iPhone Voice Memos.app - the missing manual

It took me fifty years to learn to tie my shoes. So it's not surprising that it took me months to figure out how to use the "simple" iPhone Voice Memos app.

I doubt many users could have as much trouble as I with an app that seems to have only two buttons, but if you're one of the chosen this is for you.

To begin with, I need to explain the wrong way to use the app. The wrong way is to tap the red button to start, then tap it again to stop. Wrong. Than puts you in pause mode, and to quit recording you might next tap the right side black icon, then go to another screen, then tap the Done icon and so on.

Here's the right way to use the app without an Apple headset. Headset instructions follow.

1. On startup you tap the red button to record. (Ok, I got that far.) You need to hold the microphone reasonably close to your mouth, the app isn't designed to be used for recording lectures and the like -- just for voice memos.

2. Ok, here's the trick. While recording the red button has changed from a circle to two parallel vertical red bars. It's a pause button. What you might miss, because your eye has been pulled to the red button, is that the odd "grill" button (3 black horizontal bars) has also changed. It's now a black square.

3. When you're done, don't tap on the red pause button. Tap on the right black button. Yes, the one that used to be 3 bars but now, if you're paying better attention than I, you will see is a black square.

Tap the black square and you're done.

3. What happens if you tap the red button? You go into Pause mode.

Pause mode looks just like start mode, except for the big red top banner that stays on whatever you do on the phone. In Pause mode the black button is 3 horizontal bars. Now if you tap on the (multimodal, nefarious) black button you go to review mode.

4. In review mode the app will start playing back your last recording. You can click Done to stop and quit or you can play or delete your saved recordings (swipe to delete).

At the point you can see that if your intent is to record and stop, then hitting the red button while recording is a mistake. It puts you in pause mode, and exiting from pause mode involves several precision taps. If you're dictating while driving, this is dangerous. If you fall into the pause trap, your best option is to tap the red button again to return to record mode, then tap the black button to exit.

The Voice Memos.app behaves differently if you're wearing an Apple headset. From a previous post of mine  ...

Gordon's Tech: iPhone Voice Memos.app - the secret feature

I wasn't that impressed with Voice Memos.app when if first appeared with OS 3. I joined the chorus complaining about the audio levels -- or lack thereof. It only works if you talk directly into the phone or headset mike. The record button should be huge, instead the UI is given over to a pointless graphic. It takes too many taps to close a recording. And so on.

There was, I thought, only one good feature of Voice Memos.app. It's fast. iTalk Lite had great features, but it was too damned slow to launch and record (I'd have paid for the pro version if it were five times faster).

That was before I discovered the secret feature.

If you're wearing Apple's earset and you have Voice Memos running, one click of the microphone switch starts recording, a second click stops and saves.

So if I'm driving with my right earset in, I can click dictate and click again. No distraction, no multi-taps, no delays. This is a great feature. Now I love Voice Memos.

So, where the #$$!$ is this documented? My Google searching can't find mention of this feature. Heck, I can't find any documentation on Voice Memos.app...

... PS. There is Apple documentation on some of the microphone switch's features. You can use it, for example, to decline an incoming call (hold 2 seconds) or to switch and hold (click once) or switch and kill (hold 2 seconds). No mention of Voice Memos.app though.

Little Snitch exposes network killing MobileMe behavior

My mothers modem lights were flickering madly -- but I couldn't see why. All was quiet.

It wasn't just the lights -- the network performance sucked. Sometimes things would rush down, but at other times they'd just hang. Crazy.

Naturally I blamed Videotron. Nice people, but last time we had a problem they had to replace her router twice. As usual I got an agreeable support person. Everything tested out for him, but I couldn't run the Videotron speed test - it took ages to load. He wanted to test further, but I thanked him and told him I'd check things out internally.

You see, I'd lied to him about not having a router installed. Yeah, that's bad. I felt guilty because once he'd confirmed their network was ok I had a hunch where the problem was.

I turned my suspicions to the other machines on the WLAN, including my MacBook. Sure enough, when I shut the MacBook the modem lights slowed down and the Videotron speed test showed 1mbps downlink and 128K uplink - just what Mom pays for.

So what the heck was the MacBook doing? It's not an XP machine, so I wasn't worried about malware. I don't like installing low level apps that require uninstallers, but I needed to know what was going on. So I installed the $30 Little Snitch 2 utility in demo mode

...Little Snitch has a free, built-in demo mode that provides the same protection and functionality as the full version. The demo runs for three hours, and it can be restarted as often as you like...

It's geeky, but, in short, LittleSnitch worked. The culprit? MobileMe iDisk file sync. If you have a local cached version of your iDisk share OS X Sync is very demanding about synchronizing with the remote MobileMe iDisk. I wouldn't notice this at home, but at my mother's OS X Sync was saturating the 128 kpbs uplink trying to sync a 28 MB file. The only clue to what's going on is a spinning icon seen if you view a Finder window sidebar. Turning off MobileMe sync doesn't stop this. You can only stop it by clicking on the spinning icon or by turning off local disk caching altogether.

So I was wrong, I did have malware. Apple malware.
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The Mac Mini drive clunk (knock) problem

I'm visiting my mother, so I'm reminded that every few seconds her Mac Mini makes a gentle "clunk" sound. It as though it's knocking for my attention.

Emily wouldn't care or even notice it, and I don't think my mother can hear it, but "people like me" hate noises like that.

When I first noticed a year ago, I figured her drive was failing - though Disk Utility SMART status showed all was well. After a year though, it seems like something else: "hard drive clunk mac mini.

If you turn the volume way up you can hear the sound on YouTube (my mother's mini has the same Futitsu drive). It's not just Fujitsu though, there are utilities to prevent clunking written for Seagate drives. It appears to be an OS/Firmware bug that recurs over the years with different OS drive combinations. I don't recall it in 10.4, so I suspect it was introduced in 10.5 and may be gone in 10.6 (I upgraded my mother to 10.5 about the time I noticed the noise).

Some of the better discussions include ...

• Apple - Support - Discussions - Hard drive "clunk": From 2005. The clunk behavior probably shortens drive lifespan. No fix.
• Mac Mini drive click [Archive] - The macosxhints Forums: Recommends smartreporter for diagnostics
• ClunKiller - Kill your Hard Drive *Clunk* noises! and Is your Hard Drive making *Clunk* noises?
• XdN » Clicking Hard Drives and Possibly Shortened Hard Drive Life (not clear this is a clunk problem though - PC Only)
• Set Automatic Acoustic Management level on hard drives - Mac OS X Hints (open firmware hacking -- too risky for me)
• Advanced hard drive power management via AppleScript - Mac OS X Hints - obsolete, but an interesting reference

There don't appear to be any easy fixes, and since my mother can't hear it I think I'll leave it be. Most of the complaints are a few years old, so I suspect newer drives don't clunk. I also wonder if it's fixed with 10.6, though drive clunking seems to be a cross-platform problem.

I'll update this post if I learn of a better fix.

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Subsite filtering - harder than it looks

In general the kids earn supervised computer time, but we have a "learning workstation" that's open access and less supervised. Demand is limited however; the Learning account is restricted to "educational sites". Educational as defined by Dad. The permitted sites are not terribly exciting.

One of the better sites is National Geographic Video. In fact almost all of the Nat Geo site is great -- except for the games. Of course that's also the part of the site that gets the ad revenue, so Nat Geo isn't keen to turn it off.

Naturally the kids just want to play the games. OpenDNS, OS X Parental Controls and the wee firewall built into one of our routers will let me block domains, but not specific URL patterns. So if I block Nat Geo games, I block everything.

Google's not helping me with this one. It doesn't help that the Parental Control software marketplace for OS X is moribund, probably done in by OS X Parental Controls and Steve Jobs presumed personal antipathy to parental controls. I'm also not finding any "home filtering firewall" articles, but that might be a Google problem.

I am also beginning to suspect that selective subsite filtering is technically very hard - or impossible.

I thought I'd try a proxy server with built-in filter controls, but those things are harder to find than the last time I used one about 15 years ago.

So I'm stuck for the moment. I'll update this post if I learn more. Of course eventually the kids will learn the workarounds, but by then they'll either be net solo or I'll have bigger things to deal with.

See also

• Gordon's Notes: Parental controls - not an Apple thing
• Gordon's Tech: Parental Controls - Remote Access and other tips
• Gordon's Tech: Parental Controls - The wikipedia problem solved
• Gordon's Tech: OS X parental controls still broken in 10.5.7 (this bug now fixed I think)
• Gordon's Tech: OS X 10.5: Apple engineers need more children
• Be the Best You can Be: OS X 10.5: time limited computer access
• Gordon's Tech: Can't select Jabber or Google Talk for iChat? Here's one reason.
• Gordon's Notes: The software Apple can't do
• Gordon's Tech: LEGO Digital Designer is pure evil on OS X

Update 3/4/2010: OS X includes Apache server; this post makes it sound relatively easy to use it as a proxy server and use ProxyBlock to control access. Unfortunately it's not clear whether you can control access to a subdomain; I suspect not.

Where did my Access 2007 object descriptions go? SP2 killed them.

Sometimes I have to use Access 2007. It’s always painful, but one of the worst agony comes because there are no object descriptions anymore. It’s hard enough to manage Access entities with object descriptions, but with Access 2007 all of my Access 2003 table and query descriptions are gone.

It’s weird because I swear I used to see them buried away in Access 2007 when I used it a year or two ago. Not in a useful place mind you, but at least they existed.

Turns out Office SP2 killed ‘em off:

After you apply 2007 Office system Service Pack 2, the description of an object does not appear in the Navigation Pane in Access 2007. This problem occurs when the Navigation Pane is viewed by Details.

There’s an August 2009 hotfix for this and sundry other Access 2007 bugs, unlike some hotfixes it is downloadable. I assume it will be included in Office 2007 SP3 when that comes out.

Wicked bug.

MobileMe vs. DropBox

I've been tempted by DropBox, but I signed up for MobileMe (Family!) so I could sync my OS X Address Book with my iPhone via MobileMe. (If you use Exchange Server with the current iPhone you can't do direct sync to a desktop -- I hope that will change with iPhoneOS 4.

Today I ran into a MobileMe file sync problem. The most current version of a file was "stuck" on my MacBook. I couldn't get it to sync to the server. I got a cryptic sync error message, but nothing else.

Eventually MobileMe put up the dialog I was expecting, asking me to resolve a sync conflict.

I'm not impressed. I haven't asked much of MobileMe, but it's already failed me.

I'm going to give DropBox a try -- and keep looking for some other way to manage my address book. I'm hoping I'll be able to drop MobileMe after this year is up.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe: Perspective of a crusty Palm veteran (2008)
• Gordon's Tech: The MobileMe Massacre begins (2010)

My 10.6 iMac is crashing - a debugging exercise

I hate when this happens. It's been a while fortunately.

My now flicker-free fairly new 27" quad core iMac is crashing.

There are two common failure modes. One is that it locks up when displaying photos in the screensaver. The clue is that the same images display repeatedly. The second mode is that iTunes becomes unresponsive, and then the Finder as well. I get the SBOD/SPOD/spinning beachball of death.

If I kill both I can restart iTunes, but not the Finder. I've tried several fixes. First I ran Safe Boot (shift restart). Then I installed the latest version of Onyx and ran the usual clean, check, maintenance, etc. Everything passed but the problems have persisted.

So I've begun uninstalling anything invasive. First I removed CrashPlan, and today I uninstalled 1Password (a quite involved uninstall, see OS X defect: The missing uninstaller).

I've been suspicious of 1Password for a while. I'm also monitoring Console.app, which is full of "missing bundle identifier" Office 2008 related messages. I've found mention of this problem in association with kernel panics last November, with a more recent responses. For example:

... 2/27/10 8:10:35 PM [0x0-0x28028].com.vmware.fusionDaemon[296] 2010-02-27 20:10:35.581 pkgutil[299:60f] PackageKit: *** Missing bundle identifier: /Library/Receipts/Office2008_en_proofing_brazilian.pkg...

Soo why the heck does vmware Fusion put this message out? (com.apple.backupd also complains, but that make sense). VMWare Fusion is doing quite a bit on startup, even though it's "not running".

 Tonight I'll run the Apple hardware test that came with my machine in loop mode. (I think you need to attach a physical kb to get this to work -- holding 'D' on my bluetooth kb didn't seem to do anything.) If the problem persists, VMWare will be the next to go (For example). I want it to run my XP VM, but if need be I can move that VM to a MacBook running 10.5 and Fusion 2. If I figure this one out, I'll update this post.

PS. Bundle Identifier via Apple Dev:

The bundle identifier string identifies your application to the system. This string must be a uniform type identifier (UTI) that contains only alphanumeric (A-Z,a-z,0-9), hyphen (-), and period (.) characters. The string should also be in reverse-DNS format. For example, if your company’s domain is Ajax.com and you create an application named Hello, you could assign the string com.Ajax.Hello as your application’s bundle identifier.

Update:

• I moved the suspicious Office 2008 .pkg files to another drive. I'll see if I can reduce the Console messages.
• I realized that when I drag things to the trash they're being deleted immediately, rather than put in the trash. I found an old article on this that's being cited by 10.6 users recently. Naturally it's a permissions problem. I wonder if it's related to the odd way my account was created when I used migration assistant (long story). I'll try some of those fixes.

Update b: Getting somewhere.

Ok, this is interesting. As described by the X Lab document I was getting the "will be deleted immediately" trash message because I had lost read/write privileges to my home directory. On inspection my User directory folders all refer to an user "_unknown". I think this was a side-effect of how I set up my account, which was:

1. I setup an account called "jfaughnan" on my new machine.
2. After a while I deleted it an migrated the "jfaughnan" account from my old machine.
3. The new account was given the home folder name "jfaughnan 1". On inspection I found that deleting the user "jfaughnan" failed to remove the original home directory.

I'll keep working this one. I also would wonder about VMware messing up my privileges and about migration assistant inheriting known permissions problems from my old machine.


Update 2/28/2010: Went through 18 loops without a problem, so hardware seems good. I'll keep hitting on the software issues - esp. VMWare.

Update 3/2/2010: I thought I was getting somewhere, but today it was unresponsive with a faint glowing blue screen. I tried putting it to sleep by pressing the power button, but nothing happened. Then, on a hunch, I turned off an attached firewire 400 drive. The system responded, then went to sleep. It woke up normally.

On resumption there was an iTunes complaint about loss of Apple Store connectivity. Meanwhile my console showed many instances of this message:

3/2/10 3:45:14 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.apple.AddressBook.abd[13839]) Exited with exit code: 1

Now I'm suspicious that 10.6.2 has a problem with sleeping firewire 400 drives. Spanning Sync and MobileMe get frownies too because of the Address Book message, and Time Machine because my last TM backup concluded just before the lockup.


Update 3/11/10: It's still locking up, sometimes with awake from sleep and sometimes with switching users. It might be less frequent - maybe once a week. I'm suspicious of VMWare 3.02 on 10.6.2. I don't see any useful Console messages. I will try restarting the machine every few days as a prophylactic measure. Maybe 10.6.3 will help, it should be out soon.

Update 3/12/10: Got the faint blue screen, and again turning off the external drive did the trick. The screensaver slideshow uses that Firewire 400 drive. I ran Disk Utility and cleaned up permissions on the drive. It's set to ignore ownership. Looks like yet another OS/firewire problem.

Update 3/13/10: Found iTunes was not responding. Time Machine backup not working. When I tried to add a share got spinning beachball (noted, however, a share reference to a user account that was deleted - bug there). Console said slide show found a corrupted jpeg. Unable to shutdown -- until I turned off external firewire drive. I think 10.6 and new iMacs have serious problems with Firewire 400 enclosures. Errors seem to cause the OS to blow up - perhaps some kind of memory overow issue.

Update 3/13/10b: Huge discussion thread on firewire issues in 10.6. I think I found my problem.

Update 3/13/10c: Apple just truncated the massive firewire complaint thread. Really, it didn't have anything to do with me. I guess they took care of that problem. I've switched to USB for now, I'll try firewire again with 10.6.3.

Update 3/29/2010: Same crash - locked up screen saver - but this time I was using a USB drive. Turning the drive off then on again cleared the problem. So this isn't a firewire problem after all! It's a screensaver and external drive bug. The console is showing "corrupt JPEG data", but that might just be from power cycling the drive.


Update 5/12/2010: I think this was fixed by 10.6.3. I haven't seen it since. I only have a USB drive attached however, so I can't rule out a Firewire bug. The "corrupt JPEG" console message was a red herring caused by loss of the drive when trying to display in the screensaver.

Update 10/27/2010: Things have been pretty stable since 10.6.3.

OS X 10.6 bug: persistent reconnection

I don't recall running into this problem with 10.5.

I want to connect to a network share using my remote machine user name and password. Snow Leopard, however, insists on connection using my MobileMe user name. If I disconnect, it simply reconnects.

I've yet to find a workaround.

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Facebook Lite blank page - no fix

Today is my day for tech roadblocks.

I can't figure out how to get Outlook 2007 notes to be exported as text files for use with notational velocity/simplenote, and I can't fix my mother's blank lite.facebook.com page.

I'd set my mother's FB account to always start "lite". It's a cleaner, simpler, faster UI. Unfortunately, it doesn't get a lot of FB love. There's a bug where the page loads empty. There's no way to convince FB to ignore the default "always lite" settings.

I found a hack that will get me to account settings - use this URL: "https://login.facebook.com/login.php?login_attempt=1".

I didn't have to actually enter my password with this hack, but it did bring me to normal settings. From there I can see her Profile view. Unfortunately, standard settings don't include the facebook lite control -- that's only available from lite.facebook.com.

I was able to fight my way to a report form, but I don't hold out much hope. I'll try from XP at work and see if things are any better.

Once I do get into her lite.facebook.com account I'll turn off the "always lite" setting. That's clearly a bad idea!

See also: disable-facebook-lite-switch-to-normal-facebook

Update 2/26/2010: The next day, from work using IE 8, I was able to get a non-blank page. I then switched her to regular facebook. A DNS issue? I use GoogleDNS and/or OpenDNS at home.
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Weird 1Password related bug with account migration

I've used 1Password for a while, but I've always been uneasy about the hacks used to get access to browsers. As best I can tell 1Password has stopped using evil input managers, but it has had a shady past.

So when I switched to a transiently flickering 27" i5 iMac I didn't install 1Password right away. I figured I'd get around to it, but I forgot (I mostly use it on my iPhone).

Recently I was having odd lockups with 10.6, so I uninstalled CrashPlan because of some suspicious behaviors. The problem persisted, so I checked my Console.app. It was full of messages about missing bundle bits with 1Password. All I can guess is that bits of 1Password migrated when I used Migration Assistant to move my old account (but no apps).

I downloaded and installed 1Password 3 (Snow Leopard compliant) and the Console messages are gone.

Weird.

Now we'll see if my lockup problems resolve ...

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Series of 10.6 bugs related to erasing (formatting) an external drive

OS X Grab is a pretty simple utility, so I was quite surprised when it hung with a spinning pizza of death (SPOD, SBOD) on saving a screen capture.

Deleting preferences didn't help. I switched to the Admin account to test there, and it hung with a blue screen.

What the heck was going on?

The source of this and several other bugs, including a lockup the night before, was I was performing a 7 layer erase and FAT format on an external drive being recycled for donation.

It appears than several Finder/File system related operations in 10.6 will hang when an external drive is being erased.

I've been using 10.6 for a few months on my newest machine. It's not bad, but it's still not as stable as 10.5.

Google Buzz, Chat and Reader - together at last. Farewell Twitter.

Buzz is up, though at the moment it's sluggish and it looks like Googel IM/SMS may have cratered along with it. Probably being hammered.

The Buzz site says it's being rolled out gradually, but I clicked the sign up button there and it seemed to add it to my Gmail. It looks like my Buzz followers include my Google Reader shared item followers (I'm following 43 people and 22 people are following me) plus my Chat correspondents.

The Buzz shared items are the sum of Chat status messages, Google reader shared items and Picasa image shares:

Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa Web public albums, and Google Chat status messages will automatically appear as posts in Buzz. To edit your connected sites or change privacy settings, view connected sites.

"Connected sites" create posts in Buzz. Mine started out with Picasa public albums and Google Reader shared items. It's not, however, showing my Chat status messages as a "connected site" so there's something funny there. Those should really show as "connected sites". [I don't think Chat updates are doing anything at the moment].

I think that Buzz is the gathering point and Buzz posts don't go to Google Reader shared items or to Chat status, but really it's hard to tell. The site is semi-stable at the moment.

I've never had much use for Twitter, and it looks like I'll have even less use in the future - especially if Google ties this into SMS.

PS. Viewing the people I follow, I see that my "leonine" OS X 10.6 user account icon has now metastasized to be attached in Gmail's Buzz follower view to my corporate email. Where will it go next?

Update: I reviewed how these display in my Google Profile, and I decided it was a bit too much information to have publicly available there. My Google Profile is very discoverable, hence corporate. So I removed the connectivity to Reader Shared items. I'll explore this over time.

Update 2: I wonder if Google will even try to submit an iPhone Buzz app, given that Apple would almost certainly reject it.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion

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OS X Address Book: How do you show all groups for a Contact?

Once upon a time, an early version of OS X Address Book allowed one to see all the Groups to which an address belonged:

InformIT: Mac OS X Unleashed - Address Book: "the group setup window should appear,"

I don't believe there's a group setup window any more. It's easy to add an address to a group, but I don't think there's away to inspect or interact with an address and find out which groups it belongs to.

I often want to do this, particularly when I deal with duplicate address book entries.

Sigh.

I doubt Apple will fix this. If they ever do crack the hood on Address Book, maybe they could also fix the "Find Duplicates" function - such as provide a "show duplicates" option. Or at least document what the merge behavior really is!

Update 2/26/2010: Per Comment by Kate: "Simple. Select the address card you want to find groups for. Press the option key. The groups the address belongs to will be highlighted." Knowing the answer I searched on this, and found only one reference in an old version of Pogue's "Mac OX X" Missing manual series. How did Kate know this?

Update 2/27/2010: It's in the "manual" (online help). Of course. It's not even hard to find. I searched on "show groups" and found:

Select a contact in the Name column.

Hold down the Option key.

Address Book highlights the groups the contact belongs to in the Groups column. If you have a lot of groups, scroll the list to see all of the highlighted groups.

Total humiliation, total fail.

Sync heck: CalDAV vs Exchange Server - a Google Apple review

Two years after writing "Synchronization is Hell" I'm pleased to report it's been only a bit heckish of late for my iPhone and our family Calendar.

Three months ago I switched my iPhone sync to

• CalDAV to multiple Google Calendars, including my wife's family calendar, my personal calendar, and various school and sport and social calendars all shared via Google. (iCal also subscribes to these. It's useful when I want to see the most data, but it's not essential.)
• MobileMe for Personal Contacts. MobileMe manages Contacts sync for me across multiple OS X machines.
• Microsoft's "Exchange" (ActiveSync) for my corporate Contacts, Calendar and email.
• Gmail for my personal mail.

Yes, it's rather complicated. Life would be easier if the iPhone could handle multiple ActiveSync accounts - then I could also sync to Google using ActiveSync. I lost access to my Google Contacts when I switched my single iPhone ActiveSync client to the corporate server. I think I'm now ready to retry Spanning Sync, which I gave up on about a year ago and take another stab and "Project Contacts".

Despite the Contacts loss and some quirks, it's been a miracle to finally have work and personal and other calendars all in one place. I have a fairly full and complicated life, and being able to coordinate calendars this way has been genuine progress.

There are a few limitations with this I never see mentioned elsewhere -- so here's the exclusive list:

1. On my iPhone I can't move an appointment between calendars after I've created it
2. Exception handling is quirky. I can set an appointment in Google to workweek only, but it may not stay that way on my iPhone.
3. I can't invite people to appointments created on the iPhone CalDAV account, even though Google supports invitations. I can do invites with the ActiveSync account.

See also:

• iPhone sync to Google contacts - 3 methods and work/home implications
• Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone.
• Using OS X 10.5 iCal with Google CalDAV - cleaning up import disasters
• Address book sharing with OS X and MobileMe
• Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
• Work home contact integration: Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book
• MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts

Update 4/14/2010: Currently my iPhone can't edit CalDAV synced appointments that have invitations. Really annoying. iPhone OS 4 will support multiple Exchange connections so I'll try using ActiveSync instead when that's out. I don't know if this is a CalDAV, Apple or Google issue.

Access denied: VMWare Shared Folders on Windows 7

Between Dell machines shipping with motherboard disconnected SATA cables, a Clampi Trojan on my Windows 2003 server, a mysteriously vanished backup [1], Windows 2003 blue screening on a new Dell workstation, a failed Acronis disk image and the horror of 64 bit Windows 7 it's been another fun week in tech.

Today was a bit better. I installed VMWare Player on a 64bit Windows machine and created a 32 bit Windows 2003 VM - giving it all four cores and 3GB of memory. After VMWare tools installed and I enabled hardware graphics acceleration it felt faster than on the prior 3 yo workstation lost to the wretched corporate refresh cycle.

Mostly easy, until I dealt with the second drive in the box. Even after I used shared folders to map to drive E:, and the ancient DOS subst command to assign a drive letter to the shared folder, I still couldn't write to the new shared folder. I could read, but I couldn't delete anything. If I tried, I got an "access denied" message.

Worse, it seemed I could write to the drive, but the data wasn't there. VMWare showed files as having been copied, but in Win 7 they weren't there. On restart the VM didn't see them either.

The fix was to right click the drive letter in Windows 7, choose properties then security, and allow "EVERYONE" full control of the E: Drive. Then Windows 2003 in the VM could read and write.

I suspect there's a less severe fix. After I left work it occurred to me that I should study the read/write permissions on the C: drive. I suspect the vmware_user (__vmware_user__) group has special privileges on that drive, I just need to study them and replicate them for the E: and F: drives.

I'll update this post with what I find.

PS. It's unnerving that my Google searches really didn't turn up anything useful on this topic!

[1] Retrospect Pro backup on external drive. It vanished! Dir *.* and Attrib *.* showed nothing with 325 GB used. Retrospect could find the files though -- it restored from the backup drive.

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