Monthly Archives: March 2005

Using AppleTalk networks

Though I’ve been a Mac user for over ten years now, AppleTalk is one of those protocols that has remained a bit of dark mystery to me. It’s only recently that I’ve been networking computers together at all, and because I have a network comprising Mac and PCs—together with owning a router that wouldn’t know what to do with an AppleTalk event if it was wearing polka-dot pyjamas—I am strictly a TCP/IP man.

However, this article on AppleTalk and AppleTalk zones provides a useful introduction to setting up AppleTalk on a Mac server. As and when I invest in a Mac laptop, or maybe a Mac Mini, I’ll probably dip my toe in the water. Currently, every other bit of communicating hardware I own or manage would greet such Mac language with a stony silence, so for now I’ll stick to more universal languages.

Better PC control with anti-tremor mouse

Whilst many computer users take the mouse for granted, anyone who suffers with hand tremors finds it an extremely difficult device to use. Precise movements and static double-clicking are actions that anyone with unsteady hands and fingers can find well-nigh impossible, thus restricting them from the full potential of PCs.

To meet this need, IBM have developed an adapter that sits between a conventional PS2 mouse and the PC. Based on the ‘steadycam’ technology commonly used in video cameras to stabilise a picture, shaky hand movements are filtered out. The sensitivity of the adapter can be adjusted to the needs of the user.

The adapter is manufactured by the British electronics company Motrose Secam. Their products page gives more information about how the system works and how it can be configured.

A USB version of the device is under development, which should mean that it will be compatible with newer Apple Mac models—which have never used the PS2 hardware format—as well as being hot-pluggable. The system does not work well with laptop PCs as it interferes with their built-in tracking hardware.

The Assistive Mouse Adapter retails at UK£65 ($99.00 US/Canada/Rest of the world).

Over-exuberant Mac font cleaning

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give my Mac a spring clean. Though Mac OS X is pretty good at housekeeping itself, it can’t take account for all the unused software and redundant system bits-‘n’-pieces that I’ve added over the years. I decided to load up Font Book and clean out some of my dusty fonts.

At some point in the past I remember installing the same font in multiple places, which is just plain wasteful of disk space, when all that’s required is to put fonts in a publicly accessible place and ensure that all users can access them from their accounts (particularly as I am the only ‘power user’ with a couple of other accounts for my wife and for guests that rarely get used, font management shouldn’t be a big issue).

Well, I got fed up with plodding through each font family deleting the ones I didn’t want. There were a heck of a lot of duplicates, as I suspected, and I knew it would be quicker to dive into the terminal window as superuser and delete them from the command line.

Having searched for them, I found a number of /Library/Fonts folders and located the duplicates. rm‘ed them, then mv‘ed the remaining ones into one sensible place.

Reboot…

OK the Mac OS X loading screen appeared with the progress bar, but no descriptive text. Errm… what have I removed?

Next, the desktop pattern and white menubar appeared, with the spinning rainbow disk, and then the screen blanked out for a second, and the desktop reappeared… looped again, and again, and again…

The system had stopped responding to any input. I had stupidly removed all the fonts from the main /System/Library/Fonts folder, and now not only was all the text invisible, but the system couldn’t even boot to a point where I could blindly get to the Terminal and correct it.

Help, what now?

Booting from the Mac OS X install disk didn’t help, as all it wanted to do was to reinstall the system (logical, I guess), and I wasn’t prepared to go back point-eight versions then spend the next day downloading all the updates again.

Fortunately, my Mac is old enough that Apple hadn’t disabled the “Boot into Mac OS 9” mode, so I fired it up—having remembered both the firmware and the OS 9 passwords I’d set and promptly forgotten about—I then checked out the OS X install disk again (after realising that I couldn’t even cry for help on the Apple website as my new Net settings weren’t configured in OS 9). I was very pleased that it wasn’t simply an image file, but had the real system directories and files—I found the /System/Library/Fonts folder. Now the dilemma – can I just copy those fonts over the top of my Mac OS X volume or will it corrupt the other files?

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. I tentatively dragged and dropped the 17 fonts from the CD to Kayleigh (my OS X volume), reset the startup disk, and prayed as I restarted.

Splash screen … woo-hoo – text is appearing. Desktop … I can see the menu! Problem solved, after not a little agonising over the best thing to do.

I don’t know how many of the fonts in the root System folder are required, but a sensible guess is all of them.

Moral? Don’t mess about with anything in the System folder, even things that seem as innocuous as fonts, without a very good reason. Not being able to read text properly is one thing; causing your computer to refuse to boot up is quite another. I don’t know what the solution would have been if Mac OS 9 mode hadn’t saved the day, but it would probably have been expensive.

Things Daniel Needs To Know

Daniel has gone and got himself and iPod. Fellow podders, what does Daniel need to know?

Let me kick this off.

  • I find it quicker to rip the CDs without the pod connected. They fly across pretty quickly over a USB2 connection.
  • iPod Agent – is a great tool for getting non-music content on to your pod.

    • iPod bargains

    A standard 20Gb iPod sells for A$439 retail.

    40Gb iPods are being discontinued, but if you can find one, you’re likely to pay around A$479. Which given it comes with a dock that the 20Gb, makes it a bargain.

    I just found one for $449 at ht.com.au, which makes it an utterly completely irresistable bargain. So I bought it.

    750 Free MP3s – Come And Get It

    You’ve got your fast net connection, you’ve got your torrent client, you’ve got you iPod with over 20G still free and you’re thinking it would be really cool to get 750 free MP3s to help fill it up a little.

    Well, I can help you.

    The South by South West festival have put together a 2.6G bittorrent of 750 artists associated with the festival and it’s free to all comers.

    Check : http://2005.sxsw.com/geekout/fest4pod/ and don’t miss the 20 additional songs beneath the main link to take your swag to 770.

    Samsung, Impress Me

    This afternoon I had a minor disaster. One minute my 13 month old Samsung monitor was working, the next it was just a blob of green on the screen. I bundled it in to the car and took it down to the local PC shop where I purchased it, Standard Computers on Millers Rd (who are excellent in the prompt way they have a look and let you know what’s going on, all with no charge) and they assured me the LCD panel was fine, it was most likely the electronics and they are covered by a 3 year warranty.

    Now, Samsung, you’ve started behind the pack ’cause your call centre closes at 5:00 PM, which is a ridiculously early time this day and age, and I wanted to call you at 5:15 so let’s see how you can win me back tomorrow morning. I’m not impressed my fairly recent monitor can just stop working, you’ve got a job ahead of you to make me buy Samsung again.

    UPDATE

    Wow.

    I’m impressed and probably a Samsung customer for life now.

    They are giving me a brand new monitor. A better monitor than I bought 13 months ago, and within 48 business hours (although with a long weekend this makes it a bit longer, why didn’t it fritz two days ago!). The company dealing with it will come to my house, I hand over my old monitor, they give me a new one. No fuss, no being made to jump through hoops.

    Well done Samsung, you’ve got a convert.

    Moving WordPress to a new server

    I moved my diary WordPress installation yesterday from an old WP1.22 installation to a brand new shiny WP1.5 database and URL. Here are the steps, in summary:

    1. We don’t want to lose any comments so get into phpMyAdmin and shut down comments/trackbacks on the old blog, by running this SQL:
      UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'closed', ping_status = 'closed'
    2. Then export the database, with Complete Data Inserts turned on. Get the dump down into a text file (there’s probably an automatic way, but I just copy/pasted into my preferred editor — Ultraedit)
    3. Do whatever replacements are needed on the data. I replaced all the toxiccustard.com/diary URLs with danielbowen.com ones, for instance. Be sure to change the setting in wp_options that specifies the site (WP) URL, ‘cos you won’t be able to logon if you don’t — the logon code will throw you over to the old blog. There’s another setting called Blog address which will also need changing if you’re coming off WP1.5.
    4. My export seemed to add extraneous escape characters in odd places. For instance a quote "e; in the database came out with two backslashes in front of it. I did some replacing to remove "e; with "e; — and similarly with single quotes, they all need only one
    5. Create the new database, with whatever database user WP will be using, and plug the details into your wp-config.php
    6. Run the export SQL into the new database, by copy/pasting into myPhpAdmin. I did it table-by-table so I could catch and correct any problems easily. I was especially wary of the wp_posts table, which had almost 700 rows, most with very long data. But as it turns out it all went very smoothly, with no problems whatsoever.
    7. Time to upload all the WP files into the new web server. Because I was moving from WP1.22 to 1.5, there were some steps to follow first for migrating the old template. All pretty straightforward really. Then run the WP wp-admin/upgrade.php to make sure the tables are all up to date with the latest design.
    8. Log onto WordPress and go through the config screens to make sure it’s all okay. Things to watch out for include the timezone (if different on the new server), setting your preferred template, activating any plugins you want, and setting the new file upload directory (on which you’ll need to set permissions).
    9. Check out the Permalinks. Set it up, then copy what it tells you to your .htaccess file. (The WP1.5 version wouldn’t actually work for me. For now I’m still using the WP1.2 version until I figure it out.)
    10. Check how the blog looks to the outside world. Post a test post and comment, just to check it all works. If not, go back and correct where applicable.
    11. Re-enable (selected) comments on the new blog:
      UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'open', ping_status = 'open'
    12. Insert an .htaccess redirect on the old site to point people over to the new:
      Redirect /olddirectory http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/

    And presto! Done!

    (Okay, I had some further hassles with some old HTML and broken image links mixing it up with WordPress, but that’s my problem, not yours!)

    Westpac, Use Someone’s Brain.

    The Westpac banking site is down at the moment, fair enough these things happen. But is there any reason I have to attempt a login before I’m redirected to a notice telling me that banking is not available?

    Here’s a hint Westpac – don’t waste your customer’s time. If online banking isn’t working tell us where we try to login.