Box shifting causes Migration

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

A courier arrived at our door yesterday, carrying a large brown box on his shoulder. He had tried to deliver it to next door where the address label said it should go to, but they didn’t want it. There was no addressee and the name of the building was as incorrect as the number. What we and our neighbours didn’t know was that the box contained a brand new 27″ iMac, graphics tablet, extended keyboard and trackpad. Plus QuarkXPress 9 and Microsoft Office.

Nice! Shame it wasn’t for me but my wife. Meanwhile I am struggling to convince my employers that as my job is 100% computer and telephone based and I have full access to their Citrix servers, I can do my job successfully from home just as I have done many times in the past when it suited them. Now that I need to, due to large wounds on my arm and leg which are redressed every day, they are getting sniffy about it. Blimey! I was better off when I was self-employed.

But that was a digression and this is more to do with setting up a new Mac. The iMac is the umpteenth Mac swap we have done over the years, from way back in the era of Mac Plus, and Mac IIci in the late 1980s. We know it takes time and as ever, relies as much on the speed of the connection between the two Macs and their hard drives. In the early days it was painfully slow, using the serial network, we could do it via external hard drives which were never quite large enough to do the switch-over in one go. As an average we used to reckon on two or three days, often running all night.

This time we can create a Firewire 800 network and while the old G5 Mac Pro is long in the tooth, it’s still no slouch. We have given up supporting anything older than a fast G4 nowadays. Apple’s Migration Assistant was the chosen tool and being Mac users we didn’t bother to read any instructions. Three hours later the new Mac is up and running. Not quite as we would like but as it was so quick, we will probably erase it’s drive, reinstall the System and re-do the Migration, this time starting the source mac in Firewire disk mode as we, hum hum, should have done.

It’s all good fun, isn’t it? And that 23″ Studio monitor is going to look very cool next to the one already on my desk.

TfL late to bus timetable app, just like our buses

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

In a bid to save money and regain a little of my moribund fitness, I decided to start walking to work earlier this year. But yesterday, as the rain returned to batter Londoners’ hopes of an Indian summer, I took to the bus.

This is something I reserve for days of truly inclement weather and yesterday reminded me how anathema getting on UK public transport is to me.

The whole process may be improved with a TfL app though, which will soon tell me when my bus is due. Having just tested out the beta version, which appears to be working rather well, it should at least not leave me in the lurch in terms of having a modicum of knowledge about when to actually vacate my flat.

As pointed out by my editor though, the bus arrival notifications at many bus stops in London are far from accurate. For those who’ve been promised a bus is due by those machines watching over their waiting, only to be left standing another five minutes staring desolately into the rain spattered road wondering how things got so bad, you know what I’m talking about. This app appears to offer little more. Look, even the ‘Countdown’ test page has a picture of one such ‘timetable update’ machine included on it:

It seems the timetable data will be based on “bus departure predictions” although there is a promise of “real-time departure information” on  the service’s corporate page. Will it really be real-time? I’m dubious. It’s just a web version of the already unreliable bus stop countdown machines, isn’t it?

Can’t we track every bus and then see exactly where it is via an app? That way we’d really know when the bus was coming. Given our movements are apparently followed by tech companies and Governments alike, surely this wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Finally, a positive side to tracking software. Huzzah!

But it doesn’t appear that will be the case. Furthermore, having read around the development of this app, it appears TfL is rather late to the game, just like our buses so often are. Scots in Edinburgh and Finns in erm… Finland have grown used to such services already, according to the Guardian.

Oh and if you want to use the text service, you can expect to pay the standard rate for each message. So that’s more money down the (already-flooded) drain if you want to be organised… or avoid the atrocious English weather.

TomTom loses the tweeting plot

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Is it just me, or does anyone else just want their satnav to tell them how to get between points A and B (possibly via C) as quickly as possible? I ask as I have a press release here that assures me TomTom is introducing a new feature that will satisfy that greatest of needs of the average motorist: the ability to automatically tell everyone on Twitter not only where you are going but when you are likely to arrive there.

Don’t worry, the press release reassuringly informs me, broadcasting my destination and ETA isn’t going to cause me to crash as the Twitter message is “pre-set by the user before they set off, so they can concentrate safely on the road without worrying about informing people when they’re going to arrive”. Well thank goodness for that, one less worry before I set off down the M62 again. Not!

(more…)

2011 and all that

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness has come early this year. Maybe not the mists but fruitfulness to be sure. Gardeners will tell you that their apples are better and earlier than any year they can remember. Equally, their tomatoes are a dead loss. Which considering the fortunes of Apple and Hewlett Packard is a remarkably similar story. (more…)

Is your brand in danger of sex domain abuse?

Saturday, August 20th, 2011

Cyber squatting is, for the most part these days, old hat as far as threats to your business go. After all, any business that wants to protects itself from others associating themselves with its name through the simple process of buying a related domain name can follow any number of routes to protect the brand from harm. Be it applying trademark protection laws or just buying up all the associated Top Level Domain (TLD) names from the outset, the processes are in place to prevent such abuse. Indeed, the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP) which has been developed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) deals with such matters regularly. So why should cyber squatting, namejacking and domain related brand protection be high on the business to do list now in the middle of 2011? The answer is an explicit one; in fact it’s xxx-rated.

(more…)

Man does impossible! Multitasks with two phones and car!

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

There is a belief men can’t multitask – that is the domain of the opposite sex. Yet that idea has been completely blown out of the water by a genius/wizard/possible necromancer, who managed to juggle three tasks at once whilst hurtling along a major UK road.

Unemployed David Secker achieved the feat by simultaneously operating two mobile phones (one for calling, another for texting) whilst hurtling along the 70Mph A47. How was he controlling the steering wheel? With his knees. Pretty awesome, huh?

Once he was pulled over, Secker wasn’t going to let the men in blue stop him from chatting away. The officers had to wait until he was done talking before they could start to ask questions, according to the BBC. Yeah, stick it to the man!

Shockingly, despite Secker’s impressive stunt, the authorities chose to ban him for driving for an entire year. No doubt, the country’s roads will miss his antics, although a circus career may beckon. Don’t be surprised if Mensa get in touch with him either.

One has to wonder, is this just another attack on people who enjoy testing their driving skills to the limit? What next? Telling Clarkson he can’t say offensive things on telly when speeding around the English countryside?

Or should we respect the law and, I don’t know, other people’s lives? Should people let go of their mobile when in their car and possibly forego mundane tasks such as passing on a friend’s mobile number until they get home? The latter. Obviously, the latter. No matter how important a call might seem, be it personal or business, people’s lives are far more valuable.

Mapping the London riots with Google

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

It’s all too easy to focus on the negative side of technology when looking at the devastation spreading across London as I write this. Everything from Facebook and Twitter through to the Blackberry instant messaging service have been blamed for helping the rioters to organise both the violent disorder and the looting which invariably seems to follow. However, technology can actually be helpful in times such as these. Facebook and Twitter have been reported as being used by police in working out where to deploy manpower by following postings which appear to be orchestrating events, for example. And, obviously live newsfeeds have been breaking the news of where riots are erupting before the 24 hour news channels get hold of the story.

(more…)

Scrabbling around for a solution

Sunday, July 31st, 2011

There is an annoying glitch that many Lion users are reporting with Safari. On some websites, headers are displayed as a string of little boxes with a letter A inside, looking like a Scrabble tile in appearance. Only Safari is affected, Firefox and other web browsers do not suffer the same problem and will display perfectly the sites Safari baulks at. Microsoft Office users also have similar font problems.

While this has been reported mainly in the Lion community it is not rare in earlier versions of Mac OS, including pre-OSX version, but it does seem more prevalent on Macs using a separate font manager such as Extensis Fusion or FontExplorer. Sometimes these are the cause of the glitch and adjusting settings will provide the solution but there are many more reasons for the problem Scrabble tiles appearing.

Obviously each Mac set-up is different but here are some tips for solving the problem which is almost always caused by fonts.

The first thing to try is emptying all font caches by starting in Safe Mode and holding down the Shift key as the Mac starts, then restarting back into normal mode. Or by using font cache clearing routines in most font managers and also the beta version of Onyx for Lion. At this point check whether the font manager’s preferences are set to automatically activate typefaces for Safari. This can activate duplicate typefaces and so create the scrabble tiles.

All being well that should sort things out but sometimes the problem reappears again soon afterwards, calling for more drastic action. Next, check the fonts themselves. Duplicates and corrupted typefaces are often the cause. Turn off all fonts enabled by the font manager and open FontBook. Using its tools, check for duplicate typefaces and whether any essential fonts are missing.

FontBook will show a yellow triangle adjacent to duplicated fonts in its list. Click on the triangle and resolve the duplicates. Similarly, check in the Web set to make sure Arial, Georgia, Verdana and Times New Roman are listed. Many web sites use these as a fall-back position if other fonts are missing.

If any are missing in FontBook, look in Library/Fonts and see whether they are there, or for any duplicates. The latter may have the same name plus a digit in brackets, or preceded by a hash symbol. These typefaces can be dragged to the desktop. If there are fonts in the Font folder that don’t appear in FontBook’s lists, click on the little plus sign at the bottom of FontBook’s screen, navigate to the Fonts folder and add the missing typefaces.

Still not fixed? If you are using a font manager, deactivate it and restart. Has the problem gone away? If so then it is your font manager at fault and you are down to a painful trial and error session trying all eventualities, preferences and typefaces until you resolve the issue. It is often duplicated fonts again, where one is much older than the other and can safely be deleted. If you can see the typeface the font manager activates, try putting a copy into the ~/Library/Fonts folder. Otherwise, turn each active typeface off in turn until the scrabble tiles disappear. Arial is very often the culprit and luckily is near the top of the font lists.

Microsoft and Adobe software have a nasty habit of installing new typefaces outside of the System’s Fonts folders. These often contain newer versions of typefaces than ones on the main System. In which case these need to be whittled out and placed in the Fonts folder as replacements for the older ones. There is no point in removing Microsoft’s typefaces because they will be automatically installed the next time the application is opened.

If the problem is only in Safari and Lion, it may be something to do with Safari’s new sandbox way of working. This will need solving by Apple’s engineers – report the bug and wait for a solution. There is a possible fix for a Safari sandboxing error listed on page 3 of this discussion here. Rather you than me.

However it is far more likely to be a problem with your own Mac and especially the typefaces on it. This very long article here goes deep into font management and solutions.

My bet is that Arial, Georgia, Helvetica or Times New Roman is corrupted, duplicated or missing.

To see is to understand

Monday, July 11th, 2011

I had the opportunity to see the new Samsung phones and tablets recently. Not the ones on sale but prototypes of the devices that will be on sale soon.


They are all very nice gadgets, the phone especially with its superb screen and camera. Although the phone’s back flexes alarmingly because it is made of plastic. Apparently this is to protect the phone if it is dropped, as I am sure we have all done to our phones. My concern was more about how it will react to living in the average bloke’s hip pocket. Sitting down and pressing the phone’s back into to a bunch of keys seemed as though it would crack the case with ease.


Samsung will be selling a revised tablet, more along the lines I suggested when Apple’s first iPad came out. It has a smaller screen size than an iPad but is far thinner than Samsung’s existing tablets and with the screen centred in the frame. The gadget was out of juice when I saw it so all I could to is touch and feel it. At nearly pocket sized it might suit handbag-toting commuters but I think most will go for the new Samsung iPad-alike.


This is a very lust-worthy piece of kit with a fast operating system and user interface, if a little less slick than iOS. Being prototypes, no prices were mentioned but if they get their costings a lot lower than Apple’s iPad 2, Samsung will be onto a winner. The Windows and non-Apple fanbois are, if anything, more rabid than Apple’s followers and will lap up the new Padalikes when they are on sale.


This is all assuming Apple lets Samsung get away with it. As far as I could see the new Samsung is identical to Apple’s iPad, even down to the location and appearance of the buttons. To see it is to understand why Apple has had such a huge row with Samsung. Until recently their relationship was worth over $5 billion to Samsung to make parts for Apple’s iOS mobile devices. In April, Apple accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying the iPad and iPhone. I can see what they are getting at.


It might make sense for Apple to find new suppliers because Samsung is competing with Apple, making its own phones and pads running Android. Having your major competitor’s designs in your own factories makes it easy to guess the direction Apple is heading as well as knowing how much Apple will probably sell them at.


Equally, Apple’s business is enormous, worth tens of billions each year to Samsung and all the other manufacturers. It will take months for a Samsung replacement to gear up, even if the contracts in place will let Apple move. We can assume they will still be partners in the months to come, just as Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel are at Red Bull Racing. They’ve only knocked each other off the circuit once, or is it twice, or maybe three times now?

Children predict future of tech. My arse!

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

It may well be stating the obvious but children are, it seems, the future of tech. What’s more, according to a new study called ‘Children’s Future Requests for Computers and the Internet‘ they also have an ability to predict the future shape of that tech.

The Latitude consultancy designed research, asked children from all over the planet to draw their answer to the question “what would you like your computer of the Internet to do in the future that it can’t do now” and the results were, frankly, not as amazing as some commentators are suggesting. It doesn’t take some spooky kid with glowing eyes and a brain the size of my arse to ‘predict’ that Internet tech should be more interactive, more human, more integrated with their lives and more empowering. In fact, I imagine it takes someone quite grown up to interpret kids drawings as predicting that.

(more…)