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.