Ed Buford - Just Another Geek

Mac Life - Messenger

Messenger

So I get Office installed and find there’s a messenger client that seems to have installed along with it; so this is good news to me so I launch it and it tells me that I need to download the newest update in order to use it. It asks me if I want to download it and I say yes and end up with a file on my desktop. Now I’m such a newbie at this Mac it wouldn’t matter much what kind of file it dumped on my desktop I still wouldn’t have much of a clue as what to do with it. So I open a browser and type messenger.bin.uncompressed in the google search box. After reading ideas about installing the newest version of Stuffit and tying some gyrations with the Office CD. Finally I come across this link: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=msnmessenger

I download this version and install it. No problems this time, it works like a champ and I’m happy to have an IM client. When I reboot the computer the other version starts up again, I look at the settings and tell it not to launch on start up. I would have uninstalled it but have no idea how, so this will work for now.

Anyway I have a working IM client and happy about it!

Data from the Dead

In my job it is often my sad duty to tell people about the loss of a love one. People come to me with their computers or hard drive when they are beyond help and ask me to try to resurrect them. I get a knot in my stomach when this happens because I know I have to give them bad news. Sometimes the bad news is that a motherboard is bad and needs to be replaced, this makes me feel bad when I know that money will be an issue for the person…. But usually the worst news I have to give is when the hard drive has tanked. I have a great program called Spinrite, which has pulled my bacon out of the fire on occasion, but when the drive gets to me most often you can hear the read head slamming into the spindle or the drive isn’t recognized at all by the computer…. you just can’t fix it when you can’t see it. Yes you can send the drive out to have it recovered but the thousands of dollars it costs to have a drive recovered usually means the data is just lost.

Adam Callender brought me a hard drive this week, I plugged it into my computer and after much waiting the drive showed up in Disk Management as healthy but it didn’t recognize that the drive was formatted at all. Now this isn’t a good sign, however since the computer did see the drive I had some hope. It was clear to me the MFT (master file table) was unreadable. Since this is a usb drive, it makes Spinrite harder to use, so I remembered a 35 hour marathon John DeBoer had while trying to recover the hard drive out of his laptop. I went out and got the tools from http://www.partitionsupport.com and set out trying to recover the data.

It was to my good fortune John just happened to be in the building and he stopped by to see me. I told him what was going on and started trying to remember how the findpart tool worked. After some time playing with the tool (documentation is lackluster) John was able to see data that was still there. Needless to say I was soooo happy. I was good to know I wouldn’t have to tell Adam there wasn’t anything I could do for him. I was able to copy the majority of his data off the offending hard drive. There was data that was unrecoverable, but I’m very happy I was able to salvage a 100gig of data.

Thanks John… Your Rock!

Mac Life - Entourage

About 3 weeks ago Ben put this Mac on my desk at Adam Callender’s request so that I can start using it. It took me a short tour to figure out how to add a user (me ) and I was up and running with my own admin account on the box. Next I loaded Office on it and set out to get Entourage connected to our Exchange box, much to my dismay I kept getting errors each time I launched Entourage, I showed it to my buddy Kim and he told me try installing the remove office program (this sounded funny to me but I tried it anyway) this didn’t help. It was about a week later when I ran into Jeff Peterson, I asked him to fix it for me and he did. The problems was simple and makes a lot of sense to me, the program just needed to be updated from Apple and then it worked. This update feature was the first thing I discovered that made me feel homey. Once the updates had taken over I had a working version of Entourage and with a bit of trying to figure out the labels in the email accounts I was able to get Entourage up and running.

On our OWA (Outlook Web Access) we use our own CA (Certificate Authority ) to generate the SSL certificate. Entourage appears to navigate the OWA to access my email, for some crazy reason there is an error complaining about the cert not being installed when I launch Entourage, however if I click through the error, Entourage connects to Exchange and syncs my mail. It works well so far. Entourage has a different look and feel that Outlook and it takes some getting used to. It’s not bad just different and all in all more simple than Outlook.
I must admit I’m still a bit leery of trusting my email to it, but, bit by bit I’m becoming more comfortable with it,

Thanks for your Help Kim and Jeff !!!

Mac Life

We have a few isolated Mac users at GCC, and unfortunately for them they get blessed little support. At this point we still have no intention of officially supporting Macs however it is a sick feeling knowing I have no useful knowledge of  the Mac OS when there is a problem. Because of this we’ve asked for and have received a Mac to play with.  The Mac is a new i386 MacBook Pro, and it’s the envy of many Mac lovers. It does have an official job as a backup for displaying the words to music during weekend services. This means I have it only part time, so during the week I’m using it as my notebook to do as much as I can with it. I figure I’ll learn the most about it by using it.

So I figure I’ll make some posts about what I find, what I like and what I don’t about this Mac.  I had some experience with OS 8 and OS 9 and found them difficult to deal with from a network admin’s perspective. I understand OS X will let the unit be managed by AD, this is something I’ll be looking into as I get a better feel for the Mac. In the meantime I’ll try to keep you posted about things I’m discovering, and I’ll keep an open mind about it.

If you make comments on my blog with sycophantic crap about how Mac’s don’t crash and other useless lies, I’ll just delete your comments… I’ve got no stomach to debate fantasy. However if you have good info that will help me learn about and enjoy this Mac more, please feel free to comment.  I need all the help I can get.

To all my Friends at GCC who've already helped me with this Mac... Hugs & Kisses!