Posts

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Very professional, Microsoft

I had to install MS Office 2008 for the Mac to use some templates for work and must say that I’m still not impressed with the package. It is bloated and still needs polish. I did an update today and saw a bunch of stuff in Console, including:

12/13/08 7:51:35 PM postflight[6475]: Arguments being passed to bspatch: 
['/usr/bin/bspatch', '/tmp/com.microsoft.updater/office_location/Microsoft Office 2008/
Microsoft Word.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Word', '/tmp/com.microsoft.updater/
office_location/Microsoft Office 2008/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Word',
'/Users/scott/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/16807Office 2008 12.1.5 Update.mpkg/Contents/
Packages/Office2008_en_word_12.1.5.combo.pkg/Contents/Resources/patches/
Microsoft Word.3aff8039911c44f11fc82a4f35c59c13'] runner[6323]

Hint to Microsoft, take out the debug statements before shipping a product!

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Simple amusement

The other day I was listening to the MacBreak Weekly podcast while I was at the gym and they talked about Uli’s Moose, a redone version of the Mac classic, Talking Moose. I was having a particularly bad day at work today, so I went ahead and installed it. It gave me a number of smiles throughout the day with it’s wacky sayings. My wife said that this is what happens when I don’t work in an office, I need a moose to keep me company.

In any case, this simple application is sure to drive me crazy and make me laugh at the same time. Thanks to both Steve Halls for originally creating this wacky idea and to Uli Kusterer for re-making it for OS X. (If either of you want a copy of ReceiptWallet, just let me know and I’d be more than happy to send a copy to you.)

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Google’s CalDAV – Not quite the perfect solution

This is my main topic for the week! After converting all my calendars to use CalDAV, I’ve started to see the limitations. First off, you can’t enter events on the iPhone and have them sync back as the iPhone treats them as read only calendars. Second (and I hope there is a way around this), I got invited to a meeting today and couldn’t add it to one of my CalDAV calendars which creates a problem that I need to solve as I want to deploy CalDAV to my company in the upcoming months.

I’m back to BusySync for one calendar (the one I use for meetings for work). Hopefully I’ll figure all of this out without pulling out too much more hair.

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Magic Google Calendar CalDAV fix

Yesterday I wrote about only being able to use my main calendar with Google Calendar’s CalDAV. Today I was searching and found a post by one of the authors of Calabaration (Google’s tool for adding calendars to iCal) about a preference that says “Enable read-only calendars”. I enabled this and presto, everything now works. I know that one of the calendars I added I don’t have write permissions to, so I simply don’t modify it.

While I really like BusySync, CalDAV support has a few advantages for my use. The first being I don’t have to have another program running and the second is that changes I make on my calendar are immediately reflected on Google (it updates from Google every 5 minutes). One disadvantage is that if iCal isn’t open, I don’t believe the calendars update, so MenuCalendarClock could have the wrong information and when I update my iPhone, it may not have the correct info, either. However, these days iCal is pretty much always open for me.

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Google Calendar’s CalDAV Support

Today, Google announced better CalDAV support which is excellent, but there is a huge issue with Google Apps for Domains. The CalDAV support only works for calendars for which you are the owner; Google Apps for Domains only has the owner specified for the Default domain. Any additional calendars you create don’t have the owner set so you can’t use them. I’m not sure what the issue is, but I’ve spent a few hours trying to figure this out and have gotten no where. Well, at least I can use CalDAV for one calendar (I tried this with my Gmail account and it works fine).

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AppleTV and Boxee

I got an invite to Boxee the other day and just got around to installing it on my AppleTV which went pretty smoothly. It seems interesting, but haven’t had much time to play around with it. I took the opportunity to use ATV USB Creator to install it instead of the old Patchstick I used before. I had to re-install part of my SqueezeCenter software after upgrading to AppleTV 2.3, but I’ll document that in another post when I get a chance. I think that installing the SqueezeCenter software with the ATV USB Creator will be much easier as it installs SSH 2 instead of SSH 1 so I’ll be able to use Transmit to upload files and use BBEdit’s SFTP feature to edit files.

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Something wrong with this?

Yesterday we took a walk up the street to the shopping center to goto my mailbox at the UPS Store. As we walked up, we passed the local Boy Scout troop setting up their annual Christmas tree lot. Something seems quite ironic about that to me; Christmas trees require a lot of energy to harvest, transport to lots (and then homes) and then requires energy to recycle. I picture Boy Scouts doing all that they can do to help the environment; this doesn’t seem like the right way. When I was a scout, my troop collected Christmas trees for recycling.

I’m not saying that the troop is doing anything wrong and know how strapped troops are for cash; I’m just saying that if you step back for a second, it just doesn’t seem right.

(For the most part, I support what the Boy Scouts do as becoming an Eagle Scout is one of the things that really changed my life. There are some policies that I can’t believe in, but I won’t get into them now.)

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Misleading/Wrong Release Notes

I was having problems installing Leopard Server on VMWare Fusion and posted to VMWare’s forums a few weeks back. The response I got was that it was a VMWare bug and it would be fixed in the next update. Perfect, I’d just have to wait. So today, the update comes out with the following note:

Mac OS X Server (10.5.5 and earlier) cannot be installed in a virtual machine on the new Fall 2008 MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
The Fall 2008 update to the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air requires a newer version of Mac OS X Server than the most recent version (10.5.5). If you encounter problems installing Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine on these systems, make sure your Mac can boot from the installation disc.

I downloaded the update and decided to try to install Leopard Server even though I had a 10.5.3 disc image and wasn’t hoping for much. I went through the install process and was quite surprised to find that it worked fine on my Fall 2008 MacBook Pro.

So much for believing known issues/release notes!

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The end of an idea

Ever since the iPhone SDK came out, I had planned to write ReceiptWallet for iPhone as it seemed like a logical thing to do. A few users asked for it, so I thought it was a good idea. However, today is the day that ReceiptWallet for iPhone ends. I’ve toyed with it for the last few months, but just don’t have my heart into it as it isn’t something that I see myself using. As much as I wanted to do this product to answer the needs of the public, it just isn’t going to happen. I was going to finish it to get it out the door, but then I’d have a crappy product that wasn’t my best work.

In addition, there are some serious issues that have to be overcome before it could become usable.

First off, the camera on the iPhone can’t focus close enough to get quality images. As you can see, these pictures are awful. I’m not sure they would be acceptable for any form of documentation. (Who knows, maybe the IRS would accept something that can’t be read.)

IMG_0065_thumbnail.pn

Second off, the synchronization mechanism with the desktop would not be seamless; you would have to launch ReceiptWallet on the iPhone, click on sync and run ReceiptWallet on the desktop. Apple has not provided a plugin mechanism (like Palm did with HotSync Manager) for third parties to sync data.

Third, I’m not happy with the data entry mechanism. ReceiptWallet on the desktop uses combo boxes to allow you to type a few characters and then a dropdown menu shows everything close; nothing like this exists on the iPhone.

The future may change things with ReceiptWallet for iPhone, but ending this today takes a huge weight off my chest and will let me move on.

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Securing Open Directory on Leopard Server

Awhile ago I wrote about how insecure Open Directory was on Leopard Server. I was not the first person to have discovered this, but apparently no one has found a real workaround. I did find information on how to secure it, but then you can’t use Directory Utility to properly setup the machine. After much head bashing, I have completely given up on securing individual components of Leopard Server. It would appear that the only way to secure it is to use a VPN, turn on the firewall to block all, but VPN traffic, and set Open Directory and iCal Server to NOT use SSL. Turns out there are bugs in the iCal (CalDAV) server that don’t handle a GoDaddy SSL certificate.

It still amazes me that an experienced software engineer like myself can’t secure a server designed for small business that don’t have an IT person. Maybe this will work in Snow Leopard.