Vista and Leopard's Windows Filesharing

Vista is a pain in my ass.  Leopard, decidedly less so, but still a pain.  The two of them together?  Well, please just kill me.

First issue - Vista can't connect to a fileshare I set up on my Leopard-based PowerMac.  Vista complains that I've entered the wrong password.  On the Mac, /var/log/samba/log.smbd says this:

[2007/11/17 22:57:59, 0, pid=475] /SourceCache/samba/samba-187/samba/source/auth/auth_odsam.c:opendirectory_smb_pwd_check_ntlmv2(446)
opendirectory_ntlmv2_auth_user gave -14090 [eDSAuthFailed]

From this site, I found that when entering the username on Vista, you have to do it in the format of IPADDRESSusername.  So, if the server's IP is 192.168.1.1 and the username is bob, then you enter 192.168.1.1bob as the username on Vista.  And then enter your password like you normally would.

Second issue - Vista's Windows Backup and Restore Center gives you the option to backup to a fileshare.  Seems like a no-brainer, eh?  Well, not so much, as evidenced from posts like these.  I eventually found that I had to use the registry edit to change Vista's LmCompatibilityLevel from 3 to 2.  That seemed to do the trick.

But of course, Vista has, yet again, failed in its backup.  The network share is no longer available, or some such BS.

I love Windows.  Gah.

Delicious Library

403 CDs. After a few hours of using my iSight as a barcode scanner, this is how many I know I have now.

Delicious Library is a cool little app.

One cold, calculating motherfucker.

iPod mini - 4GB of storage - $249
iPod - 15GB of storage - $299
iLife - $49 (downloads of iPhoto and iMovie no longer offered)

It's about time that they put the hurt on users for iLife, and I'll happily shell out $49 for iPhoto's speed improvements (it's unbearably slow on a dual 1.42GHz G4 with nearly 2000 photos). GarageBand looks cool, but I'm not much of a musician... playing with loops in Soundtrack is fun, though. I'm still happy to get updates for all the other apps as I use them all. iMovie's currently exporting a video to VCD so I can send it to my Speed TV-less friend up North.

As for the iPod mini, interesting concept, but not quite what I was expecting. I thought it'd be more square-shaped than it really is. As a coworker of mine commented - iPod mini price drops could happen if Apple starts selling a lot of 15GB iPods (and subsequently stops selling 4GB iPod minis). Oh, and Phil Schiller (Apple's Sales/Marketing VP) mentioned that Apple hasn't ruled out the 2GB iPod mini. Interesting.

I'm still in love with my 1st generation (1G) iPod, but the announcement that Alpine would be coming out with a car unit with an iPod control interface might actually convince me to update to a 3G iPod (or use Nicole's 3G iPod in the car ;-).

El Gato's new EyeTV stuff looks cool. They added quite a lot of features in their newer models - MPEG-2, Digital Satellite support, and HDTV. Note that each feature comes in its own unit, but all use a Firewire interface. Unfortunately, there's not one über unit that supports it all. Still, it's better than MPEG-1 from the original USB EyeTV.

Hrm, what else... good on Ten Technology for coming out with a Bluetooth audio interface for the iPod. I'm curious as to how good it sounds. And Griffin's playing catchup now with Belkin as it released a voice recorder for the 3G iPods.

Software, Hardware, and my wallet

It's a good feeling to work with a developer to resolve a bug. About two weeks ago, I bought a camcorder, a Canon ZR60. It had multiple purposes - videos (obviously), video capture from analog sources (this is something that Canon cameras can do), and data backup. Data backup? Oh yes.

There's a piece of software for OS X called DV Backup. I downloaded it, tried it out, and after verifying it worked on a 35MB backup, I bought it. That's when the trouble began. I wanted to back up my iTunes music library (20GB+ worth) and needed somewhat reliable, somewhat cheap storage, that could be spanned across multiple media. DV Backup offered this functionality, and at a good price. It was able to successfully back up my data, but always crashed/failed/died during the verification phase. Always.

I contacted the developer and explained the problem, and after much testing, I've got a much more reliable application, that seems to work on the verification moreso than it did. There are still problems with it, but instead of failing on the first tape (of 3), it fails on the 3rd. This means about 19GB of music is able to be restored, at this point. Much better. The developer had it good - he had me and another person to test and, as he explained it to me, it only affected dual-processor Macs. If the app failed for me, it was always reproduceable by the other tester. That's got to be nice, from a development perspective.

On a hardware and wallet-related note, last night Nicole and I went to the Mac Store here in Seattle and traded in her dual 867MHz G4 PowerMac for a 1.25GHz Aluminum PowerBook G4. Gorgeous machine, and with Panther supporting fast user switching, we have no need for two PowerMacs in the house. We'll really only need one computer each. Now, if we could just get Panther soon, we'll be set :-)

I guess I'm getting in all my purchases now before someone decides to lay me off. Yup, hooray for credit. No more major purchases for the rest of the year, now.

Damn crappy [insert country here] software!

After reading this article over on Salon, I wonder if you'll hear me sometime in the future complaining about crappy software primarily programmed by outsourced programmers.

I think it'd be nice if there were some sort of information available with the software that said "some outsourced programming from India, Ireland, Russia, etc. was used in the creation of this software." Of course, I don't think it'd do much to change my buying habits, considering I drive a German-designed, Mexican-made car, but still.

I've been lucky, so far. My company isn't outsourcing any programming or support jobs to other companies/countries. But, I have had been on some calls with other companies that do outsource to other countries. I'm not knocking the competency of the other programmers, I just worry that programmers could be going the way of the skilled laborer of yore.

If outsourcing really takes off and India becomes a major white-collar industrial power, are we going to start bashing them like we did Japan back in the 70s-80s-90s?

iDVD, for why do you not use my chapters!?

Video editing on my new PowerMac is very nice. Compared to my old 800MHz iMac, this new dual-1.42GHz PowerMac is a speed demon. Lately, I've been grabbing some shows off the TiVo and archiving them. The convoluted conversion process I have to follow goes something like this:

1. Download show off of the TiVo using MFSStream
2. Convert .ty source file with TyConvert X.
3. Demux resulting MPEG-2 file with bbDEMUX
4. Encode resulting .m2v file into format of my choice (DV for iDVD projects, in particular) with DiVA
5. Convert .m1a audio to AIFF using madplaywrap and MAD.
6. Normalize resulting audio file with Sound Studio
7. (optional) Compress AIFF file into MPEG-4 AAC or something smaller (if I'm not outputting to DVD).
8. Use sync-hole to combine and sync audio/video tracks between the DV file (or whatever output compressed format I chose) and the audio track.
9. Use Quicktime Pro to edit out commercials
10. (optional) Save as a self-contained movie

If I'm going to DVD, I end up with a large DV file that I bring into iDVD. The iDVD product page says that iDVD will read chapter tracks within a Quicktime file and then use them within a project. Does this work? Yes, for iMovie, no for the chapter tracks I've been added to my movies. Once I create the chapter track and add it to my DV file, Quicktime works fine with it. But, bringing the file into iDVD does nothing. iDVD doesn't even recognize that there's a chapter track there.

And, I can't take my huge DV file and import it into iMovie because iMovie has a limit to the size of clips you can import. Argh!

I wonder what I'm doing wrong here. Am I asking too much of iDVD, or is there a bug that prevents it from reading chapter tracks from files created with Quicktime Pro?

Beware of M$ software updaters...

I can say I've never had a problem with a software updater from Microsoft, until today. I've used updaters on Windows and Macs, and all of the Windows updaters have been great. The Mac updaters also have been great, but the Office v.X 10.1.1 updater is a piece of crap, without a doubt.

I'd been following the reviews at Versiontracker, and they weren't encouraging, to say the least. Lots of people were reporting problems getting it installed, with missing library issues, and wiped out Office install directories. Well, I bit the bullet, and installed it on my iMac G4/800. It went fine, surprisingly. I was pleased.

My PowerBook's at work, so I went to work and installed it on that. Blammo, it fucked up my Office install. First I got a privileges problem with the installer. In that process, the Office Component Library got wiped out. Since I'm at work at the moment, and I don't have my Office CD, I use AFP to connect to my iMac at home. Grabbed the component library again. I decided I'd try to install SR1 again. Didn't work, that wiped out Word and Excel, leaving the original files in the trash. Well, at this point, all I could do was drag my Office folder to the trash.

Similar problems occurred on my girlfriend's PowerMac. To make a long story short - if you have these problems, there's a very simple way to get back to a working installation of Office:

1. Delete your current Office folder
   
2. Install office from the Office CD
   
3. Install SR1
   
4. Install 10.1.1 update
   

It seems that there's a problem with the 10.1.1 in the way it sees installed permissions. One person on VT said that the updater expects that the user installing the update must also have installed Office and SR1. And the installer doesn't require admin access, so OS X network admins be aware: you could have users installing this update really screwing shit up.

Long story short, be wary of any updater, M$ or not. At least this update didn't delete all of my hard drive.