1. GDS might have a future.
2. When you build a product around Plugins, you gain a lot of power.

A strange bug with Microsoft Office Outlook and Access 2000 and Palm HotSync and PocketMirror and ...

Microsoft Office Online Home Page

I wanted to consolidate and manipulate about 1100 contacts stored in an Outlook file. The history of those contacts is probably valid here. They've been through a myriad of applications over the years: FileMaker Pro on a Mac. FileMaker Pro on Windows. Palm Desktop/Mac. Palm Desktop/Windows. PocketMirror. PocketMirror Pro. Exchange. Outlook.

And that's the short list.

I export them from Outlook into Access. So far so good. In Access I can parse, manipulate and clean-up the data.

Except my queries don't work. I query 'not null' and get records with empty fields. I know Access 2000 had problems (2003 is better), but this is ridiculous. It can't be that buggy. The fields, however are empty. I run all the database repair utilities -- no effect.

Or are they?

I export all the data to a delimited file. Then I use a text editor to set the character set to ANSI and save the text file as PC format. They I reimport. Now all the queries work.

My guess is that there were 'illegal' characters in those fields. I know Access 2003 can handle UTF-8 data, maybe there those characters would have rendered in some way. In this case, they didn't. They were there, but Access couldn't get at them and couldn't delete them.

The risks of moving data between a LOT of platforms ...