Resolving ghost printers in Win7 - delete redundant print queue

My corporate Win 7.64 box had a printing problem. Everything looked fine, but jobs sent to some printers didn't appear.

I was also seeing "ghost" printers -- they displayed in Windows print dialogs, but they didn't show in Control Panel "Devices and Printers".

For example, from the print dialog I saw "biz-c1" and "biz-c1 (copy 1)", but from the control panel I saw only "biz-c1 (copy 1)".

I think this glitch came from running an XP or 32 bit Win 7 printer installer on a 64 bit machine.

The printers that had this problem had an extra context menu entry "delete print queue". After a I deleted the "older" (non-copy 1) queues this context menu item disappeared! (Google was no help, this was my closest hit.).

The transient "delete print queue" menu item worked to fix the print dialogs. They again show a single queue. Even better, my printing was restored.

I assume this is a bug in Windows 7 that Microsoft knows about. There has to be a reason that the "delete print queue" option appeared on printers that had a redundant print queue. It's odd that it's not better documented however.

Facebook Pages: Only Administrator status updates go to fans

There are many books and web pages that try to explain how Facebook works.

Alas, even the most topical material gets most things wrong -- confusing messages with stream updates for example. It doesn't help that the rules change constantly [2]. Even Facebooks own, very limited, documentation is often dated. For example ...

Facebook Pages: How to manage a Facebook Page - Facebook Help Center:

... Your Page [1] can now post status messages - short text-only messages like those found on user profiles. Soon, these statuses will appear in fans’ News Feeds...

I don't know when this was last revised, but Page updates have been appearing in my News Feeds for months.

Ultimately, the only documentation on Facebook is Facebook. It's mind-boggling that this works for them. Suggests most of humanity has given up on understanding how the modern world works; which means that modern services need not be understandable.

If you want to know how something works, you have to experiment.

So I did this experiment on one of the Pages I administer. These Pages are "Liked" in my Profile.

I posted from two non-admin accounts (Emily and mine) and 1 admin account. I found.

1. When a Person posts an update on a publicly accessible Page it is public and viewable to anyone on the net, regardless of one's FB privacy settings. This is obvious in retrospect, but I suspect most people don't know this.
2. When a Page posts an update it goes to all subscribers.
3. When someone you "Friend" posts an update on a Page you subscribe to you will receive a Wall (stream) update notice.

What I couldn't test is what happens when someone who is not a "Friend" of mine posts an update to Page I "Like". I suspect, in this case, I will not receive any Wall update.

So for the Pages I administer, if I want a status update to be received by all "Fans", I need to post it "as the Page" rather than using my personal account.

john

[1] In Facebook lingo a "Page" is something belong to an organization or celebrity or business. Individuals have "Walls". "Pages" have "Fans", regular people have "Friends".
[2] For example -- until today Facebook sharing has been symmetrical. If I "Like" someone they are notified of my shares and I'm notified of their shares. We have mutual access. Ok, I'm simplifying, the notification rules are constantly changing.

Nisus Writer Pro, OpenOffice and Rosetta - why I bought Pages.app

I've been a longtime user of Nisus Writer Pro. There's a lot of good things about it, but what I most like is the native file format. NWP uses RTF, the closest thing we have to a standard document format.

What liked least, though, is NWP's .doc import. It's slow and troubled.

Today I discovered something I liked even less. Our MacBook fan was running full tilt, but I couldn't see any explanation. Process Explorer didn't show anything grabbing CPU -- at least nothing I could recognize.

Then I sorted by memory allocation -- and I found OpenOffice.org taking up a very large amount of memory. Process Explorer told me it was running in Rosetta as PPC code.

That made no sense. OO wasn't running; it's not even installed on that machine Mail.app, Safari and Nisus Writer Pro were the only apps running. So I quit them one at a time. When I finally quit NWP the OpenOffice process died.

A few moments later the now Rosetta free 10.6 machine cooled down. The fan went silent.

There's not much on this around the web. Google found only the one post ...

Modified OpenOffice source code
Nisus Writer Pro (versions 1.2 to 2.0 inclusive) use modified OpenOffice code to help with the import/export of certain file formats. Under the OpenOffice license any modified copies of the source code must be published and made available. The source code used by Nisus Writer Pro can be downloaded below.

I'm on 1.4.2.

I think that explains why their .doc import was so slow and problematic. NWP was spinning up Rosetta code. It also explains months of mysterious battery killing machine baking problems.

NWP has now switched to LibreOffice (2.0.1)
Changed: import: switched DOCX/.doc file importers from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. This fixes a variety of problems, including cases of garbled text, formatting bleed, etc. Also made some other fixes to import process.

I suspect they had to do this to run on 10.7.

I could pay the money to go from 1.4.2 to 2.0.1 -- but I feel like a chump.

I'm buying Pages for $20, or about $6/machine.


Related

• Word processing on OS X: my personal choices (11/07)
• Nisus Writer Professional: the undocumented but critical improvement (4/09)
• Nisus Writer Professional - the manual is a work of love (6/08)

Update 5/29/2012: I don't think I ever did a formal review of Pages. Here are some quick impressions after use with one longish project.

• Pages is 90% of the way to being a robust and full featured project. Unfortunately there's no sign that Apple intends to finish it; if anything their current directions are away from traditional applications like Pages.app and Numbers.app. 
• Pages doesn't need a major rewrite or redo. It needs the 10% gap filled.
• Pages is somewhat buggy, but less buggy than any version of Word I've used. So it's bugs are acceptable. I've learned to work around them.
• Pages has a workable implementation of Style Sheets. That's better than 17 years of Microsoft Word (to be fair Word had great Style Sheets prior to 1995 or so).
• It's annoying that Tables cannot contain Tables.
• Pages limited import capability, particularly for Apple/Claris wordprocessors of old, is very annoying. (I wonder if Apple/Claris no longer has access to the code for those old file formats.)

Gmail and iOS: When I say DELETE I mean DELETE

I thought I had this figured out long ago. When I deleted an email from my iPhone, it would be deleted from my "Exchange" (ActiveSync) GMail account.

I was wrong. It works that way for my corporate ActiveSync account but not for Gmail. The iPhone button said "DELETE" but the messages were being sent to "All Mail". My "All Mail" archive was infested with spam.

I thought this was a matter of some fiddling with Gmail or iOS Settings. That's wrong too. At this time if you use ActiveSync (Exchange Server) to sync Gmail with your iOS Mail.app delete on the iPhone will always Archive in Gmail - regardless of what the Mail.app UI indicates.

This doesn't seem to be documented. There's (misleading and confusing) documentation on iOS IMAP behavior, but I couldn't find anything official. There is, however, a long old thread in Google's forums about this, degenerating at times as to whether this is a bug and, if so, whose bug it is. (IMHO - Google's bug.)

The only fix is to stop using ActiveSync for email and return to Apple's default IMAP based Gmail account setup. In that mode there's an iOS settings control to change Gmail Archive behavior. That works.

I suspect I solved this back when I used Apple's preferred iOS Gmail/IMAP setup, and didn't catch the recurrence when I switched to using Google's preferred Gmail/ActiveSync setup.

Fixing Lion's "application downloaded from the internet" bug

OS X warns users the first time we open a newly downloaded application.  The message is "xxx is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?"

It's a helpful warning. Problem is, for some apps I installed into Lion, it shows every time I open the app. Annoying.

I suspect the bug is that I installed them from my Admin account, but am using them from my non-admin everyday account. A permissions bug in other words. OS X usually has these, no reason for Lion to be different.

The fix for me has been to copy the app to my desktop. Then delete it from the Applications folder. Then drag it back to the desktop. This changed the permissions to read/write for me and ended the warnings. I then tested from my admin account and didn't get warnings there.

Not a bad workaround until Apple fixes this annoying bug.

Update: Thinking about this more, I bet the bug hits if you install from Admin, but never open the app from Admin. Next time I do this I'll switch to my Admin account and open it there.

Banks that support Direct Connect (OFX) with iBank

IGG, the makers of iBank for Mac, list banks that support "DirectConnect" (OFX transactions without website login). This is the kind of information I want when evaluating a bank. (Any bank that supports DirectConnect with (ugh) Quicken should also work with iBank.)

The list is dated 2008, but i'm told it's regularly updated. I hope that's true and that they market this more prominently.

Lego Universe for Mac

I'm trying to install Lego Universe on the Mac. It's a software monstrosity. I'm guessing a botched port of a windows app done by a low bid offshore team.

Lego is becoming a four letter word.

Update: It didn't work. I suspect it can't run on a non-admin account. During early installation the data input fields were partly scrambled and inaccessible. I deleted it and cast a spell upon Lego. The locusts are coming guys.