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Sunday, February 27, 2005

Show #122

Oscar night. Let’s see if the Hollywood Stock Exchange has got it right!

NOTE: If you’d like to add to the show notes, great, but… please don’t sit in the web-based editor. When you save it will erase others’ work. It’s best to create and edit your comments in Notepad or some other local text editor then paste them into the wiki, quickly. Thanks!

 toc | toc 

Today’s news items

Jef Raskin passed away peacefully yesterday of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61. Jef was one of the great thinkers in the computer era. Responsible for creating the Macintosh, hia life work was focused on improving user interfaces. His book, The Humane Interface, was a manifesto for better computer interfaces. At his death he was working on Archy, a unique and wonderful computer desktop. (Checkout the Flash demo.)

The obituary written by his son, Aza, for their local paper describes Jef’s genius and contribution best.

Don’t confuse the Vin Diesel voice mail hack with the Paris Hilton hack. The media is getting this story all wrong. Probably because they don’t own a Sidekick II and don’t understand what happened.

The Vin Diesel hack is a problem for all T-Mobile customers, but it only gives people access to your voice mail, nothing else. The difference here is that all the content on Paris’s Sidekick was stolen - not just the voice mails. To do that you’d need to be able to log into her T-Mobile Desktop Interface. That’s completely different from voice mail, and the password is different, too (the T-Mobile voicemail password is a PIN, the Desktop Interface password is a normal text password.)

In Paris’s case, she used her dog’s well known name as the answer to her secret question. Which leads me to believe that the “hack” was actually trivial and not a systemic weakness at T-Mobile. The moral is: choose good passwords and obscure secret questions.

11a-Noon

Harry in Lancaster - emachine BIOS speaks Spanish

His emachine boots in Spanish - he can’t find a command in the BIOS setup to change back to English. Any help here?

He also wants to write batch files in XP. Easy enough. You can edit them with Notepad, but put the file name in quotes to keep it from adding .txt to the name, e.g. “mybatchfile.bat”. Microsoft documents XP’s batch commands here.

Steve in Sherman Oaks - UltimateTV

He wants to buy a new UltimateTV. Good luck. Microsoft discontinued it in 2003. He also needs to replace his hard drive - it’s going bad. Be careful there. DVR drives are often formatted differently or require blessing to work. One way to do this would be to image the old drive and put the image on a new drive.

Steve Check this site out:

UltimateTV Upgrade
This site seems like it answers your question.
Henry in Saint Robert, MO

Noon-1p

Susan in Dana Point - Improve web site ranking in Google

She would like searches for her name to turn up her site. According to Google the best way to do this is to create good content. In actuality your ranking is based on how many highly ranked sites link to you. So get other sites to link to you. You can check their ranking at www.googlerankings.com. Read how Google does it (officially) on their site. Read about how others think Google really works on Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch.

Seth in Massachusetts - Mac and Windows networking

He can’t access Windows Server 2003 shares from his Mac. XP on the same network works fine.

Jerry in Whittier - Networked Scanners

He’s looking for a way of sharing a scanner as you would a printer on an XP network. You can buy networkable scanners, but they’re expensive. I don’t know of a way to do it with normal USB scanners.
Technoboijoe in Fraser, MI states: There are two ways to share your scanner – a software and a hardware solution. You could use a program to share your scanner on the network. One such program is RemoteScan: http://www.programurl.com/remotescan.htm You could also use a USB server that attaches directly to your network, such as the one offered by Keyspan: http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/server/ One caveat is that you must have drivers loaded for both the USB server and the devices attached to it on the computer you are using, and you must log into the server to use the devices on it. Also, only one user can be connected to any particular device at any time. Therefore, the scanner will be unusable by any other computers on your network at the time you’re using it.

Bryan in Chicago adds:I’ve been looking to share an all-in-one printer/scanner across three machines that are physically very close together. I found a USB Sharing hub that allows up to four PC’s to share up to 4 USB devices. The problem with attaching via USB rather than over the network is that only one PC can be connected at a time. This hub comes with software so you can take control of the devices when you need them. If you don’t want to run the software on your desktop, there’s also one with a manual switch. I haven’t tried either of these yet so I can’t vouch for their quality.

Andy in Valencia - Linux as a desktop replacement

He recommends Mepis. Robin Miller’s Point and Click Linux comes with Mepis.

Ash in Los Angeles - customers can’t see files >2GB

He’s a musician who works on orchestral loops for the movies (using Gigastudio). He burns the loops to DVD and sends them to his clients. But some of the files are larger than 2GB and some clients can’t read them. That’s a hard limit for IDE files. To use files bigger than 2GB your customers will either have to upgrade to XP SP-2 or buy a more up-to-date IDE controller.

I may have to revise my comments on this. The problem is more likely in the Joliet format he’s using (he said he’s creating hybrid discs). Use plain ISO 9660. Macs and PCs will be happy, and the 2GB limit will go away.

Leo: I have personal experience on this one, (at least on the PC side of things.) it is the ISO 9660 standard that is incapable of handling files larger than 2GB, as it was designed for CD-R’s

The only way to deal with this problem is to use the archiving application to split the archive into chunks that are less than 2 GB

re: limits on IDE, As far as I know, there isn’t a limit on IDE at 2GB. There is an IDE limit at 512 MB. but the next one is a lot bigger than 2GB. FAT16 addressing on the other hand is limited to 2GB (2^30 Bytes) of usable space.

Macdisk http://www.macdisk.com/mden.php3 will mount files over 2 gig on a DVD.

1–2p

Anthony in San Diego - XP crashed during sound card install

It’s just sitting there and he’s reluctant to just turn it off. If you can get the Task Manager to run by hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL click the Processes tab and try to close the process that’s hanging things up. If that doesn’t work, it’s ok to just turn the thing off and start over. Press and hold the on/off switch for four or more seconds.

Ann in San Diego - Creating a family web site without a computer

She just wants to send some pictures and text to someone and have them set it all up. I’d recommend finding a high school student who is studying web design. Pay her $10/hour. It will take her around five hours to set it up, then just an hour a month to update it.

Maybe I could help http://www.basicwebservices.net/. I’m learning HTML and could use the experience. This is my new site.

Chuck in Winnetka - OS X can’t see icons on a hard drive formatted by OS 9

He’s using an external drive on two machies: one running MacOS 9, one running OS X. The OS X computer can’t see all the 9 icons. OS X stores icon info in the .DS_Store file - delete the file from the Terminal and see if that fixes the problem. You might also want to rebuild the Desktop from the OS9 machine.

Pete in Canoga Park - Mac mini hard drive 4200RPM?

That’s right, it’s a laptop hard drive. You could put a faster drive in. Any Apple reseller can do it without voiding the warranty. Or do it yourself with a putty knife.

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