Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped student MR with VPN and spam quarantine questions. Helped student KS with change password questions. Followup with Doug C about directory information and FERPA. Flickr group work: created labs, updated descriptions and cetera for others. Lots of calendar scheduling today. Phone chat with Susie and Eric about new homepage changes. Spent over an hour flailing in OS X because I forgot that OS 10.5.2 does not support multisession DVD burning. Grrr! Installed Disco 1.0.3. Found in its online help this text: "Can Disco burn multi session DVDs? No, as it stands it is technically impossible for any disc burning application to do this. It is simply not a feature of the DVD media." Okay, but this works for me in Windows, and it appeared to work for me in OS X on a different DVDRW disc. Things wouldn't start working for me until I erased the DVDRW disc I had using Disco and then burning using Disco. Weird part was that the Finder showed 2 DVDRW discs mounted after the erasure—I didn't understand that. After Disco reported that the burn completed successfully I had 3 DVDRW discs mounted! Totally bizarre! But still I couldn't get Disco to do what I needed (burn once, eject dvdrw, insert same dvdrw, burn more files to the same disc)—upon reinsertion Disco would not detect that the DVD already had files on it—so I moved Disco to the Trash. Installed BurnAgain DVD 1.2.2 (1.2.2). All worked fine until the end of the 2nd burn when I received the following error message: "Error during burn! The DVD burn aborted with an error. (OK)" I look in Console and the last message says, '4/9/08 2008.0409 11:40:40 BurnAgain DVD[19033] burnerrors: ("the LUN appears to be stuck writing LBA=93b0h, keep retrying in 70ms", "the LUN appears to be stuck writing LBA=93b0h, keep retrying in 70ms").' I realized today that I can't use Entourage 2008 to compose certain e-mails because it automatically changes single and double quotation marks to real quotes when I don't want it to and there doesn't seem to be a way to disable this feature. In OS 10.5.2 I don't understand the following behavior: In System Preferences > CDs and DVDs I have my preferences set so that when I insert a blank DVD it should ask me what to do. I insert a blank DVD, and I am prompted with Ignore followed by a list of choices. If I choose Ignore, the dialog goes away but the DVD does not mount on the desktop. If I select Open in Finder, then the DVD mounts on the desktop. Also, sometimes a DVD icon appears and sometimes a Burn Folder appears—I can't figure out why it's one sometimes and the other other times. Tried BurnAgain DVD using a new DVDRW disc and this time it completed the 2nd burn successfully, but when I attempted a 3rd burn I received the following message after attempting to drop the new files into the BurnAgain DVD window: "The application BurnAgain DVD quit unexpectedly. Mac OS X and other applications are not affected. Click Relaunch to launch the application again. Click Report to see more details or send a report to Apple. (Ignore) (Report...) (Relaunch)" I checked Console, which reported: "4/9/08 2008.0409 12:02:53 com.apple.launchd[98] ([0x0-0x4b64b6].net.freeridecoding.burnagaindvd[19155]) Exited abnormally: Segmentation fault." At this point, I give up and resign myself to copy all the data from the DVD back to the computer, creating a Burn Folder, adding my new files, erasing the DVD, then reburning all the files anew. So I try that and upon starting the new burn, I receive the following error message: "Burn: Burning the disc failed because the disc drive is in use. For example, another application may be using it. (Error code: 0x80020021)". I notice that Disk Utility is open, so I close it and restart the burn. It appears to burn the entire disc successfully. Just on a lark, I reinsert the previous DVDRW—the one that got sticky LUN errors in BurnAgain DVD. I erase it using the Completely option, then reburn—it burns successfully. In OS 10.5.2, why when you right-click a CDRW or DVDRW there is no Erase option in the popup menu that appears? Lunch with Joel at Ten. Chatted on the phone with Melissa H—help buying a computer. I noticed that sometimes when I press the Eject key on my keyboard OS 10.5.2 will eject the disc in the drive and then the tray drawer will immediately close again. I've nearly gotten my fingers trapped or injured due to this strange behavior and have had to train myself to wait suspiciously to see what OS X will do for a few seconds before reaching in to retrieve a disc or before inserting another one when the tray is empty.