Tuesday, March 15, 2005

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.

Monday, March 14, 2005

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.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

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.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

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!