Nice summary of a diy quiet vista desktop

The sweet sound of near-silence has a good summary of a quiet vista desktop build. I'll probably never build another PC, but I like tracking these examples.

Gmail won't send a zipped bat file

I tried to mail a zipped archive to my work address. It contained one batch file -- Gmail rejected the zip since it contained an 'executable' file.

Grrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

I'm beginning to see some more problems with these hosted services.

I renamed the file to .bak.

Google to Acquire GrandCentral?

Google to Acquire GrandCentral? is a recent rumor. The author adds a tongue-in-cheek comment "I wonder why Google would want that company...". GC is all about owning identity of course, and all Google fans now that Google's core strategy is owning identity management and authentication.

I'd probably rather Amazon owned my identity, but I'll take Google over Microsoft or the Banks.

I like GC, but I'm not willing to commit to them (put my GC number on my business card) until they show evidence of persistence. A Google acquisition would do that.

Using a GC number on your business card would eliminate the biggest downside of using a corporate mobile account ...

OS X and Mac Mini tutorial and configuration guide

I've updated the tutorial, and associated system configuration guide, that I prepared for my 77 year old visually impaired mother. The reference may be of general interest in preparing an OS X system for any person with visual impairment, or who needs a minimalist computing environment.

Here's the guide (the configuration information is in an appendix)

• Mac Mini Tutorial (PDF, 2.5MB)
• Mac Mini Tutorial (RTF, 3.5MB)

There's also a companion blog with screencasts, but to date those have not been very useful.

Most recently I made the following changes:

• OS X 10.4.10 allows one to change mouse pointer size. Maybe that's always been there, but I didn't notice it before.
• I stopped using the ctrl-mouse scroll zoom feature and instead enabled the keyboard zoom. I turned off the dizzying screen motion default behavior, now the screen is fixed and moves only when "pushed" by the pointer at a screen margin. I set maximal magnification to "two" and I changed the keyboard mapping from an obscure modifier key to the + and - keys at the far right of the keyboard (which she doesn't use).

I've not added it yet, but I have also found that a lower intensity halogen desk light ($12, I checked before purchase that the cheap thing worked) that illuminates the keyboard, without shining on the display, is very helpful.

See also:

• Adaptive iPod (old style)
• OS X usability hall of horrors
• older post on this topic

I think this would be a great Tidbits 'take control' book topic but they didn't respond to my suggestion. (Anyone who wants to do that can take whatever I put up. No rights reserved.)

Canon's CanoScan drivers: the horror and the Vuescan alternative

On the one hand, Canon has historically had better OS X support than say, Hewlett Packard. True, their drivers are famous for cooking hardware, but at least they existed. On the other hand, one might be better off without them.

I recently tried reinstalling Canon CanoScan LiDE 30 7.0.1.1X drivers on my mother's Intel Mac Mini. I had odd error messages about "error code -5000" and "N067U not found" during my reinstall attempts, despite running as an administrator. My guess is privilege/security issues and left over bits from an earlier install were confusing Canon's very (very) primitive installer. A quick Google confirmed my suspicion that this was not a battle worth waging. So I went about removing the bits and pieces.

Wow. What a mess. OS X desperately needs to permit only use of signed installs with the Apple Installer and true uninstaller support. Canon's installer sprays junk everywhere. Spotlight seemed to find it all, including seven files in \Library\CFMSupport. (Touch that folder with great care -- like everything in \Library it can have some dangerously critical stuff in it. In my case, however, Get Info showed every file there belonged to Canon.) Then I had to delete two "login" entries. (I got rid of some Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard drivers at the same time, that uninstall was only marginally better but I think they were well behaved enough that I could have left them alone.)

I then tried Vuescan. Vuescan is the idiosyncratic [1] OS X and Windows product of Ed Hamrick, a Caltech alum who's been working away at it for 9 years. I think he may be a one man shop, and based on my own CIT experience (unofficial motto: "the truth shall xxxx you over") I have a clear (though likely incomplete) mental picture of Ed. In brief, trustworthy, stubborn, irascible, reliable.

Mercifully Vuescan supports the LIDE 30 without any Canon drivers (but not, for example, the LIDE 35 -- that scanner is junk now). I'd registered Vuescan two years ago, but my one year upgrade period had passed and Ed doesn't offer old downloads. He does offer[2], for $40, upgrades of an old 1 year license to a "professional" license that provides upgrades as long as Ed stays in business. That's the same as a new 1 year license and the new version (pro or regular) has a "guide me" feature that I think my mother might be able to use (the other pro features don't matter to me).

So I upgraded to Vuescan Professional and it's working well so far. I do get odd behaviors with auto crop, similar to what I remember with earlier versions. but the manual crop works.

Oh, the Vuescan Installer? Drag icon to Applications. Uninstall? Drag icon to trash.

[1] Ed's approach to license numbers, serial numbers, and email addresses strikes me as a bit over-engineered, but with some patience and persistence I was able to figure it out. I've no idea why he insisted on changing my customer number with the upgrade -- maybe something to do with identifier misuse.
[2] Download new version. Enter old information. Try to register. You get an upgrade button.

PS. If Apple really wanted to please customers, they'd use some of their billions to hire some device driver programmers to create Apple drivers for scanners and printers. Either that, or return to the old days of reselling devices under the Apple name. Canon, HP, Brother, etc are incapable of producing quality drivers - on any platform. XP/Vista is no different, but there Microsoft writes the drivers that work. For that they deserve praise and credit.

Yahoo Pipes: an iPhone free feed

TUAW created a Yahoo Pipes feed that filters out posts containing the string "iphone". If you have a Yahoo account I think you can view the code here: Pipes: editing 'Posts that don't mention the iPhone'. That's really neat. Now I know what sorts of things Pipes are good for!

VisualHub $24 - turn DVDs into H.264 video

TUAW likes VisualHub 1.24. Sounds like well need a copy. $24.

Office 2007 - omigod

I've been using Office 2007. Ugh. I have a headache. Heartburn too.

Maybe the new menu structure/ribbon thing will be worthwhile someday, but it'll take years for me to recoup the productivity loss from this transition.

It varies by application. Word was such a miserable product that the ribbon is a minimal hit. They appear to have made some stab at fixing Word's completely broken stye sheets, but the "themes" tool requires use of .docx (surprise!) and that's not practical. Maybe in 3-4 years.

Access appears to have been severely wounded by the ribbon. Does Microsoft really think there's a way to make Access pretty? It's a data hacking tool for heck's sake! The new Access has some nice Sharepoint integration, but I don't see anything else I like so far. They don't appear to have fixed the big problems with Access (inline functions don't return values, rather the cell contains a pointer to the function, and the links to tables are still absolute paths and break all the time). Excel, as usual, escaped the worst of it. Nobody dares touch Excel.

Then there's Outlook. Ye gads. It may be the worst of the lot. Damn ribbons - I need a 32" display now! There's only one good thing in the Outlook update (excepting Sharepoint integration) -- the category view no longer breaks whenever you sort on a field. That bug has been in Outlook for eons.

Only a monopoly could get away with something like this ...

Update 6/26/07: Some things look bad, but get better over time. The ribbon isn't doing this. Ctrl-F1 toggles ribbon display of course, but that only mitigates the mess. There's something called a "Quick Access Toolbar", it feels like it was added in a last minute panic. You can partly restore some basic usability by painfully configuring the QAT, including tediously ordering the list by clicking, incessantly, an up and down arrow. That's right, no drag and drop, clicking an arrow. Vintage 1989. If the OpenOffice team tries to emulate any of this stuff they're insane.

FTP connections via Finder: use ftp://username@foo.org

Another good TUAW tip:

TUAW Tip: Using FTP in Finder - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

This week, Apple posted a tip about using FTP directly from Finder. What Apple fails to mention in its tip is that whenever you connect via the Finder's Go -> Connect to Server option, make sure to include the user name in the ftp address. Don't connect to ftp://foo.org, instead, connect to ftp://erica.sadun@foo.org. Adding the user name fixes nearly all the connection problems that people write to me about. Instead of getting "The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in (address) could not be read or written. (Error code -36)." an authentication window appears.

The model of username@ also works for smb:// and afp://

Messing with OS X icons

Preview has surprising abilities ...

Import your icons into Photoshop - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Basically, the trick is to open the application's icon in Preview (as was pointed out in the comments, you can most easily do this just by copying it in the Finder and selecting "New from Clipboard" in Preview's file menu), then save it in Photoshop (PSD) format. Now you can open it in Photoshop and get access to the image for editing, including the alpha channel.

I've usually done a get info to see icon, clicked on it, then cmd-c then open in preview.

Use of the SUBST command to reduce breakage of Microsoft Access 2003 links - an esoteric hack for escaping DOS 2.1's "path trap".

Where to pass on these kinds of tips and techniques for working around Microsoft's kludgy applications? It's a bit of a puzzle since Microsoft's products have an unlimited number of oddities requiring an unlimited number of hacks. This is but one of the myriad ...

I posted this one to Microsoft's high quality Access queries newsgroup, and since I use this blog to keep track of things like myself I'll post it here too. It's probably too esoteric for anyone else though ...

Use of the SUBST command to reduce breakage of Access links

One of the great failings of the past 20 years of Microsoft's dominance has been the failure to implement good file system redirection. XP today is almost as dependent on absolute paths as it DOS 2.1. [1]

In the world of Access this manifests as broken links to external data sources. I use links very extensively in my data management work, a typical project may contains dozens of query files with links to dozens of data tables distributed over one or more drives. Any change to any path, including renaming a folder or file or moving a file, will break the links.

Access 2003 responds to a broken link by irreversibly breaking a query on first use. It doesn't matter if you don't save the query when you see it's broken, the query is now broken. (This may be fixed in 2007.) If you're careful you can use Linked Table Manager to repair the link before first use of the query, but if you foget you're in trouble.

Today I reinvented a workaround. I say reinvented because I found a single mention of it in this newsgroup from 1999 [2]. It worked then so I presume it works now. Seven years is long enough that I'll repost the technique.

The trick is that DOS 3.x's SUBST command still works in XP. Indeed, in XP you can apply a SUBST operation to path containing a drive letter mapped to a network share.

The result is a de facto partial indirection layer.

Assume I have a database file john.mdb in c:\work\fark\dbase\cpt.

I run this command: SUBST P: c:\work\fark\dbase\cpt.

Now I create a link from a query database to a file in john.mdb

The link will have the path P:\john.mdb

Now I move john.mdb to e:\dbase\cpt

I now clear the P: substitution and run: SUBST P: e:\dbase\cpt
my links will not break.

For more information on SUBST simply type SUBST /? on the command line.

Of course if Microsoft were to implement file system indirection, or even relative paths in Access links, this kludge would not be useful.

meta: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, Microsoft Access 2003, indirection, redirection, link, linked table manager, 070620

[1] Mac Classic's greatest innovation was an absolute file identifier that provided indirection, one could move files around without breaking relationships. OS X, sadly, broke much of this, but OS X today still has quite a bit of indirection.

Indirection is a member of the interesting class of things that are as unappreciated as they are valuable. Nobody ever mentions file system indirection as the most important innovation of the early Macintosh, but I think it really was. Twenty years later XP is almost as much a "prisoner of the path" as DOS 2.1. Sadly, OS X has regressed, though it's still well ahead of XP.

Despite the nastiness of using a fully specified path name to implement data table links in Microsoft Access, I do have to say the "link to table" technique is very useful and has very impressive performance and reliability.

The future of SVG is ?

I was an old SVG fan way about 3 DCB1 (before the Dot Com Bust 1). I'd lost track of it over the past few years as it was eclipsed by Flash and by Ajax based non-standard solutions. Work questions made me look it over again recently. Somewhat to my surprise, the technology may not be quite dead. So if Apple and Google decide to be nicer to each other than, say, Netscape and Sun @ 1997, we might see SVG play some role on small low bandwidth computing devices. Like, say, the iPhone.

But what about, you know, the IE web? On the one hand Microsoft's Silverlight is going to crush Adobe's Flash, so Apollo and Flash are irrelevant. Similarly SVG can't play on the larger web without Microsoft, so SVG seems irrelevant on the IE web too. On the other hand Google can't cede this battleground to Silverlight. (Apple of course can't either, but in this struggle they root from the sidelines).

So will Google buy Apollo/Flash (and/or Adobe)? Or will Google embed SVG support in the Google toolbar and thus bring it to IE / Vista? Or bet on both horses, since either is safer than Silverlight? (Adobe's SVG plug-in was never relevant, so let's not even mention it.)

This will be interesting to watch ...

If anyone sees evidence that Google is going to put an SVG reader into their toolbar code please send a note to jfaughnan@spamcop.net. I'm curious!

Gordon's Tech - migration to new domain

I've now migrated my three primary public blogs to the domain kateva.org. False alarm, I had some imaginary glitches and switched back to the old url for now. I'll probably switch again in a few weeks because it does actually work including automatic feed updating through the '301 redirect'. Below are some notes I'll leave in for reference ...

Update: Well, that didn't go so well after all. The feeds don't seem to follow the migration, so if you move a blog the old feeds don't seem to work. I'll see if I can get some Google tech support help, but in the past they've been hard to work with.

Update 6/20/07: I was too impatient. A post to Google Groups (I didn't try Google tech support) received a very kind response from "wasted":

I don't use bloglines myself, but Blogger will use a 301 redirect on the blogspot address to go to the new custom domain, for everything including feeds. So any feedreader should follow the redirect...

And so it does. It just takes a bit longer to update than usual, and it follows the common bloglines behavior of showing an unread count of "10". Bloglines updates the URL as well. I did two roundtrips on my test blog and it works. I've switched back to the old urls (hey, I was justifiably nervous) but I'll switch them one at a time over the next few days. It's noteworthy that bloglines managed two roundtrips, a "301 redirect" is "permanent". (see also)

Clearing the Finder "Open With" contextual menu

Delete com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. For more, see - Mac OS X: Clearing the Finder "Open With" contextual menu

How to create a google apps custom domain and move your blogger blogs to your new domain

Okay, I'm impressed.

This was a bit hard for me to figure out from Google's generic documentation [1], but with the way I've described the process below anyone can do it. Cost is $10/year. It took me about 30 minutes to:

1. create and register a custom domain (kateva.org) and set it up with free google apps.
2. create a CNAME entry corresponding to the name I want my blog to have.
   (Example: instead of http://googlefaughnan.blogspot.org this blog will eventually move to http://tech.kateva.org)
3. change my blog publish settings to the new url and demonstrate the new url works and the old one redirects.

I've done this for a test blog I created for this kind of experiment, but in the description below I'll use this blog as an example (though as of this posting I've not yet moved it).

Get your Google Apps domain and configure your subdomain CNAME settings.

1. Go to Google Apps and register a domain for $10/year configured with the free Google Apps services. (Same thing we do for our family email, I have a few businesses setup this way too.) In this case, I used kateva.org. (Kateva is our dog's name, I rather like it.)
2. From Google Apps follow the link on the advanced tab to eNom's configuration screens. (The advanced tab will give you a high security password and username information). Note there are host records associated already with ghs.google.com.
   
3. Click the edit button and add a new row. For "host name" enter the name of the blog, such as "tech" (for Gordon's Tech, which would then have the url http://tech.kateva.org). For Address use ghs.google.com. For Record Type use CNAME.
   

Now go to Blogger and select the blog you want to move.

1. Note the current blog URL, because when you're done it will be gone (but it will redirect).
   
2. Click on Publishing tab.
3. Enter the url corresponding to the CNAME you created (example: notes.kateva.org).
4. Don't use the missing files host. (This is mostly for persons who had FTP blogs and are switching to a hosted blog.)

Now test

1. Does old URL redirect?
2. Does new URL work?

I'm going to do some more testing with feeds and the like, then move my blogs. As to why I'm doing this, that will be a post on Gordon's Notes shortly ...

Two Blogger help files to use for reference:

• Using a custom domain
• Create a CNAME record for my custom domain?

[1] They're clearly trying to be "open" and "generic", but this works very easily if you do everything with Google. They just don't document it that way.

Update 6/18/07: I'm concerned that after one makes this switch, feeds that point to the old URL no longer update. I hope I'm wrong about this! I'll update as I learn more. Not good if true! (See also)

Update 7/19/07: It turns out that the 301 redirect works, but only at the domain level. Since Google changed the syntax for RSS feeds between their blospot and custom domain implementations RSS feeds don't "update" by redirect. Atom feed syntax is identical, so they do update. Google has not acknowledged nor documented this.

Also, it's interesting how this works. A CNAME is imply a redirect. So all requests for blog.kateva.org are redirected to ghs.google.com. I assume when one switches in Blogger to a "custom domain" Google creates a relationship in ghs.google.com so that all requests for the custom domain sent to ghs.google.com are resolved internally. So this solution implements two layers or indirection, one at the CNAME level and one at ghs.google.com.

Update 4/15/2008: Google never did fix the old-rss redirect bug.