• Dec 13, 2008

    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!

  • Dec 12, 2008

    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.)

  • Dec 2, 2008

    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.

  • Dec 2, 2008

    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.