Pips ‘N’ Peelings

Trying to collect email or surf the net with the iPhone without 3G here in the UK is hideous. I am going to have to try to find someone’s open network because while I wait for BT to repair my line I can’t do a thing. Well, there are some things that work well given the narrow bandwidth here in Wantage, Oxon:
1) The App Store (installing new software takes a while but it does work)
2) The wordpress app on the iPhone I am using now
3) Unbelievably the Google maps app
4) The linkedin app

But please O2 sort out 3G coverage in Oxfordshire!

My phone line has been literally severed do I can now only connect via my iPhone. So I’ll be putting it to the test until the 26th when I’m reconnected. Sadly I upgraded to the 2.1 software and the phone is unjailbroken so I can’t use it as a modem. So glad my business depends on the Internet…

Twice in two days I have been working with MacBook Air notebooks where the owner has not brought either the slim superdrive or the install disk it came with. I’m not going to ramble on, just to say this loud and clear:

If you are going away with your MacBook Air, do not leave the superdrive or the installer disk behind. Because if it goes wrong it will be a pig to fix without them.

I was setting up a client’s access to Microsoft Exchange Server from his lovely MacBook Air today. There was a big drumroll to this because the client left the mac at one of his company’s offices while he went to some important pow-wow. I had a window of opportunity to sort it. So I was not happy when after backing things up and selecting new Exchange account I was greated by a message saying that Office 2008 Student & Teacher Edition does not support Exchange mail accounts, and that I needed to ‘upgrade’ to the full version of Microsoft Office 2008.

Huh.

1. I suppose a business user should have known better than to buy the student pack. I couldn’t help thinking that any install of Apple Mail in OS X Leopard supports Exchange.
2. I needed to lay my hands on a copy of the ‘Full’ version fast. Or perhaps the ‘upgrade’. But no local computer shops stocked it. I had to find an Apple Reseller. Not so handy. But they imparted the bomb-shell that there is no upgrade from the Student & Teacher edition to the ‘Full’ edition. So what looked like a £100 upgrade turned into a £300+VAT purchase of the ‘Full’ version for my client’s company.
3. Of course the ‘Full’ version isn’t the full version because there is a Media edition that does more. But I didn’t need that today, I just mention it so that you understand that Microsoft’s grasp of English is confusing.

On the way to and from the reseller I got to wondering what would happen if OS X came in different flavours. OK, I know there is the server edition, but that is such a special case. Generally the consumer is not greeted by a range of different versions more or less crippled/accomplished. For instance, I had a call from a PC user the other day, and I actually helped him out. To start the remote desktop session it was necessary to know what version of Windows he was using, so I asked. “Home Premium edition” he said. Now I am a bit rusty on Windows, but I was fairly sure there could have been an XP version of that, as well as Vista. So I explained that to start the session he needed to download the right client and that the XP version was different to the Vista version, so again, which version was he using? “Home Premium edition” he said.

What I am leading up to is the possibility that Apple might go that way if it caves in and produces a mac to compete with the cheap PCs on the market. I really hope it doesn’t. The Mac OS X is now one of the things that makes macs great to work with, and it would be a pity to purposely cripple it to make a lower entry point for the prospective buyer.

And finally, upon my return with the ‘Full’ version, I realised that I had been left a MacBook Air without its DVD drive, so that was another hurdle. And once surmounted, and the new version installed, it said that the ‘main identity’ (containing all the contacts, emails, accounts, attachments) was not readable by this ‘Full’ version of Office 2008.

Humm

I didn’t put my back-up to the test. I unzipped the Student edition which I had very concientiously backed-up, opened that version’s Entourage, it reread the ‘main identity’ and opened. I closed it again, then opened the new ‘Full’ version, and it read the identity without a hitch. Phew.

A client has bought a really grand Epson Stylus Photo R2400 for his top notch photography business. Putting aside my jealousy for a moment I tried to install the necessary driver and software from the CD.

But we find that:

1) The CD that came with his new printer is not just incompatible with Tiger/Leopard, it doesn’t work on Intel macs!

2) We only find this out on the website after trying to install. So it insists we reset the Printer Setup app and restart.

3) Then download the Intel driver and printer configuration software, and reinstall the printer.

So you do all that and although it will find and install and print to the printer, nothing is printed out. And the configurations in the printing dialog are inaccessible (greyed/struck through). The pdf manual put this down to the wrong driver, but it isn’t. Re-Reinstalling the driver does nothing; no printouts.

4) Searching the Epson site yields nothing. Tech support only available in US or Canada. Thanks so much.

Beginning to feel peeved on behalf of my client now because he isn’t mucking about; he has a serious business and either the mac, Epson, or possibly me are letting him down. Then I realise that his other USB printer was found immediately after reseting the printer system. The new printer connects via Firewire, but can it connect via USB? Sure enough it does. And guess what? Fully configurable options appear on printing!

Nowhere at any time did we find anything that said the drivers do not work with Firewire.

When troubleshooting a misbehaving application one thing I learned early on was to go to the user’s home folder, and find the application’s preferences file (.plist) in the Library/Preferences folder, and drag the file to the desktop (bin it later). This often has a miraculous effect after restarting the application.

Other corruptible files are in the Application Support folder in the user’s Library folder, and the one that solved a problem today: removing the relevant cache file in Caches, again in the user’s
Library folder.

That one got InDesign working properly again when the color picker became stuck on pantone only. I had begun to wonder what to do, but was reassured when I logged in as Guest, started InDesign, and all was well. That proved that the problem was with the user’s settings and not the application proper.

What would you rather do? Pay tax or get a mac? If you have a business you can lease a mac the rental is 100% tax deductable each year in the UK. Ordinarily it is a no-brainer, but now (Sept 2008 only) Apple UK are offering macs for leasing and you can get the software included in the lease for a fully loaded mac.

OS X Leopard still seems to have trouble finding printers that are shared on the network from macs running earlier versions of OS X.

Potentially you could waste an enormous amount of time getting this to work. But if you know that the printer should be found by the printer browser, especially if it was working before without Leopard, or other macs simply see the printer, try the following in Terminal:

cupsctl BrowseProtocols=’”cups dnssd”‘

(yes, the various speech marks are intended -use cut and paste to make sure you get them)

Then if you try to add a printer again (remove any previous attempts) the shared printer should appear when you add printer.

A full explanation of the problem and why it happens here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2275?viewlocale=en_US

Because I can. Something else I couldn’t do with iWeb as far as I know. There seem to be so many plug-ins available too, that extend the powers of the blog; making automatic search engine optimization and google sitemap updating possible for a start.

But for anyone used to iWeb the graphical flexibility of it is dreadful. Not saying you couldn’t knock up a graphically rich blog, just that at the moment I can’t. I will have to look into this further.

Meanwhile, this is being typed live on my iPhone. I am going to blog about the iphone here a lot. But for now let’s just say that it is marvelous (understating it) but that the on screen keyboard is not working for me yet. I hesitate to say it is rubbish, as it’s auto correct feature is very intelligent - it has to be - as there would otherwise be mistakes in every word. The two thumb method relies on this entirely. But compared to that on my SE 990i which is a hardware keyboard, it is slow and actually quite uncomfortable.

This is the first post in my new blog. I did have a blog with the same name that I knocked up in iWeb, but I am going to make a go of moving over to Wordpress. iWeb works best when running on dotMac (or MobileMe), but I want a blog that runs off my hosted site where Google is more likely to find it.

The iWeb blog is no great loss. Nobody ever read it anyway except my son who left me rude messages.

The rest of my site is designed in iWeb 1.1.4. I find it easy to design with and use it in preference to Dreamweaver. I am not sure how I am going to find Wordpress as it is not easy.