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.

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.

Go West… err East…no, is it North?

Monday, July 25th, 2011

If you haven’t got a satellite navigation system or smartphone app, don’t bother reading any more than this paragraph. Buy CoPilot Live Premium and you won’t be disappointed. It does everything you need and a lot more besides, running on Android and iOS phones. If you have CoPilot Live 8 already and are wondering if it’s worth upgrading perhaps our experience will help you decide.

CoPilot Live Premium is a brand new app based on CoPilot 9 and not just an update to CoPilot Love 8. This means it will cost the same as you have already paid. Even so, the two prices added together are still cheaper than a dedicated sat-nav and arguably a lot better. In two weeks of testing, CoPilot Live Premium hasn’t let us down and there are still many new features to be explored. As before, maps, POI’s and speed camera updates are free. Try that with your Garmin or Tom Tom.

From initial start-up, CoPilot Live Premium is very different from previous versions. The screen display is less cluttered with emphasis on showing the next turn and the name of the road to turn into, as a large icon and text running along the bottom of the screen. After turning on the text to speech option, CoPilot Live Premium informs you “in 500 yards, turn left into Bayswater Road”. Unfortunately, Emily, who has lived in our CoPilot across Europe, isn’t up to this task and her colleague Eleanor speaks instead.

She sounds a bit like Katharine Hepburn in her ‘On Golden Pond’ voice, all juddery as if she is sitting on a one-cylinder diesel engine. Most of the time we leave her switched off and especially in Europe. After all, Place de Gaulle could be almost anywhere in France and who would know the Rue de Cholet as such when you are looking for the D960. However, once you get into city centres this changes especially if you are following a tourist map and know the road you are looking for.
Text to speech is especially good when you are walking and following Eleanor’s directions. Then you have time to search for the street names hidden behind a boulangerie’s awning or high up on a wall still pitted with bullet holes from WWII.

Getting ‘there’ is another new experience and a lot better than the previous CoPilot Live. From the start you are offered three different route options, based on your personal preferences or motorways or not and whether to allow toll roads or ferries. It is easy to adjust the routes by ‘clicking’ on the road marked on the map in one of three colours. Then dragging the line to the road you prefer to use. As before, CoPilot doesn’t get into a hissy fit if you miss the turning and rapidly recalculates back to the old or a brand new route.

ALK, publishers of CoPilot, ask you to send your automatically recorded routes to them so they can gather real-time data or correct errors. This is done easily from your cellphone as an option in one of the settings. At the same time you can grab some of their live updates such as traffic information. Live traffic data needs a data connection so it limited to the UK or the very wealthy. At only £7.99 per year it is still an upgrade worth buying.

We proved that the route selections are darned good too. Driving from Le Havre into France, CoPilot kept trying to get is to avoid the Pont de Normandie, which costs about a fiver to cross, and instead routing us to the nearby and free crossing of the Pont de Tancarville which would also take us onto our chosen route for very little extra time. En-route CoPilot continued to argue with the Nissan’s sat-nav we were following in the car in front and the route it chose to Saumur cost us about £30 more than CoPilot’s route.

There are still one or two glitches with the maps. For example: CoPilot wants to route me by way of Dover and Calais to get to Dieppe, rather than using the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry just down the road. It recognises the route but thinks the 4 hour crossing will take over 15 hours. It could just as easily route me from Portsmouth to Le Havre or Ouistreham in quicker time than the three hour drive to Dover.

As any sat-nav user will tell you, there are times when motorways meet in a spaghetti of options where getting on the wrong one may mean a round trip of 100 miles to get back to where you needed to choose the correct route. CoPilot Live Premium has tackled this with clearer route markings showing the correct route to take. I need to test it around Paris or Rouen before I will believe it. Where three or more roads combine then depart from each other, while you are driving at 130kph, on the wrong side of the road. Behind is a crazy trucker in a 40 tonne articulated monster, indifferent if he runs you over or not. Remembering Dennis Weaver in Spielberg’s Duel is not a good thing at such times.

The menus for settings and accessing other features of the app, are easier to get at with one tap on the map taking to the most immediate needs with a further button to get to the rest of the options such as POIs, PhotoNav and My Places. Along the bottom of the screen is a horizontal bar with icons for the remainder of the settings. Compared with the previous version of CoPilot it is far easier to use but has advanced options we haven’t tried yet and to be honest probably never will. We have no real wish to broadcast where we are to Facebook or Twitter, one of the new features for those who want it.

One thing we found a little irritating is that on tapping on the Points of Information to find the closest, you are presented by three options for the nearest: Restaurant, Hotel and Petrol Station. Not our chosen three which would probably be: Carrefour, vineyard and Public Toilet. Nevertheless, underneath is are two large buttons saying Search All which brings up a text entry screen, and More Categories, listing all POI types in alphabetical order as well as having a broader selection than earlier CoPilots. These work without a data connection and are downloaded to your cellphone regularly when data is available.

I note that according to CoPilot, my local Co-Op is called a Co-Opreative which just about sums up CoPilot Live Premium. For anyone about to buy a navigation app, it is pretty hard to beat and the price is very reasonable. We are glad we have the new version and going back to the previous one makes us realise all the new tricks you appreciate. With only a short time playing with the options and learning the menus, you’ll co-opreate with CoPilot Live Premium and trust it to get you to your destination. But do take a map with you as well, just in case…

Two years until Google+ hits 500 million?

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

Remember that pivotal moment in The Social Network when Facebook holds a little party to celebrate hitting 500 million users? If you haven’t seen the film, it’s likely you would have been slapped in the face repeatedly by the slew of stories focusing on the milestone anyway.

Now, if current estimates are on the money, then Larry Page and his minions will be holding a similar shindig in the not too distant future for their Google+ venture. In two weeks, the service has amassed 10 million users, according to an estimate which claimed Google+ membership would surpass that figure today.

Extrapolate that figure in a very straightforward way, and it’ll be less than two years (approximately 20 months) until Google hits the 500 million mark. It took Facebook six years to get there.

My maths here is admittedly pretty lax (even the above estimates from Paul Allen are somewhat flawed, as the man himself admitted). For instance, it doesn’t take into account any withering of excitement around Google+ or the fact that registration is only by invite at the minute. So the eventual date could be a year or so either side of mid-2013.

Nevertheless, it’s startling how quickly the enterprise has gathered momentum. Already it has attracted a host of plaudits with some (a little lazily and unsurprisingly) labelling it a Facebook killer.

Just a few weeks ago it seemed as though Facebook was the only social network that mattered and it would remain so until the final days on earth, so indomitable did Mark Zuckerberg’s company seem.

But as with any major move it makes, Google has shaken things up. It did it in the search space when it first started, it did it with its cloud-based productivity tools and it did it in the mobile space with Android. The Mountain View company has tried to do it with social networking before, but never has it received such instantaneous and widespread approval of such a venture.

Android left others staring on in amazement, drool hanging from their gaping jaws, as it made its way to the top of the smartphone OS pile, trampling on the woebegone faces of Apple’s iOS and Symbian along the way. So don’t be surprised to see Google+ do something similar and overtake Facebook in terms of membership numbers in the not too distant future.

Facebook has reportedly been losing users too. So the timing and the product itself appear to be just right for Google to become the king of yet another market in the tech world.

Whether you like it or not, Google wants to, and will be, a part of your everyday digital lives.

Google guy goes Gaga over Backplane

Monday, June 6th, 2011

We know the name of Lady Gaga is used time and time again just to draw attention to websites with no link to their actual content, but trust me, this girl has gone tech.

A blog post in the New York Times has revealed the global phenomenon that is Gaga has put her hand in her pocket to invest in tech start-up Backplane. Why? It is all down to music…

Gaga become a spokesperson for Apple’s Ping project from its launch, even recording video messages for Steve Jobs’ keynote. But, when working closely with the Apple CEO, her manager Troy Carter decided its integration with social networks didn’t go far enough.

Carter, along with tech investor Matthew Michelsen, went on the search for a start-up with the technology to put their plans for musicians to connect and inform their fans around the world into action.

““I said why try to find a platform, let’s try to build one,” Michelsen told the New York Times.

Here they stumbled upon Backplane, a tiny firm with just seven employees but the inventive software to create Carter and Michelsen’s vision.

So Gaga is investing in the Silicon Valley start-up, but she is not going it alone. Enter stage left Eric Schmidt, Google executive chairman and former CEO of the internet giant, to put in his two cents – or million dollars. His investment company, Tomorrow Ventures, is also stumping up the cash and the first round of funding has already raised over $1 million.

A new music service with the backing of the industry’s hottest star and one of the tech world’s most famous CEOs? This sounds pretty exciting to me and with names like Gaga and Schmidt on-board, I am thinking this will be a success rather than a bad romance…

Random Hacks of Kindness

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Speaking of volunteering, ( blog entry doing-it-for-free/ ) here’s an org with a great name

Random Hacks of Kindness

and what seems like a great idea – get people who like a bit of coding doing something useful!

Small scale email marketing works a treat

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

A long time ago, in a place far from here, on a dark and stormy night, I sent out my first mailshot to 100 names plucked from Thomson’s Directory. It read ‘Mark and Mac for hire’. The response was amazing, creating a customer base which lasted for a decade and more. My wife and I were some of the first designers in Brighton with Mac set-ups, including a PostScript laser printer and a full range of design software. It all cost a gazillion to buy, the typefaces alone were worth thousands of pounds.

Over the years, clients moved on, to be replaced with others. As new facilities became affordable we bought them: ISDN, ADSL, high-res scanning, image manipulation, large format colour prints and web page design.

Gradually I specialised into book production, with clients in London, France and America, while my wife worked for a national charity. But the bankers screwed the world, people stopped buying books, publishing moved to ebooks and for the first time in 25 years I had to get a proper job. Ironically back to my old career where there is a huge lack of staff and I’m working less for the same money I earned from design. But I still keep a toehold in the creative world, hoping for the return of the good old days.

Zany, attractive and to the point

Which is how one email caught my eye and instead of marking it as junk, I read each new one with interest. They were zany, attractive and to the point, obviously from someone who knew what they were doing, or at least appeared to do so. The email was from Keith Scott, another jobbing freelancer who was trying to create a new client base via email.

Pre-recession Keith had been the man behind British Airport Authority’s annual report. As any designer will tell you, a glossy annual report pays the mortgage for a year. When BAA were taken over, Keith found he didn’t have enough work after a career in typesetting and design for print, dating from the days of hot metal.

Keith explained: “Once BAA’s 2006 annual report had gone to print I was back in the normal run of things with no financial umbrella and wondering what to do about the monetary vacuum. I had been sending postcards then followed up with a phone call but it became too expensive and time-consuming. I decided to try email.

“I had built up a small database of about 120 contacts whom I telephoned to get an email address before starting a monthly mail-out. It was a slow, manual process but it did keep the work coming in. Eventually I set FileMaker Pro to send the emails for me.

“At the start of 2009 I had 300 friendly contacts and about 1200 who had never replied. Each month I carried on emailing both and slowly increased the friendly list, which kept the work coming in. Unfortunately, as the recession hit, work started drying up, I had to put my time to good use.

“With the help of Yell.com, Yellow Pages on line, I searched for graphic design companies in London and the southern home counties. I telephoned them and said I was an artworker. I gave them my details and asked for the email address of the creative director or studio manager. The vast majority of people were very obliging.

Life threatening

“One day, searching Yell, an odd message appeared in a new browser window. It said that I was deemed to be using their site for the purpose of making a database which was strictly illegal and if I did not desist I would be prosecuted. It frightened the life out of me.

“Now I buy low cost lists from other companies. Not all of them have been particularly useful and one even instigated a contact from another database company threatening to prosecute me for using their data without permission. A list I had bought was clearly not legal and I had used a hidden trojan.

“I now have 570 friendly contacts and over 3000 who have never replied. The irony is that I have less work than ever, although it does seem to be improving slightly. Producing an html email for a client gave me the knowledge to create my own. I tried Dreamweaver which wasn’t very successful before I settled on TextWrangler which is free and very good. I use MacMassMailer to send my html emails.”

As with all jobbing designers, Keith has had to learn new skills and software to keep up with the industry. He is keen to learn from others’ experience. In the last couple of years, MacUser articles have made him re-evaluate his approach and present himself more forcefully. For example: a recent article showed that skilled freelancers should present themselves as specialists rather than just run-of-the-mill artworkers.

Like Keith, MacUser’s Steve Caplin convinced me to switch to a graphics tablet and adopt a different method to do ‘hairy cut-outs.’ This was immediately before I created a book for the Imperial War Museum called The Animals’ War. Page after page had cut-outs of hirsute animals which even the best Photoshop filters were a major head-ache. Steve’s advice was to paint quick masks, convert them to cut-outs before generating ‘hairiness‘ with brushes and fitters. This helped when I went on to do The Children’s War.

Keith Scott concludes: “The obvious thing for me was to promote my traditional typesetting and artworking background. This is why I try hard to distinguish the fact that design and artwork are two very different disciplines.

“But I feel that I’m barking up the wrong tree much of the time – some might say I’m simply barking.”

Far be it for me to contradict him.

It’ll be worse before it’s better…

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

I used to have this verdant, green lawn. However, if you looked closely much of the green was moss. So, a couple of weeks back I fed it “weed and feed” which killed most of the moss and I have spent much of this weekend raking it out. The trouble is I now have a lot of brown earth and not much grass. The idea is now the moss has gone the grass will (eventually) grow over the bare patches the way it couldn’t over the moss.

So what has this to do with IT? The whole process reminded me of bug fixing a project that has gone bad. Once a system is well out of hand fixing the bugs gets tricky because they interact with other bugs and you end up with temporary fixes and work arounds until the other bugs are fixed which in turn create their own problems… The “best” approach (for development) is to clear them all out and start afresh. The problem is you end up with system much like my lawn – a bit bare.

This doesn’t go down well with users, however they will sometimes live without features for a while IF they believe they will be replaced with fully working ones.

Marketing usually really hate the idea – they’d rather have a healthy looking a system even if the healthy look is only from a distance. Still, I have often said the you could display everything about most marketing departments’ enthusiasm for openness on one screen of a smart phone … in a very large font.

Please saw off the branch you are now sitting on…

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

I am heartily sick of installers asking me to close down all other windows etc. I appreciate that updating a library that may be in use is a problem but it is irritating.

To top it all I ran an install today that asked me to close the installer! That’s what comes of the company wrapping installers in its own roll out – and presumably never testing it. Or maybe someone had a sense of humour or even a grudge against the support team who would have to take the calls.

Here’s to the <irony> unobtrusive, fast and painless updating we can expect in the future </irony>.

Recursion the hard way

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Has anyone got a simple way of getting a command to recurse sub directories (in windows / dos)?

I seem to remember writing something years ago but it wasn’t terribly satisfactory, I’m currently doing a
dir *.dat /s /b > temp.bat

dir *.dta /s /b >> temp.bat

and editing the batch file to add my command (a file compare) to each line via a macro.
Surely there’s a better way?

Come to that is there a windows option to compare directory trees? It seems a basic requirement just to check backups…

I expect I ought to be saying something witty and clever about IT and royal weddings  but I’m not much on weddings or royals so I’m sticking to the IT!