Well Microsoft has finally caved in and realized they were wrong by not including Visual Basic Support in Office 2008. After some hand waving about Applescript blah blah, the reality is that some spreadsheets just won’t open on the Mac - So much for interoperability!

Anyway, now they are adding VBA support back - but not to the product you already bought. Oh no, it’ll be the next revision of Office.

Read about it from the source

While trying to fill out a voter registration form, I ran into this sad state of affairs:

1. Preview works with the check boxes and radio buttons, but the text fields are only 2 characters wide.
2. SmileOnMyMac’s PDFpen application doesn’t work at all. Radio buttons are displayed randomly on the page, the text fields are not editable at all.

3. Adobe’s own reader works for editing, but they don’t let you save the document! To make matters even more insulting, they have gone out of their way to disable OS X’s “Save as PDF” from the Print Dialog! So you get this comical, yet infuriating sequence:

   3a. “You cannot save this form, instead print it for your records”

   3b. “Save as PDF has been disabled. Use File->Save instead”

ROFL. Stupid Adobe. Another company going down in flames, just like Microsoft, slowly but surely. Maybe this is some maneuver to push people to buy their distiller product or some other software?

Edit:

Found this hack on the Apple forums:

Adobe Reader and Preview can’t save filled-in PDFs, only print them. You can install CUPS-PDF http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx to create a virtual printer. When you print to that printer, it will create a PDF file of the filled-in form

I’ve now found 5 spreadsheets for Excel, written in Excel, that won’t open in the 2008 Office for Mac.

• No VBA Macros
• Super slow performance (try 15 minutes to edit a cell)

Are the two big issues. What a joke.

Edit:

• I have tried the latest 12.0.1 version.
• http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t11882-roguegearspreadsheet/ is one of the spreadsheets that fails, if you choose a new race for example

Yes! Yes!

After 12 months of not being able to use my router, Apple shipped Firmware 7.3.1 which passes SonicWall VPN packets!

So far, the router is fast, super fast. Now to see if it keeps connections!

I gave a demo of NetNewsWire at PMUG tonight. Well actually, I am giving the demo

I have not tried this yet but looks interesting:

Backup Bouncer

Note: This is a geek tool at the moment - Requires XCode, etc.

• Make movie in iMovie
• Upload to .mac web gallery
• Get url: http://gallery.mac.com/sriggins#100087

What the hell is that? Why didn’t it let me choose the url to use? iWeb does the same lame stuff.

I can’t take this serious with a url like sriggins#100087

I ordered a Mac Pro, Dual Quad Core 2.8 with 2gb RAM and the nVidia 8800GT today from the Apple Store.

Just kiddin, Erick. I ordered it via The Beaverton Mac Store, got my PMUG discount (5% for you PMUG members!), and also picked up AppleCare for my MacBook Pro.

I’ll add more RAM and drives later. I see crucial just started shipping Mac Pro 2008 RAM.

This machine will be a server, play WoW really well and let me free up my overworked laptop some.

All of my music and videos will go to the Pro. I’ll take boot camp off the laptop and move Windows to a VMWare image on my external 100gb drive when I need that. That alone will free up 48gb of space.

I’ll put boot camp on the pro on a second drive, so it can be fully dedicated if I ever need that, but since the Pro will be our Apple TV synced machine, that will limit how much time I can spend in Windows

Not sure when it’ll arrive. Should be super duper fast though

1. I see file I want on dock, drag to Finder window.
2. Poof sound and animation heard. Crap, I just deleted my Downloads stack off the dock
3. See downloads in said Finder window. Drag to dock.
4. Poof sound and animation heard. Crap, I just deleted my Downloads sidebar item, also.

/sigh

It’s on your software update. And here I thought it was my lame typing or iSkin that was causing the first character I typed to be lost!

From Tim:

Don’t know whether you’ve ever tried:

        defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.50

to set the global scaling (works pretty well except some apps actually go all fuzzy and others look fabulous)? It turns out it breaks the cmd-shift-4 to snapshot the screen and save the image to a file. The general advice if you google this stuff is to do:

        defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.00

to revert to normal size - which indeed it does but snapshotting is still broken. What you need to do to both revert and repair snapshotting is:

        defaults delete NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor

Let me tell you a somewhat long tale about the week I’ve had. This will get a little geeky, but you’d find out exactly why you should be using Time Machine and maybe a few tips to help your disaster recovery process.

Time Machine is Mac OS X 10.5’s automatic backup system. You attach a drive to the computer and after a simple dialog, you’re backed up.

Time Machine backs up every hour, quite quickly, and then keeps the last day’s changes and one set of changes every week.

If your computer has a 140gb hard drive and you have a 300gb Time Machine, you can easily keep 3-4 months worth of data in your Time Machine. This allows you to go “back in time” and get a file you just ruined, etc.

I have three Time Machines:

1. One I keep offsite, that I plug in once a week or so to update. This is in case the house burns down
2. One I keep downstairs in the office
3. One I keep next to the couch

To switch Time Machines, you simply attach the drive, open the Time Machine preferences and select the different Time Machine.

Last Tuesday I had been on the couch using Time Machine as normal, then we went to lunch. As I usually do, I unplugged the Time Machine to take it with me, so that way, again if the house burns down, the laptop is lost, but not my data. Call it paranoid, but I did have a tree fall on my house once

We come back from lunch and get back to work. Later that night, around 7pm I am checking out World of Warcraft and noticing i have very slow graphics, like 8-9 frames per second.

Being a developer, I download the 10.5.2 graphics update 1.0 and reapply this to my Mac, thinking it couldn’t hurt.

Well, on reboot, my video was dead. Black screen of death. Over the next couple hours I tried everything, reset the SMC, the PRAM, try an external monitor, boot off DVD, boot off the repair disk, safe boot, you name it, I tried it.

Well this sucks. We are shipping Sophie this week and my machine is dead.

I have a second laptop, which Elizabeth uses, so I decide to use that. Now both of these machines have user accounts for me and both have the same ’short’ name. This proved to be very important.

I log into my user on the backup machine and attach my Time Machine. Then I use Browse Other Time Machines by holding down option when I choose the Time Machine menu in 10.5.2. I select my Time Machine drive and wham, there are my files!

So I go back in time, and the last backup is from 1:57pm, when we went to lunch. Crap! I had not plugged the time machine in again.

Since I knew the laptop was working, I removed the Time Machine from the backup machine, booted the now-video-less laptop, attached the Time Machine and waited. Then I logged in by typing blindly.

I then waited and waited until I saw the disk being used and yes, Time Machine was backing up. This took an hour, but you can start it by ssh if you are a geek - Another article on that topic later.

So after the Time Machine disk stopped accessing, I pressed power, then return to safely shut down. I plugged the Time Machine back into the backup laptop and wham, the most recent backup was now the current time.

I restored my email and work data and went back to work.

I took the laptop into the Apple store at 8:30pm and they said they didn’t have the motherboard. I called the next morning and Bridgeport Village had one. By 12pm Wednesday Apple had my machine and I headed home to get back to work.

This morning, Thursday at 8:30am I get a call. My laptop is repaired! Sweeet! So I go pick it up at 10am and notice they forgot to reset the serial number. This was a sure sign I did indeed get a whole new motherboard. They reset the motherboard and I come home. Talk about great service!

I use the time machine on the backup laptop (A different time machine disk) to restore the data I had worked on from the previous day and a half, remove the second time machine and plug in my downstairs time machine.

I didn’t want to touch my most recent time machine, and did this prove to be wise.

You see, my machine name is ’serenity’ and while I had a new motherboard, I had the same hard drive. So, I should just plug in the Time Machine, select Backup Now and be good to go, right?

Nope. “Not enough space to back up, please choose another Time Machine”

What? Alright fine. I look on the Time Machine disk and there are now two folders, ’serenity’ and ’serenity 2′ Oh noes, Time Machine thinks this is a new computer

Sure enough, with help from friends I found this article on Mac OS X Hints that describes how Time Machine records the Ethernet MAC address of your computer with the folder associated with your machine.

This data is kept at a very geeky layer, hidden in the Access Control Lists, so repairing this was not for the faint of heart. That is another article topic for later as well.

After a lot of mucking around, and an all important reboot, I had my time machine understanding that this new machine is really the computer for this time machine.

I’ll have to repeat these steps with my other two time machines. Joy.

So, after all of this, what did I learn that I can pass on to you?

1. Keep your Time Machine plugged in 100% of the time, so you always have your latest data
2. Do not use an internal disk for a Time Machine. Convenient? Yes. Easily usable on an emergency computer? No.
3. Keep file sharing turned on just in case your computer’s video dies.
4. Spend the money and buy multiple drives for Time Machines.
5. Be aware that if a computer repair replaces your motherboard, you likely won’t be able to use your old time machines for backing up. You can get the data off, but likely not put more data on, depending on the size of the drive.

I can see why Apple doesn’t just use a machine name to map computers to Time Machines. There are many scenarios where someone could wipe out a Time Machine by either naming their machines the same, or getting a new computer and wiping the time machine out by backing up an empty drive, etc.

However, Apple does need to handle this use case where nothing but the motherboard changed.

Regardless, use Time Machine. Use many Time Machines. Keep them running 24/7.

It will save your butt when Murphy’s Law strikes.

I bought an Apple TV after Apple’s promised rental changes. Ok, so it is a toy, really I mean come on, $230 just to pay Apple more money to rent movies, but i love tech and wanted to check this out.

I’ve always wanted a 1080p Apple TV and while this is still 720p, my TV does a great upconverting job.

I rented “SuperBad” in SD via iTunes earlier in the month. Once the update installed, I tried to find the movie via streaming, but it could not be found.

I then realized you have to sync to watch movies rented on your computer. So I set up a custom sync and moved the movie over to the Apple TV.

This process, about 1.6gb of data, took 30 minutes. You can’t play a rented movie that is syncing, you have to wait.

The audio was prologic, and the colors a bit dull and dark, but the quality was very acceptable.

After that movie, I decided to rent The Simpsons movie in HD. After about 14 seconds, my movie was ready to go.

WOW, the colors are fantastic. The audio is 5.1 and sounds great.

This could get expensive. Even though we have Netflix for Blu Ray, renting HD movies via the Apple TV is fast and fairly affordable.

Oh yes, we’re watching Simpsons while iTunes is doing a new “automatic” sync, which will keep as much data on the Apple TV and let me stream everything else, in theory at least

Unconfirmed reports state that Apple Engineer (QuickTime, iTunes and others) “suddenly” passed away. More information is not available at this time.

According to Tom’s page he wrote the popular Darkside of the Mac screensaver.

Tom worked for Apple for 17 years as of the last update of his page, more like 21 now.

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.