Friday, December 7, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Reinstalled Sophos for OS X because it wasn't working. Installed Flash 9 for OS X. Got a replacement UCSF ID card since mine was old and faded. frankfarm.org has been down since yesterday around 1:00 AM. At first I thought it was related to our router not working properly, but Patrick restarted that and the website was still down even after he got internet connectivity back. I had him restart Apache, but that didn't fix the web server. When I got home yesterday, I did some investigating and it seems there are problems with the hard drive. I didn't have time to troubleshoot—will try tonight. I have been learning some interesting things about keyboard shortcuts with Parallels (currently using Parallels Desktop for Mac, Build 5160, September 11, 2007). At work I have been keeping both a Mac keyboard and mouse and a non-Mac keyboard and mouse plugged in at the same time to my Mac Pro. Every day I still encounter keyboarding problems and other Parallels problems that I don't know how to solve. One is that when I'm in OS X and press Windows+H or Command+H to hide an application, the application hides as expected, but after that Parallels brings itself to focus and opens the Start Menu in Windows. Parallels isn't supposed to come to focus and open the Start Menu. It doesn't matter what OS X application I'm in—this is consistently reproducible. One of the interesting things I have found is that when you have Parallels in focus in Coherence mode and you press Windows+M or Command+M to minimize all Windows windows, you actually still have keyboard access to the Windows desktop even though you can't see it. For example, if I have a folder on my Windows desktop called "foobar," with a Parallels window active I can press Windows+M or Command+M, then type f o o b a r and press Return (Mac keyboards) or Enter (Windows keyboards) and the foobar folder will open. Another interesting thing I discovered is that sometimes the contextual menu key (which appears to be missing from Wikipedia's Keyboard (computing) entry), aka Shift+F10, appears to take effect even though you don't see the popup menu appear. This means that you can still activate items on the contextual menu with the keyboard even though you don't see the menu appear. I haven't yet figured out the exact conditions which permit this to happen. One example is if you select an image file in Windows Explorer, press the contextual menu key (or Shift+F10), then press v—the image opens (sometimes) in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Also, I realized recently that Windows XP has long had an image browsing interface that is remotely akin to Apple's Cover Flow. Most people don't know about it because Microsoft hides it well; it only appears under certain conditions which are unknown to me. The feature is Windows Explorer's Filmstrip view. To activate it, in Windows Explorer open a folder with images. Open the View menu. If "Filmstrip" does not appear, get properties on the parent folder (go up with either Backspace or Alt+LeftArrow, right-click the folder, select Properties), select the Customize tab, and in the What kind of folder do you want? section, select Pictures (best for many files). Optionally select the checkbox called Also apply this template to all subfolders, then click OK. Reopen the folder, then select View > Filmstrip. In filmstrip view, the currently selected file (image) is show large at the top while you see smaller icons representing other files (images) in the same folder below. You can use the arrow keys to navigate, just like Cover Flow. You can maximize the window and the previewed image gets larger, just like Cover Flow. It's certainly not as visually beautiful as Cover Flow, and it doesn't handle as many file types, but this leads me to believe that Cover Flow had a well-established but primitive and relatively unknown predecessor. I have mouse cursor problems in Photoshop CS3 for Windows when running Parallels. Occasionally the mouse cursor won't let me access certain portions of the screen. For example, I'll move my mouse right and the cursor will begin to move right, then disappear and reappear 200 or 300 pixels to the left. Restarting Photoshop CS3 makes the problem go away temporarily, but it eventually returns. I don't know what causes this. I also have screen redraw problems in Parallels at various times. Sometimes Alt+Tab followed by Alt+Tab makes the screen redraw problem go away, and sometimes not. Once I had to restart the virtual Windows machine because a line of screen corruption wouldn't go away—it stayed on top of whatever window I was working on. Picked up a copy of the final self study cdrom from Kim. Dinner at home with Patrick, but I can't recall now (2007.1209.2221) what we had. Attempted to fix my web server. Chatted briefly online with Greg C.