Friday, February 8, 2008

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Lots of weird problems today when using my computer: Today only, OS X or VMWare Fusion wasn't keeping track of my Caps Lock key correctly. When the Caps Lock light was on, I would be typing lowercase. Or when the Caps Lock light was off, I would be typing uppercase. Another weird problem is that the Spaces feature in OS X doesn't respond to the keyboard shortcut I set to activate Spaces. I had it set to F13, but F13 doesn't do anything. I set it to other function keys but that also didn't work. The mouse also did not activate Spaces when I set mouse button 5 to activate it. Another weird problem: I discovered that I now have duplicate items all over my calendar after I began using Entourage 2008. The weird thing is that I don't see the dupes in Entourage 2008—I only see them in Outlook 2007. Did a number of small but important web edits and updates: graduation e-mail, set or remove a vacation notice, posters. Lunch: leftover cow stew from Chris and Nate, leftover tortilla chips from yesterday. Worked through lunch: more computer maintenance for student MH. Followed up on orders which never came in. Prepared and sent a message to forthcoming grads about when accounts like e-mail will close. Laptop maintenance for our 2 shared office laptops. "Error 1606: could not access network location" when attempting to install latest Quicktime + iTunes in Windows XP SP2. Resolved it by editing the registry using instructions on installshield.com (id=Q110724) except that I had to change one of the keys from REG_SZ to REG_EXPAND_SZ before it would work. Disk cleanup and defrag for our older shared office laptop. Reinstalled and then uninstalled Parallels from the newer shared office laptop. "The system is unable to log you in at this time. Contact your system administrator for more information." error message when attempting to log in to OS X. (Note to Apple: This message is not very helpful when I am the system administrator.) Restarted. Tried to log in. After accepting the password, it sat doing nothing for about 10 seconds and then gave me the head shake (no). The computer is joined to our Active Directory domain. I successfully logged in as local admin. Installed Office 2008 for Mac and repaired disk permissions on the newer shared office laptop. Many Quicktime + iTunes updates. Uninstalled Apple Software Update after this for every computer since Apple Software Update in Windows is stupid and prompts a user without administrator rights to install software that they don't have administrative rights to install. Why is it that you can set OS X to request a password when it wakes from screen saver but you cannot set it to request a password when it wakes from a sleeping display? For example, I want my computer to continue running so that Mozy will back up a large data set, but I want the display to sleep so that the screen doesn't suffer burn-in, but I also want OS X to request a password when it is awoken. Currently with OS X, you must force it to activate the screen saver in order for it to request a password upon wake—if you force the screen to sleep, it won't request a password upon wake. Another weird problem: today is the first day that I found that activating my screen saver in OS X causes the screen to flash white repeatedly. In System Preferences > Universal Access > Hearing, I unchecked "Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs" and now when I activate the screen saver I can hear a continuous beep-beep-beep-beep that wasn't there before. I am restarting OS X to see if that fixes it. I later figured out what the beep-beep-beep-beep was: I had forgotten that a while ago I had plugged the KVM into the Mac Pro in an attempt to control everything from the Mac keyboard. Once I had unplugged it the problem stopped. The beep-beep would happen only sometimes when the KVM switched to another computer. Apple's current Active Directory implementation is a headache generator. Today the shared MacBook laptop and my Mac Pro both stopped letting me log in using either my regular or admin domain accounts. After unjoining and rejoining the domain my domain admin account works but when I try logging in to my regular domain account it lets me enter my login and password and then appears to hang during login. No beach ball, and the cursor changes to an I-bar when I hover over an inputfield, but otherwise nothing. I let it sit for 20 minutes and still nothing. I fix permissions and check the volume in Disk Utility (no problems), restart, and still the problem occurs. I think something has screwed up my local account, possibly unrecoverably. I no longer trust Active Directory in OS X—it has been far more trouble than beneficial since I don't think we get a lot of benefits from being joined to the domain. If I ever get out of this, I'm unjoining from the domain and leaving it like that. In my experience, Active Directory joins FileVault in the list of OS X technologies that are far more trouble than Apple advertises—untrustworthy. Firefox 2.0.0.12 installs. KVM reconfiguration. Stayed at work late to reinstall Mozy and restart the server gracefully after Joel and Scott returned from interviews and everyone had left. Also helped Joel learn some new tricks in OS X. Dinner at home with Patrick: linguine with prawns in red sauce, herb slab bread, Smart Balance Light. Watched disc 2 of Tales of the City (episodes 3 and 4) at home with Patrick on Netflix DVD.