Making the gmail POP migration - tricky settings

My local ISP is visi.com, I've used their email services for many years. They changed management recently however, and I don't care for their new procedures. I've decided to move away from their services; that meant my pop services needed to migrate to gmail.

Gmail is already my primary email workplace, I use Eudora primarily for maintaining a local archive. So this migration was really more sensible than my old forward from Gmail setup.

It took me a while to get Eudora working with gmail -- I kept getting timeout errors. I had no trouble with OS X Mail.app, so I figured I was missing something in my configuration. Turns out I had two errors:

1. I had to require eudora use its "alternate" port (be nice if Eudora simply let me set the port address) for both send and receive.
2. Leave mail on server must be unchecked.

I like how it works. In particular:

1. It doesn't matter whether I archive email or leave it in the inbox - it comes across when I access the pop service.
2. If I send mail from eudora it's saved as sent email both in eudora and gmail.
   

If I send email from Gmail, it's not picked up by Eudora. So when I want to save a copy in my home archive I send it to my old visi account, there a redirect sends back to my Gmail inbox. The next time I do a pop check the message is saved to my home archive.

Overall it's a nice improvement. I mostly use Gmail and delete whatever I don't care to keep, so this will reduce the amount I store in my home archive.

OS X "character palette" - use symbols in OS X

Years ago I put the character palette on my OS X menu bar ...

To activate this, open the International preference pane and click on the Input Menu tab. Select the check boxes next to Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer. Then select the Show Input Menu In Menu Bar option. Your region’s flag should appear in the menu bar. Click on this flag to access a menu where you can choose to open the Character Palette or the Keyboard Viewer.

I've not done much with it though. For example, if I put α into this Firefox post box, will it display properly in XP? How about ❝fancier quotes❞? Could I start writing café?

I guess I'll find out when I view this post tomorrow. Carleton college, btw, explains how to use the "favorites" feature, but it does look like I can only add favorites one character at a time.

Keyboards for Macs - don't toss the old ones

Keyboards, a longstanding Macintouch report thread, is a great source of info on Apple keyboards. Years ago I tossed out some superb old-style Mac kbs thinking they were worthless. I didn't know about the Griffin USB to ADB converter. It pains me to recall how great they were.

I don't like any of Apple's desktop keyboards at all. Sooner or later I'll bite the bullet and make do with a PC keyboard.

XP: Recent lessons from the dark side

[see update about the two "versions" of WDS and a later update as the saga continued ...]

At home I sail the often calm waters of OS X. At work I fight the fury of the storm, trapped in the XP triangle.

Now, it must be admitted that if my Dell XP laptop were sentient I'd be condemned as a cruel master. I torture the darned thing. I know few who see as much of XP and Office's brittle nastiness as I. Maybe if I treated OS X the way I do XP it would break to. (Vista? You're joking, right?)

That said, a recent flurry of cascading messes taught me a new lesson and reminded me of old ones.

1. Sometime in the past few weeks my 75GB drive suddenly had only 9GB free. It's dangerous to fall below 20% free space on a heavily used XP or OS X system, and I think this was one of the "straws" that pushed my XP system from its usual metastable state to accelerating collapse. In retrospect I'd somehow ended up with a 5GB orphaned pagefile.sys. I couldn't see it, because I somehow had Explorer configured to not show system files [12]. I eliminated the orphaned pagefile.sys by accident [1], but I think if I'd had Explorer showing me system files I'd have seen it, and dealt with it. New lesson: always display the hidden files so you can track pagefile.sys.
2. A combination of Windows Desktop Search [5], an unstable corporate network with intermittent Exchange connectivity failure, a 3.5 GB Outlook PST file [11], severe disk fragmentation [2], bugs with Outlook 2003 [3], my use of Microsoft's Onfolio [4], my insanely persistent use of Palm synchronization [6], Microsoft's Live Meeting Outlook Add-in [7] finally led to a system meltdown with increasingly odd Outlook behavior and, finally, OST corruption.
3. Good news: no covert alerts of drive read/write errors in XP's monitoring tools (XP quietly tracks many disk failures without notifying even admin users) and no chdksk/scandisk/whatever-it's-called-now problems.

So now my OST file was corrupt. Happily, that's usually not a big deal and it wasn't this time either. I turned off WDS (I snoozed indexing but I think I should have disabled the indexing service using XP's service manager - it kept trying to return to life) and found my OS file in "C:\Documents and Settings\[user_id]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook". I renamed it and restarted Outlook, which then rebuilt my OST file from the Exchange Server. The new version was about 7MB smaller than the old one (103MB) but I seemed to have everything -- including some old tasks that suddenly reappeared from the twilight zone. I then ran my series of Outlook clean-up switches [9]

/cleandmrecords
Deletes the logging records saved when a manager or a delegate declines a meeting.
/cleanfreebusy
Clears and regenerates free/busy information. This switch can only be used when you are able to connect to your Microsoft Exchange server.
/cleanprofile
Removes invalid profile keys and recreates default registry keys where applicable.
/cleanreminders
Clears and regenerates reminders.
/resetfolders
Restores missing folders for the default delivery location.

DANGER (don't run this one unless you need it):
/resetnavpane
Clears and regenerates the Navigation Pane for the current profile. This will vaporize your Outlook Shortcut pane

When all was done I restarted WDS and had it rebuild its index from scratch, then I set my Palm sync to have Outlook overwrite the Palm.

Another fun lunchtime with Microsoft ...

------------- footnotes --------------------

[1]I removed my cache to free up enough space to run defrag, and when I restored a fixed 2GB cache the system asked if I wanted to delete an old pagefile.sys. Then my free space reappeared. A new 160GB high speed drive is on order.

[2] XP won't defrag when free space is less than 15%. OS X is much less prone to serious fragmentation.

[3] Still, it's much better than its predecessor.

[4] XP has the world's best blog writer, Windows Live Writer, but XP's corporate-friendly blog readers are very weak - and getting worse. Onfolio was the best, but Microsoft has left it to fester post acquisition. I fear it's becoming increasingly unsafe. OS X has the opposite problem -- lousy authoring tools, great readers. Of course OS X can also run WLW in a VM ...

[5] Really, I need all this stuff. But WDS is trying to index 4GB of Outlook and hundreds of thousands of system files.

[6] If you're not a Palm addict, I beg you, don't start. Life with Palm and Outlook/Exchange is like juggling antimatter, and it gets worse all the time.

[7] Ok, so this is another straw on that broken back. I am very suspicious of that plug-in and how it impacts Outlook/Exchange behavior with an unreliable network.

[8] This is typical of whenever I regenerate Outlook's OST file. Something old always reappears, it's never been important. Bugs.

[9] I do them one at a time exiting Outlook after each one.

[10] Outlook 2003's Shorcut pane is a "pain in the ***". So dumb, yet so essential in a complex Outlook configuration.

[11] This is why WDS is not an option.

[12] This is the default setting, but I always change it. Not this time apparently.

Update 9/28/07: Wow. Microsoft is in such bad shape. After all of the above I discovered Windows Desktop Search wasn't working properly -- in ways to diverse and complex to document here.

I found that Microsoft has two somewhat different products they call "Windows Desktop Search". If you Google on WDS you will find the product they aim at the corporate sector. Don't get that version (so called "3.1").

I ended up uninstalling WDS-Corporate-individual user 3.1 I installed the version you get with Windows Live toolbar..

1. Install Windows Live Toolbar
2. This should install the right version of WDS. If not use "toolbar options" and "install buttons" to find and download WDS...

The version number of the "good" WDS looks like an IP address ...

Update 10/23/07: The saga continued with some improvements as noted above, but then the flakiness returned. In particular Outlook would exit with a hung process, and I'd lose network access. My employer has larded up my system with various inventory services, but, mercifully, does let me disable services. I kept working through the list, disabling various XP services but with little impact. I reviewed my list installed software, and uninstalled various apps I don't use. That' when I noticed a very suspicious Yahoo updater (don't you hate that every damned app has its own update infrastructure?) -- removing that did seem to help my startup time!

The error frequency grew, and it became apparent there was a hardware component to the debacle -- one that wasn't showing up in XP's event logs.

I hate hardware failures -- especially those the OS can't detect.

I replaced the hard drive on the general principle that drive failures are common. If that doesn't work it's time to test memory and even the video memory.

Phone won't charge? Palm won't sync? Scrape the connectors

Eons ago, when the legends coded in binary, Jerry Pournelle was forever urging his BYTE column readers to spray something on electrical contacts. It kept some kind of demonic influence at bay.

I thought of him when I recently fixed my wife's Samsung i500 and my battered Palm Tungsten E2*. Her phone wouldn't charge, my Palm wouldn't sync. In both cases scraping the metal contacts with a pin cured 'em. Crud was blocking the connection.

Now that's satisfying ...

* I know people complain about Apple's LiOn battery life, but the Palm battery died when that sucker was about 8 months old!

iPod Diagnostic Mode and failure code 702

This is why Apple is pushing so hard for flash memory. Cars in particular are murder on hard drives, and we all use our iPods in vehicles.

My iPod was starting to skip a ridiculous number of songs. It would play a a minute or two then jump to the next song. It's been years since I ran diagnostics on an iPod, but the methodShop iPod Diagnostic Mode was great. Apple's help page on "song skipping" was worthless. Once you reboot (select/menu hold) and enter diagnostics (select/rewind) with the device plugged in you use the menu and previous buttons (M25 Diagnostics 0.7) to select either auto or manual diagnostics.

I ran the auto diagnostics and got a red screen (M25 Diagnostics 0.7) with Failure Code 702, 25 fails on the automatic diagnostics. I suppose one might call this the ipod "red screen of death".

Now, one would assume Apple might help with this, but the Google Search "ipod failure code 702 site:apple.com" fails. So does a search on Apple's "all documents" support site. it's not hard to find a reference on Apple's Discussions though -- so they're not censoring it completely.

I then did the manual test, HardDrive is under the initial IO menu (menus seem to vary with the newer devices). Options are HDSpecs and HDSMARTData. HDSMARTData showed no errors however! Specs, interestingly, told me my hard drive temperature, but nothing useful. The "NTF" option has more tests, but none mention the hard drive.

I'll try a "restore" tonight and retest, and if that fails I'll check my credit card's extended warrantee policy. The next option will be to look at some of the commercial drives, or see what Apple's built-in Disk Utility offers. I don't see a lot of net discussions on this topic, so it might in fact be a relatively rare problem. Just my luck ...

Update: Looks like there's a semi-radical approach I can try

• mount iPod in disk mode and run disk utility to repair
  
• do a factory reset/restore via iTunes
• test with both OS X Disk Utility and the built-in diagnostics
• if it still fails, reformat as HFS+ via Disk Utility and follow these restore directions.
• if it still fails at that point it's probably toast.
  

Update: No, it's not likely the hard drive. The drive passed every test I threw at it, including OS X Disk Utility. I even zeroed out the entire drive, reinitialized, followed the restore directions, etc. I always get the same red screen and error message:

M25 Diagnostics 0.7
Completed
Failure code: 702 with 26 fails

I suspect it's the SDRAM, not the drive.

Update 11/9/07: It's been a few weeks since my original post, but nothing has turned up anywhere to explain this error code. On the other hand, my iPod hasn't been skipping at all, even though the test results never changed.

My best guess is that this is a count of bad sectors on the disk, but that the OS normally masks out the bad sectors. So they represent some lost capacity, but when I restored my data to the drive it went to the good sectors.

It's weird that this is genuinely undocumented, it's the sort of geeky thing that one expects to find an easy answer too.

I did receive a comment about audio problems with a 'red screen of death' test. Mine is not having those problems, it seems fine now.

Update 5/12/2009: No further problems occurred, so my above fix worked for this particular 702 problem.

Interesting comment on scanning color negatives

Color negatives are hard to scan. This is rarely mentioned ...

Scanner Review: Microtek ScanMaker i900

... Converting color negatives to positive is a black art. We discussed it at length in two Advanced articles, explaining what the orange mask does and the proper way to account for it. Fortunately, Microtek's two software solutions both include advanced negative conversion modules that, if nothing else, are excellent starting points. SilverFast Ai includes NegaFix and ScanWizard Pro has a similar feature, as does VueScan...

In my experience, given limited time, you may get better seeming results from a high quality print than from a negative -- especially if the negative is old. Color is funny.