Things to remember.

With the coming of snow leopard I am making a big assumption and that is the only real reason I can see why apple would bring out a new OS so soon after the release of Leopard.

iphones!!!!

The iphone launched it was cool it was great, but not for business more of a play toy. Then they release the 3G and 2.0 which promised exchange support. Ah well yeah kind of but not that great. It works, but the impression apple gave was that it would do a lot more than it currently does.

So the reason I assume snow leopard is coming out is, well to fix these issues. If you look at apples website the only real addition to snow leopard is exchange.

So the reason for posting this here is I have various clients using iphones trying to do calendaring type stuff which should be a simple thing, but not when it comes to iphones and well just ical in general. So I though I would get my requests in.

First request the ability for some one to have a personal calendar that belongs to them but the ability to give up rights to that calendar to another user or users. For example a PA that would administer it for them. The user would then only be able to have read access to it no write access.

Second the ability to sync ical to your iphone or any other windows mobile or smart phone over the air with the ability to see shared calendars or delegate calendars that you are subscribed to.

Third the ability to have a personal calendar as well as a work calendar. while entering events into your personal calendar will show up in your work calendar, with out a description or just marked as personal so as to indicate that the particular person is not available with out letting any one subscribing to that persons calendar know what personal event they may be attending.

Those are my three requests please put them in it would make my life so much easier.

There seem to be an issue with printing from some CS3 products in OS X 10.5. When you print the first page that comes out seems to be mirrored.

There does not seem to be a fix for this at the moment, but I have found a simple way around it. First I thought put a blank page in front and then it should print the rest fine. This how ever does not work. So I then said to my client put a page with some text in front of the first pages of the document. Well that seemed to work.

It looks like the first page with something on it (I only got it tested with text) seems to print mirrored and the rest of the document prints fine. Ok this is a waste of paper but I later thought (have not tested this) if you put a page with text in front and then make the text white the printer will print white text on white paper and you can then reuse the page after.

Note the page was not a full page of text just a few lines.

Well over the last few weeks having changed job and all. I have been really getting bogged down with entourage problems.

I used entourage once that was about five years ago when I first started using macs. It made sense to me to move to a application that was similar to a outlook as that is what I used before on windows. So I can see why people would feel the compulsion to move to use it.

Soon after (a few days later) that I was suggest mail.app by a friend and thought I would try that. Needless to say I never went back and have rarely used other mail applications, if I have it has purely been to test them out.

One problem I have come across in entourage is that folders you create with in it that reside on a server so something like exchange or Kerio mail server seem just disappear out of entourage. Although if you were to look in the webmail interface or use another program like mail.app or thunderbird the folder would still be there.

These are personal folders I am talking about not public folders. I discovered a glitch that did not seem to be mentioned anywere on the web, possibly me just missing it but hey here it is. If you create a personal folder in entourage it will show up. As soon as you start creating sub folders with in that folder they disappear (out of entourage that is). If you bring those folders back to the top lvl they reappear.

Now I have only tested this with Mac Office 2004 and using that with Kerio Mail Server. Now I don’t think it is a bug in Kerio as any other app can see those folders perfictaiy fine. I will have a chance to test it on Mac Office 2008 in the near future but I suspect it will be the same issue.

If any one can confirm this to be true on any other combination of entourage and exchange type server that would be quite helpful and make this post more conclusive.

Well I insalled the wordpress app on my iPhone and this is the resault. I have not been very impressed with the 3g model so far and this is probley one of the plus points so far an app that works.

Minus points would be reduced battery life, slower at doing things (definatly noticable in the address book), smaller screen, signal is always crap, 3g ain’t so 3g (that could just be O2) and something else I just noticed is the spell checker is gone to crap suggested words are far and few between.

I bet more will pop up sooner rather than later. If it keeps on like this I may go back to my 1st yen iPhone, but hey it has only been two days.

Ok so every one know the iPhone 3G has come out and every one went a little crazy trying to get one. I have a 1st generation iPhone and did try to get one on launch day, but was unable to. Not a big hang up as I am still entitled to my free upgrade and when the stock comes back in i’ll get mine.

Having installed the version 2.0 update on my phone I can do most all what the 3G can do less the GPS and well 3G.

We use Kerio Mail Server at work and roll it out to all the clients we do work for. One particular client wanted their iPhones working with the mail server. Kerio is an exchange client, but does not support the iPhone until the update released today 6.5.2.

I have tested it and well yeah it works great email, public folders, calenders and contacts. The other cool option is the wipe option that you can use to wipe your iPhone if it goes missing. When I saw it I was like a kid looking at that big red button your not supposed to touch. Well you guessed it I touched it. I have to say it works.

You push the button it Kerio informs you it is going to wipe the phone and a few seconds later your phone reboots. Only problem is it does not come back up. This is fine if your phone was stolen, but eh yeah mine was not. So after about 10 min I start to get worried and think, oh well I’ll go shower and it will be sorted when I come back. I came back, still not sorted.

Holding down the power button has no effect even for a prolonged period of time. What I did find out is if you push the power button and the home key at the same time the phone resets is self, but does not start up. You can turn it off this way and then hold down the home key and push the power button and the phone will start in recovery mode. From there open itunes and restore.

So my lesson is now learned. If you push the button that says don’t push something bad will happen, but I will probably still push the button that says do not push. So no real lesson learned.

I have come accross a strange problem to do with black MBs. I while ago my Girl Friend got a new Black MB which worked fine for a week or so. Then it started having intermitent trouble connecting to the internet. The only way to solve it at the time was to restart the machine, but this became annoying for her and me.

I eventually figured out that it was loosing its DHCP and self assigning an IP. I thought that maybe there was a IP conflict on my home network due to the fact that there are about six macs running in our flat. It turned out that was not causeing the problem. I eventually ended up assinging an IP to here airports mac address which seemed to solve it and I have not had any problems since.

To day I came accross this problem again. Having to help out a friend that had two new black MBs that were having intermitnet internet problems. It seems they were doing the same thing. I again assinged them an IP address each to their airport mac address. This has again solved the problem.

It makes me wonder if there is a problem with the black MB line. As I have not had this problem on my MBP and have not come across it on any other MBs or PBs. I am running the exact same version of OS X 10.5.4 on my MBP as was running on these black MBs.

I came across a problem the other day and then the solution. The problem being that I need to change the license key on a windows XP system.

I am currently do work for a company that produces a lot of computer systems. Any one who has had to build computer systems on a large scale knows that the easiest way to to sort out the software side is to clone one machine and then image the rest. How you achieve that is up to you my preferred method being PING.

The problem you then have is that all your systems have the same product key installed on them. If you have an OEM distributors license not a problem if you do not well then you really should be reentering the unique number for each machine. The main way to do this would be to use Sysprep a nifty little piece of software, but also a pain in my side.

When running Sysprep it take you through the whole set up process again and as such undoes network settings an irritation for me as the systems I am working with have two network cards one a NIC the other a SAT card that needs specific settings.

There are some other ways to do this that I found on the net which involve the registry and are different for the version of XP you are using. There is also some scripts about, but the same thing applies.

What I have found and created is probably the best way of doing this for simplicities sake. Windows stores the activation info in two files. C\Windows\System32\wpa.dbl and C:\Windows\System32\wpa.bak. If you delete these files and restart windows it you will be prompted with a screen that tells you that windows is not activated and you have one day to do it. If you chose to activate windows you can simply reactivate it and it will be fine or you can choose to “activate by telephone”. Doing this then changes the screen and you are give the option to change the Product Key by click the button at the bottom of the window. Once that is done click back and follow the instructions as usal to activate via the web.

Copy past the following into a text file and name it “whatyouwant.bat”

del C:\Windows\System32\wpa.bak
del C:\Windows\System32\wpa.dbl
shutdown -r -t 0 -f

The command above will delete the two files and the shutdown command will restart the system for you.

If any one has ever used OS X Server 10.2 they will know what a pain in the ass it is. There are a lot of bugs in it and always seem to be ones that effect what I am trying to achieve.

A while back I had a problem were users could not access files on various shares. It turned out that the file permissions had all changed to odd things. Why I don’t know.

Any how the simple solution is to select the parent folder and change it’s permissions to the correct settings and then apply to all enclosed files and folders. This does not seem to work in OS X 10.2 Server. Possible just the copy that I was working on was damaged some how.

I found a program that does this all for you it’s called BatChmod http://www.macchampion.com/arbysoft/Welcome.html. The only problem though is the version on the site does not seem to work properly on OS X Server 10.2 but I have a copy of a previous version 1.32 that does. The two versions on the site are 1.37 (supposed to work on all versions from 10.4 down). and the Current version for 10.5.

This is a great utility and is very quick and easy to use. It saves a lot of hassle when you have problems trying to set permissions and saves having to go into the terminal to do it.

I have/had a PBG4 12″ which I had passed on to my girlfriend after upgrading to a MacBook Pro 15″ a year and a bit ago. The PBG4 I think is of a much better build standard and in the 4 years I have owned it the only thing that is gone wrong with it is the battery. That was until about 3 months ago.

It happened to slide of the side of the bed and would not start up afterwards. It turned out to be the hard drive that was damaged. So I opened it up and took the drive out. I had bought a IDE usb HDD caddy for the drive off of ebay which cost me about £4 inc postage which I though was a bargain.

The heads of the hard drive had got stuck and the drive was clicking like crazy so I pretty much assumed it was a goner. I decided to be brave and actually open the drive up which was quite easy. I managed to unstuck the head and get it spinning again.

I tried a few times to recover the data off of through my MacBook Pro, but it could never read the disk properly even when I tried to boot with the my Disk Warrior cd. I recently acquired a G4 tower which I have since installed OS X 10.3 onto (Reason for 10.3 being that I have a legal unlimited client license). I decided to plug the drive in last night and what do you know it saw it and mounted it straight away. Of course the disk is damaged and I could not copy anything off of it so I decided to run Disk Warrior over night and see what would happen.

Well when I woke up this morning I had some good and bad news. I worked so far in the sense that it did everything but when it came to repair the bits it needed to it came up with and error stating that it could not fix the drive because it had ACL’s on it and I needed OS X 10.4 or higher. So being me I did the whole process over again this time booting from the CD and running the rebuild like so.

I came home this afternoon and it appeared to have worked. So I have done the preview which allows you to choose a destination to dump the recovered data. Disk Warrior is busy copying my 50GB of data onto a good drive as we speak so I am happy.

This is the second time I have made use of Disk Warrior for such a feat. The last time was a crashed server HDD that had not been backed up properly. With a bit of a struggle it worked as well and pretty much recovered everything.

So the morral of the story back up and if you don’t go buy a copy of Disk Warrior now! When you do loose your data the $99.95 won’t seem so much. http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

Since finding this tip a few months ago I have since googled it again and found it to be more widely available. I though I would dump it here any way as I thought it was quite useful. Unfortunately I can not remember where I got it from the first time round so no credit to that person although I have since found it on Microsoft’s web site.

Having had to work on a lot of windows systems in the past and recently one of the big things I find and not many people seem to know about is that when you install hardware into a windows based system and then remove it at a later state windows seems to hold onto that information. They are called “Ghost Devices” and can be seen in the device manager (with some trickery).

I first knew about this about 8 or 9 years ago having notice that if you boot a windows system into safe mode you would see greyed out devices in the Device Manager that were not installed in the system these are devices that had been installed previously. Some of them can be removed, but a lot of them can’t because Windows takes control of them.

With the commands below you can release the devices from Windows and remove them from the system. Why would you want to do that you may ask. Well on occasion I have come across problems were a device that was once installed and is no longer part of the system can cause problems when trying to install a new piece of hardware or new software drivers.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315539

1. Go into a command prompt.
2. type “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1”
3. Hit return.
4. Type “devmgmt.msc”
5. Hit return.

Once device manager has loaded, go to View, Show Hidden Devices.

You will then see “greyed out” old devices and network cards that you can remove