Articles posted in May, 2004

Power Mac G4 (MDD) Superdrive won’t mount DVD-VR discs

Monday, May 31st, 2004 • 5:37 am

This one is rather tricky… I have a Sony DVD recorder in my living room that’s connected to my PVR unit, so that I can transfer PVR recordings on DVD for archival purposes. This DVD recorder is capable of recording DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW discs, as well as DVD-RW discs in “VR” format, also known […]

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Mac OS X’s Address Book: Limited options for font size

Monday, May 31st, 2004 • 3:50 am

There are many problems with Mac OS X’s Address Book application, and I have had the opportunity to describe quite a few of them: cmd-Z undoes everything no “Copy” command in contextual menu (Apple fixed the problem in Mail, but not in the contextual menus in Address Book itself in Browse mode) general sluggishness even […]

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Rick Schaut on users providing reliable reproducible scenarios (or not)

Monday, May 31st, 2004 • 12:33 am

Microsoft developer Rick Schaut has yet another lengthy piece on the Word debugging process. In this piece, he obviously (albeit without naming names) refers to the response that his previous piece on the topic generated, including the response in the blog you are currently reading. In my response, I expressed my utter surprise when reading […]

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File list synchronization between Mac OS X applications: Using ‘Nudge’ as a work-around

Sunday, May 30th, 2004 • 7:07 am

This happens to me quite often — far too often, in fact. I use Snapz Pro X to take a snap shot of something in my Mac OS X environment. I open the snap shot in Photoshop, do a little bit of editing if needed, and then save it as a new web-optimized GIF file […]

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Safari tip: ‘Reload/Stop’ button doubles as ‘Go’ button

Sunday, May 30th, 2004 • 5:08 am

When Safari first came out, for a while I was frustrated by the absence of a “Go” button similar to the one in Internet Explorer: When I am browsing the web and loading and reading various pages, I often have my left arm resting on my desk top above the keyboard tray, and my right […]

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Keyboard access in Apple applications: not following Apple’s own guidelines

Saturday, May 29th, 2004 • 7:39 am

It’s bad enough when third-party applications fail to embrace some core Mac OS X technologies, such as full keyboard access. It gets worse when Apple’s own subsidiary FileMaker Inc. fails to do so as well. But it’s really bad when Apple itself demonstrate a serious lack of professionalism about it. I’ve already reported on problems […]

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Panther freezes: New twist!

Saturday, May 29th, 2004 • 7:37 am

Well now… Just as I had pretty much decided that my recurring Panther freezes had to be related to Mac OS X’s display sleep feature, I just got hit by a system-wide freeze right while I was writing an e-mail message! This changes everything. It means that the freezes are not related to the sleep […]

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Panther freezes: Still there in 10.3.4

Saturday, May 29th, 2004 • 5:30 am

It’s always the same, isn’t it? Just when I decided that I had enjoyed a long period of stability and started bragging about it here, bam! I get hit with another system-wide freeze. The symptoms are exactly the same as in the last freeze a week ago. I leave my computer running doing various tasks. […]

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Bryan Curtis on ‘How Widescreen Won’

Friday, May 28th, 2004 • 6:37 am

Slate associate editor Bryan Curtis has an interesting column on movie viewing habits in the US and how widescreen movies have become the standard in DVD products — as while “pan and scan” used to be the preferred format in the days of VHS tapes. As a lover of quality movies, I am obviously pleased […]

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Server Monitor using up a lot of CPU cycles

Friday, May 28th, 2004 • 5:42 am

Now that I am responsible for an Xserve server running in a remote location, I use Server Monitor, which is a Mac OS X Server administration tool that lets me monitor the status of the server remotely. I’ve set it to check the status of the Xserve every half-hour and to send me various types […]

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Mac OS X: Return to stability

Friday, May 28th, 2004 • 5:25 am

After a few rocky weeks with various types of system freezes requiring hard resets, I am happy to report that, since I have replaced my internal hard drive with a brand new Seagate model and turning off the security option asking for my password every time I wake my G4 from sleep ((displays only), I […]

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Mac OS X: 10.3.4 update

Friday, May 28th, 2004 • 5:10 am

After waiting for a couple of days in order to make sure that the update was not too risky to install, I did my usual little routine: restart from DiskWarrior CD rebuild directory on startup volume with DiskWarrior CD restart from startup volume with Shift key down (in order to prevent start up items from […]

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Canada: Paul Martin and those deaths

Friday, May 28th, 2004 • 3:23 am

The big news yesterday in Canadian politics (yes, we too are in an election year) was NPD candidate Jack Layton accusing Paul Martin, the current Liberal prime minister and candidate to his own succession, of being responsible for the deaths of homeless people because of his drastic cost-cutting measures when he was Minister of Finance […]

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Champions’ League final: Monaco 0 – Porto 3

Wednesday, May 26th, 2004 • 11:05 pm

Well, at least there were goals… Last year’s final was unbearably boring and ended in a 0-0 draw, with the winner decided on penalty kicks (a.k.a. the Ultimate Football Lottery). Last night, there were goals… But that was pretty much the only positive aspect of the game from the neutral point of view. Porto’s strategy […]

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Running Panther Server: Using the mod_rewrite Apache module

Wednesday, May 26th, 2004 • 6:31 am

This is a follow-up to my report on setting up a blogging system on my Xserve running Panther Server (Mac OS X Server 10.3.3). Yesterday I wrote that I had managed to get most things to run fine on the Xserve, including PHP, MySQL, and the open source WordPress blogging system. The only thing that […]

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