Three Apple support articles

Three Apple support articles worth scanning ...

• Archive and Install explained: read the tips and scan the list of what's moved. Apple recommends a file system repair first. The option is not available on update CDs.
  
• File sharing: Claims only public folders are shared. I thought 10.5 allowed sharing the shared folder too (I don't have 10.5 yet).
  
• Resetting sync services: I just know I'll need this one day. Nobody has sufficient respect, or even fear, of synchronization.
  

Microsoft Office Document Imaging - a little known gem

If you have any Windows version of Microsoft Office, you have some version of a little gem of an app almost nobody knows about.

It's called "Microsoft Office Document Imaging" (MODI). There's an icon for it in your Office Tools folder, along with truly exotic beasts such as "Picture Manager". You'll also probably see an icon for "Microsoft Office Document Scanning", which is basically a shortcut to the scanning dialog in MODI.

The Wikipedia article on MODI claims MODI was introduced in Office XP:

Microsoft Office Document Imaging - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) is a Microsoft Office application that supports editing documents scanned by Microsoft Office Document Scanning. It was first introduced in Microsoft Office XP and is included in later Office versions including Office 2003 and Office 2007.

Maybe, but I used to be very familiar with the Xerox-authored document imaging app that was once bundled with Windows 98 and 2000. This looks awfully similar to that twenty year old app.

MODI feels like ancient code, crafted by lost Giants who dreamt in assembler. It's blazingly fast on today's hardware.

It's also the simplest scanning application I've ever seen. Remember to click the 'prompt for additional pages" checkbox and even on a single page scanner it will assemble the images into a single TIFF. It even does quite decent, and very fast, OCR. If you have Adobe Acrobat you can readily convert the output to PDF, and if you don't you can probably "print" using freeware products.

Or you could just leave it as TIFF.

I use the B&W settings when scanning expense receipts on an old personal scanner I brought to work (nobody wanted the scanner after I bought a higher end model). Very nice results.

Devilish Dealings: How to get a corporate discount on an AT&T iPhone

Several months back I switched our family plan from Sprint to AT&T. My wife needed a new smart phone, and since I wanted iPhone 2.0 w/ SDK we decided to change rather than pay full price for a new phone.

I detailed the transition a few months back: Gordon's Tech: A deal with the Devil: We move from Sprint to AT&T and towards an iPhone.

It wasn't, in retrospect, a good business move. Our phone bill has gone up by about $40 a month because AT&T charges much more to call Canada (mother!) than our (legacy) Sprint Canada calling plan. Our phone usage is also awkwardly between AT&T call plans, so we end up with unwanted extra minutes.

Oh, and don't get me started about AT&T's vile rebate strategy.

Ah well, more adventures in phone pricing. And people think only physicians prefer to avoid transparency ...

Now, we do benefit from a 15% discount available through my employer, but iPhones don't qualify for these discounts. So I was figuring we'd lose the discount.

Except ... there's a small loophole. We may not lose it completely.

AT&T's current billing system associates the discount with the primary number on a family plan. So if the primary number isn't an iPhone, the discount should be retained.

Emily is staying with her BlackBerry Pearl for the moment. So today the very friendly staff at my local AT&T shop swapped her number to the primary position, and made mine secondary. They had to manually tweak the rollover minutes so we didn't lose those, though so far they're pointless.

In theory, all I need to do now is pickup an iPhone 2.0 sometime after June 9th and activate it via iTunes. The discount should continue ...

I'll update this post with what really happens. Satan usually comes out ahead in these games ...

Google Calendar Outlook Sync is making a mess of my calendar

I was pretty happy when Google's official Outlook calendar sync arrived.

Not so happy since.

I'm synchronizing my aged Palm T/2 to Outlook (home), and Outlook to Google Calendar. I'm getting multiple instances of some events -- with the metastatic replicants all one hour early. All day events are turning into 24 hour events that spill over into a 2nd day.

It's a ruddy mess.

Update 5/20/2008: I prefer not to think about sync problems, but here are some clues to what's going on:

• There's some kind of a time zone bug in the gCal/Outlook 2003/Palm chain. It could be an emergent bug, so it doesn't show up if you just live between gCal and Outlook 2003. It may be related to changes in US time zone transitions and the hacks that were put into Outlook 2003 and Palm to work around this.
  
• There's another problem that may be even more intractable. I believe Outlook, gCal and Palm take different approaches to events that are either 'all day' or 'no time'. That is the events are associated with a day, but not with a particular time of the day. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays etc. I would not be surprised if Outlook were the "bad actor" with a particularly odd implementation of date-associated events, particularly date-associated recurring events. Since Outlook is 'in-the-middle' of this transaction set that's a bad problem.

If I were really going to try to stay with Palm I'd install Outlook 2008 and see if the problem improved. Truth is, of course, I'm hanging on the cliff edge with aching fingers, bleeding nails, and gritted teeth for iPhone 2.0.

For now I think the problem is most severe for events I create on gCal, so I'll treat gCal as read-only and do my authoring on the Palm or Outlook.

Update 5/24/2008: I confirmed data was correct in Outlook 2003 and the Palm, then I set Google Calendar Sync to update gCal from Outlook. It wiped all existing data and created a new set. Recurring appointments are ALL off by one hour. Non-recurring are fine. I confirmed time zones are set correctly in Outlook, my desktop and in gCal. This is a gross bug, there's no way QA could have missed it. So it's back to looking at the commercial non-Google properties. I'll have more to say on this in a couple of Gordon's Notes post.

Windows Live Writer - gallery of plug-ins

The world's greatest blogging tool has a new and improved Plug-In gallery. (The Firefox Blog widget is prominently featured.)

As fond as I am of WLW, it does pain me to praise it. It's a Microsoft Live product, and there's no OS X version on the horizon. It's a bit much to load VMWare Fusion and XP only to run WLW, but I'm tempted.

There's nothing comparable for OS X. Ecto showed promise once but every time I've tried it I've been disappointed. In particular it made a mess of Blogger posts; WLW handles Blogger quirks and bugs as well as anything can.

Update 5/20/08: The WLW Firefox add-in is not compatible with FF 3! Wow. Wish I'd thought about that before I upgraded. I'd have held off on my XP machines.

Creating baseball cards with Aperture

O'Reilly -- Reader Submitted Tips for Aperture includes a tip on creating baseball cards. It combines an open source template with Aperture's watermark feature.

My MacBook fan was roaring. Why?

The MacBook sounded like a jet engine. Fan running full blast.

I figured out what was wrong, but it took longer than it should have. I wonder how regular folk ever keep computers running...

Emily emailed me about the roaring mid-day, though she didn't know it was the fan (why should she?). I figured it was some crummy Adobe Flash code running wild in a child's session. An easy problem to fix when I got home.

That wasn't it. The 1.5 yo MacBook was fine on restart, but as soon as I logged into any user account the fan went wind tunnel.

I'm a bit out of practice, so I forgot the first rule of a berserk fan. Go to Applications:Utility and launch 'Activity Monitor'. Set it to show 'All Processes' and look for one that's out of control. (The default setting shows the Processes for the current user only, so you'll often miss an other user or system process.)

I guess we've just had too much stability for too long. I've gone soft. That never happened in the days I managed multiple PCs at home -- I was always in top debug shape. Never a lack of practice.

So instead of going right to the problem I did a 'safe start' (reboot while hold shift key). That clears up most minor problems, but not this one. The machine was running with a CPU temp of 68 C instead of a more normal 58 C and the fan was racing to cool it down.

Then I did a PRAM refresh -- which never does anything for me on modern Macs. I suspect PRAM zapping is all fake now, like office thermostats that don't connect anywhere.

Still roaring. Finally I ran Activity Monitor. The #!$$! print queue was out of control. I killed it and eventually found a stuck .jpg print job in the #$^@ Canon printer queue. Fan problem solved.

The really annoying thing is that I wrote about the same problem on my G5 iMac years ago. Canon's OS X device drivers for scanner and printer alike are not just bad, they're unspeakably bad. Bad enough that nobody should buy Canon printers or scanners for OS X. It doesn't matter how good the hardware is, the software is barely one step above malware.

Not that Epson is perfect, they just suck less.

Turns out, there's a reason for this.

I really wish Apple would return to the days they branded other people's hardware and wrote their own device drivers. I'd happily pay a premium for an Apple branded version of Canon/Epson hardware with Apple device drivers.

I decided I'd look for a new version of this driver. Maybe there was something better. I found one that's six months old, but it came with some pretty grim warnings. I've bolded one or two ...

Photo Inkjet Printers - Photo Inkjet Printers - PIXMA Pro Professional Inkjet Printers - Photo Printer - PIXMA iP4000 - Canon USA Consumer Products

... Mac OS X v. 10.3 to 10.4 9. Installation of the printer driver may require a little time to complete, and it takes 3 to 4 (possibly as much as 8 to 9) minutes from when the Continue Installation button is clicked until the Restart button is displayed. 10. In wireless connection, after print head alignment, the operation panel does not become active again, and the utility cannot be used in some instances. 11. Multiple numbers of the same printer name are registered to the Printer Setup Utility in some instances. 12. Even when an error is released, the error message remains in some instances. 13. When attempting to print, the printer does not operate in some instances. 14. In the following environment, even after clicking "About ink" in the Ink Level Information menu of the Canon IJ Printer Utility or "Initial Check Items" in the confirmation dialog for nozzle check pattern printing, nothing is displayed: Security Update 2005-005 or Security Update 2005-006 is installed in Mac OS X Ver. 10.3.9 15. In Mac OS X Ver. 10.4 or later, the number of copies cannot be entered in the Print dialog. 16. When the Print dialog is displayed from IllustratorCS2 or InDesignCS2 in Mac with Intel-made processor, the margins are incorrect and so the message "The entered value cannot be applied to margin" is displayed. Therefore, as "Margin" or "Duplex Printing & Margin" option is not displayed, auto duplex printing cannot be performed. 17. When the following procedures are performed, iPhoto6 crashes. Procedures: 1. Display Page Setup while the print dialog is open. 2. Click OK or Cancel to close Page Setup. 3. Click Advanced in the lower middle of the print dialog. 18. When the following procedures are performed, the following items are not displayed in the print dialog menu of iPhoto6: - Quality & Media - Borderless & Printing - Duplex Printing & Margin Procedures: 1. Display Page Setup while the print dialog is open. 2. Click OK or Cancel to close Page Setup. 3. Click Advanced in the lower middle of the print dialog. Mac OS X v. 10.5 19. When the monitor resolution is 1024 x 768 or less, as the “Print” and “Cancel” buttons are displayed behind DOCK, those buttons cannot be clicked.

Really, this is pathetic. I'll stick with the old driver. At least I know that devil.

The Canon iP4000 is old. The next time it runs short of ink it's junk. I'll buy an Epson, and upgrade to merely crummy quality.

One last question to think about. Why won't Canon invest in better drivers?

Update 5/17/08: nice review of laptop overheating in Mac Fixit.
Update 6/3/08: I just installed 10.5.3 on the MacBook, and had to resinstall printer drivers. With this OS printer installation is very well done; I was offered a driver (CUPS I suspect) from the OS. It's working in limited use, and I haven't had to install Canon's awful drivers.
Update 10/2/08: Came to look at this due to a thank you note (a lot of people find this article). I have since installed 10.5.4 on all my machines, and now they all use Apple provided drivers. No Canon malware. It's not repeated often enough, but whether you use OS X or XP you should strongly resist using drivers provided by hardware vendors. Strive only to use what the OS bundles. If hardware needs more than the OS provides, try not to buy it.