Thursday, July 26, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Canceled meeting with Eamon—nothing to meet about just yet due to other issues pending resolution. Chris reported loud grinding noises coming from his MacBook Pro and handed it in to me. Upon start into OS X, no noises. I installed all software updates from Apple. I upgraded Firefox to 2.0.0.5. Upon start into Windows (Boot Camp beta), no noises. I ran Disk Cleanup then defragged. CD-ROM build edits. QuickTime licensing followup. Org chart work. Handed off school logo to Jeff C in Public Affairs. Web edits: set up outlook, e-mail. CD-ROM duplication paperwork, prep. Organized equipment for surplus. Chris's MacBook Pro followup—Chris has instructions on handing off for service. Helped student WJ with logging in to WebCT. Lunch: chicken burrito from Carmelina's. In the 10 minutes that it took for me to walk downstairs to the food court, I forgot to use the 10% off coupon that I had clipped. They win! Helped Alyssa resolve a paper jam. From a few days ago somehow I had archived some e-mail messages inside a PST file and the next time I tried to open it I found that it thought there was a password. Thanks to Nir Sofer's PstPassword 1.01 password recovery tool I was able to open it again. The first password suggested by PstPassword did not work, but the second one did—I was surprised at how easy it was. Nir Sofer explains on his website how weak the password protection is in Outlook. I commend Microsoft for including this weak password protection in Outlook, which makes it easy on me as sysadmin to work around password protection when I need to using PstPassword. Legal name change followup for a student. More work on restoring the Mac Mini. While fixing, I interestingly ran across my journal entry of August 16, 2005. Watched Heroes, season 1, episode 5 with Patrick. Home backups. Okay, for those of you still watching my RSS feed and haven't given up on me, frankfarm.org is back and the journal is mostly back up and running but right now only through RSS. The display of the web pages relies on mod_rewrite and every time I set up my web server I have trouble with that part, so browsing the website directly from the web does not work for the journal yet but it does work for the rest of the website. What happened was that I was salvaging data from Aaron's laptop to the Mac Mini which runs the web server and by an amazing coincidence the Mac Mini hard drive crashed while I was copying the data over. It took me a while to figure out what had happened since one does not expect a Mac to crash when copying files to it from another computer over the network. And since I was in the process of helping Aaron fix his computer, I had that in the queue before getting to fixing my Mac. Aaron's laptop was no further affected by the Mac Mini crash, and I was successfully able to copy his data to one of my Windows computers, which permitted me to complete his hard drive replacement and restoring all of his important data as far as I could tell. Downtime for my Mac Mini and frankfarm.org: 22 days (and counting, since the journal is not yet completely fixed). Loss of data: none. If you want to catch up on days missed, start on July 4, 2007 (but remember these links won't yet work until I fix mod_rewrite—use the RSS feed for now). I noticed that the tar.gz files I had been creating for backups have not been properly saving my symlinks (or maybe I didn't restore them properly, I don't know). I'll have to figure that out. Over the past few days I've been running my Dell 2005FPW in portrait mode at 1650 × 1080 and liking it a lot. Outlook works particularly well that way when you set the reading pane to bottom. And web browsing is much more productive, particularly with those many websites which use a fixed-width layout—they scale poorly to landscape widescreen monitors. Also, in OS X, when viewing the RSS visualizer screen saver, you see some very interesting graphics that you don't normally see in landscape orientation. However, I've had to switch back to landscape on the Mac Mini because its graphics drivers don't seem to be optimized well for portrait orientation—screen draws are comparatively very slow. In Windows, it's rather nice except on one computer the display is not as clear as it should be and I'm not certain whether it's a hardware problem with the monitor, a hardware problem with the graphics card, a software problem with the graphics drivers, or something else. It's really too much to troubleshoot, no one working for those companies will ever listen to me if I should bring it up, and it honestly doesn't bother me that much. The condition actually makes it appear as though everything drawn on the screen has a subtle reflection as though sitting on a pane of glass, so it's both cool and scary in a Web 2.0 kind of way like that. That would really be scary, I think, if Microsoft or Apple or Linux included something in their operating systems to make it really easy for software developers to add these subtle reflections automatically to whatever they wanted. It's also making me think twice about buying the forthcoming new iMac since the current model does not permit screen rotation or even vertical height adjustment. The current model has—I believe—only a single pivot point for monitor adjustment. I want, if possible, full adjustment features and a handle for easy carrying. Is that too much to ask? Given Apple's success with iPhone's portrait-landscape instant switching, would it be too much to ask Apple to extend that idea to the iMac? Maybe even without touchscreen CoverFlow goodness, I'd still be happy if they were able to bring back the good old days of the Radius Pivot. I still remember marvelling at using the Radius Pivot when I had a brief temporary job at West Marine headquarters in Watsonville, California doing page layout, editing, and installing IBM OS/2 onto giant supertower computers using the kazillion floppy disks required for the installation. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Radius Pivot in the early 1990s was a full screen monitor (old TV-tube style CRT) and when you rotated the display it detected that you turned it, and it automatically changed the screen's orientation accordingly. Graphic designers loved it. Today, no monitor manufacturer I know has the same capability. You can rotate monitors today, but you must manually instruct the operating system to rotate its display as well—a two-step process. The iPhone has automatic switching, but it's not a full screen monitor. After Radius went out of business, it seemed no other monitor manufacturers decided that feature was needed or wanted. Please, Apple, please fulfill my wishes with the new iMac! Portrait mode is really very, very useful! I've been doing a lot of weight training lately but haven't been bothering to record it. While posting comments on Chris's blog today, I received the following error message: "Sorry, you can only post a new comment once every 15 seconds. Slow down cowboy." So I wait several minutes and click Submit again and I get the same error message! Grr!