Update:Microsoft has reposted the instructions

In my RSS was a Mac Mojo post from Eric Schwiebert about the 502 error in the Office 2008 Installer. I went to read the rest of the post but it has been removed, and seemingly not replaced yet. Here is what my RSS reader cached:

You may have seen recent reports on the web of a security issue in the installer for Mac Office 2008. The issue is that our installer is incorrectly granting ownership of the files to a particular local user as it installs them, so that if your Mac actually has a second local user and that user is not an administrator on your Mac, they could modify your Office 2008 install. The issue does not expose the Office 2008 install to modifications by any networked user account or to any local account other than the second one created on your Mac.

Microsoft and the MacBU take all security issues seriously, and we intend to fix this situation in several ways. First of all, if you have already installed Office 2008, you can run a command in the Terminal to fix the file ownership and remove the security concern (see instructions below). Second, the MacBU is working on an update to Office 2008 that will automatically fix the file ownership for you… …

Hopefully this saves someone else an hour.

If I stuck one of the IR buds directly to the IR “eye” on the Apple TV, the Apple TV would not recognize any IR.

I had to stick it below the IR “eye” in order for IR codes to be received.

I’ve been in touch with AppleCare ever since I got this router. They have continued to “look into” our VPN issues with SonicWall. They even swapped my router for a new one (before the gigabits came out)

The last email I from Apple was today:

It appears we still do not have a solution or a workaround for this particular issue. Again, I would like to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and hope we will correct this issue sometime in the future.

Sigh.

Sigh, Microsoft. I can confirm the report at bruned that the Microsoft Office 2008 installer sets the owner to user 502, which is the second user on your machine.

In this case, my test user. Nice. What a security hole.

This installer also mucks with other user ids, so be careful.

I ran repair permissions in Disk Utility and it didn’t fix anything.

So I fixed them in the Terminal, which is a pain:

• sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/Fonts/Microsoft
• sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/
• sudo chown -R root:admin /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008/

The Finder doesn’t make it possible to change the owner of a file in Leopard, at least I have not figured it out.

Really, this is useful. Thanks, now I get to sort out which of the 50 items I am administer for I don’t have permissions on.

It really is too bad the computer doesn’t know which items I don’t have permissions to replace, because if the computer knew, it could give me a list, that I could copy and email to the admin. That would be nice.

</sarcasm>

Alright, I know the bru-ha-ha over MacHeist, but seeing one of the chaching guys push the bundle made me at least feel that due to the success of MH1, the developers are getting a better deal this time around.

Why did I buy it?

Because I loathe Intuit. I am tired of their Mac apps being behind Windows, I am tired of paying for nothing more than bug fixes, and while chaching falls short of what I need, I want to support them somehow.

If the midnightapps guys add splits, I’d be set.

Now for what I was using QuickBooks for. Not accounting, just invoicing. I found a much, much better solution:

Billings2 is a nice Mac app that tracks jobs by time, by task, expenses, prints nice invoices, can auto save to disk with a filename of your liking, can auto email, integrates with address book, etc, etc. Very nice and for around $60, affordable.

I love where the Mac is these days. With indies giving huge corporations like Intuit a run for their, well, money, I am a very happy Macintosh user.

In response to John’s Keynote Roundup about Apple’s new Time Capsule, I wrote to him:

Hi John,

I saw your glowing review of Time Capsule and wanted to point out a few things.

1) Backups should be reliable.

Sure, a “server grade” hard disk that supports the proper buffer flush commands is great, but you are wedding a router and a backup. What happens when:

1a) The router dies, and you lose the backup while the router is fixed. 1b) You find out the router does not pass the new VPN your fiancé’s company uses (like I am stuck with in the current router), and now you have a very expensive WAP, just to have a backup 1c) Your hard drive dies, and you lose your router while the hard disk is replaced.

2) Backups should be movable

Again, being stuck inside of the router makes it impossible to move this backup offsite for any reason. You need another backup, or a second time capsule. You should be able to take a full time machine and archive it if you like. You cannot with the Time Capsule. You have to allow files to be deleted, or stop using it altogether.

---

What Apple should have done:

A) Made the USB port on existing extremes work. AirDisk works very poorly now.

B) Supplied this disk as a USB/FW drive, with the proper flush commands.

C) Sold Time Capsule as a Airport Extreme N router with firewire, and the drive from B.

Ca) Or even better, had a drive sit below the router on a eSata bus connector, so you can buy/swap more capsules.

Summary

This is an awful product because it ties people’s sense of backup security in with another piece of hardware, a router, which can fail, or need to be replaced, thus putting either component of the capsule at risk. It is similar to using two drives striped Raid 0 for a backup, thus doubling your chance of backup failure.

Steve

I have a large amount of respect for John and his body of work. I just don’t want to see customers use this product expecting to have a reliable backup system.

It seems that the Office 2008 installer leaves several copies of their fonts in /Library/Fonts/

The older versions are named such as “Courier New” while the newer versions are named “Courier New.ttf”

Sadly, Font Book as disabled the new fonts and offers to delete them over the old fonts. Yuck.

I am not sure what caused this, but I am guessing it is due to the migration of Tiger to Leopard, copying the old MS fonts, but since i had never reinstalled Office, the office 2008 installer found nothing to uninstall, including the older fonts. Sigh.

I cleaned this up very simply:

• Use Font Book to look for duplicates
• Scroll through your font list and look for a black dot next to a font name
• Turn down the disclosure triangle for the font
• Select a font and press CMD-I to show the info pane
• Select two of the same faces (say bold) and compare. One of the info fields is location, look for the font name with .ttf and delete the other (So if you have Andale bold and Andale bold, select each bold, compare versions and names, then delete the non .ttf file)
• You can easily remove a font by right clicking the font and choosing remove font.

You’ll find you have something like:

• Andale ** bold ** bold ** italic ** italic

etc. Once you delete the non-ttf file, all duplicates for Andale will disappear.

Move on to the next black dotted duplicate font.

“Can’t start server : Bind on unix socket: Permission denied”

“Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’”

Wow I found a lot of stuff on the net about this, but only two things helped because I was not using PHP:

• Check permissions on /tmp

Mine were user:user with user read only! Changed to root:wheel and sudo chmod a+w tmp. Bingo!

• You might need to add:

socket=/private/tmp/mysql.sock

to the [mysqld] section of /etc/my.cnf

Disk Utility Repair Permissions fixed this issue as well

As pointed out in the EULA by John Gruber, HD rentals can only be done on the Apple TV and are not transferable to a computer, iPod, etc.

ok fine, maybe they did this for licensing reasons, or maybe because an iPhone doesn’t want nor can play an HD version.

There is a solution.

Make the HD rental give the rentee a license to the SD version as well. If I need it, I can go to iTunes, download the SD version and put it on my phone.

The same key would be used, so if i was 12 hours into my rental, I’d only have 12 hours left.

Fair and works for everyone.

Ok this product is a joke. Apple has a bad enough record with routers as it is (My 10 month old router still does not allow Elizabeth’s VPN to connect, wheres linksys and d-link do) but check this scenario out:

• Back up to Time Capsule, oh laptop kernel panics. Reboot. Wait 9 hours while it scans disk and backup over wifi.

• Hard disk fails for some reason. Oh explain to the wife/etc that you have no network for days now while hard drive is replaced in router.

ROFL What were they thinking? Don’t buy this. Wait for them to fix the external port on the current base station, or support Macs as time machines over wifi.

Summary - DUD

Pretty well, I’d say. Honestly, the best thing about running a roomba every T-Th-Sun is that it forces us to keep the floor clean, which not only allows the roomba to run, but makes it easier to vac with the Electrolux.

So, after a week of cleaning, the roomba was picking up very little top level stuff like hair, but the filter (which is small of course) was still getting clogged with dirt.

So, break out the Electrolux (which I love). Results from a quick pass over the open areas of the living room:

So, now we’ll see how the roomba does this next week. The two in tandem will work very well I think.

Yahoo!

If you read RSS on the Macintosh then you likely know that Brent Simmon’s NetNewsWire has been the best app around. Vienna is very nice and gave NNW competition, especially in the price category.

Well now, Newsgator has announced that NNW is free! Yes, free! You have no excuses now:

Download NetNewsWire For Free!

If you don’t read your news via RSS, you might want to consider it!

I have added a review of my new Roomba 550 to the Roomba Review Wiki at:

Roomba 550 Review

I am late to the game checking it out. Email me your ids, mine is geeksrus. Original, eh?

Any good clients to use other than the website?

I created a file titled Foobar 3.0 in TextMate with the words “hello world” in it.

I did a spotlight search for Hello World but my file did not show in the list. I clicked Show All and it was not in the full list either.

With the full list open, I renamed my file from Foobar 3.0 to Foobar 3.0.txt and immediately, my file showed in the spotlight list.

So, Spotlight does filter files based on extension, and really does not like .0 extensions