X-flow

This seems to happen regularly and not only when updating Acrobat Reader and/or Safari. When I go to open/download a PDF linked on a website and instead of the PDF opening within Safari a dialog pops up asking me to identify which application I’d like to use to view the file. Invariably, I cannot associate PDFs with either Acrobat Reader or Preview and must choose Acrobat Professional. Bleh. And then it forgets again.

Today’s “forgetfulness” would seem related to my recent Safari 4.0.5 update. Unsubstantiated wild guess.

So, here’s what I do to correct this problem:

1. Shutdown Safari
2. Go to the /Library folder (the machine’s root /Library, not your 
user ~/Library)
3. Open the folder called “Internet Plugin-Ins” (I’m using 10.6.x)
4. Remove AdobePDFViewer.plugin
5. Restart Safari.

PDFs will now open directly in Safari using the native Preview application. This is ideal for most PDF uses. However, I find that if I am opening a PDF that has embedded fields and forms then it’s best to open with Acrobat Reader.

You may either continue to use Preview.app as your default PDF association and right-click to “Open with Acrobat Reader” — OR — you may “repair” your Reader installation by having Reader re-install the AdobePDFViewer.plugin that you just chucked out.

To do this:

1. Shutdown Safari.
2. Start Acrobat Reader.
3. From Acrobat Reader’s menu, choose “Help” and then pull down to “Repair Adobe Reader Installation”.
4. You’ll be prompted to enter your password and then AdobePDFViewr.plugin will be re-installed in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins. 
5. Restart Safari and your PDFs will now open using Acrobat Reader.

To switch back to Preview as the default, go back to the first set of instructions and delete ye olde plugin.

Shouldn’t this be automated within a Safari preference? Ahem.

Neat feature!

If you have a MobileMe account (http://www.me.com/) and turn on the feature in your iPhone’s MobileMe account preference, you can locate your phone in two ways:

1. Geophysically. The onboard GPS reports back where on the planet the phone is and displays a Google map of its proximity.
2. Sound. You can send a message to the phone from the MobileMe website that causes the phone to vibrate and play the Sonar pinging sound (a little too quiet if you ask me).

Here’s what the MobileMe interface looks like:

You can also send a signal to remotely wipe all the info on your iPhone.

The iPhone OS 3.0 update took

Before I began the update my 16GB iPhone had 3.82GB available space.
iTunes backed up my current iPhone (which I had already done manually so it was pretty quick).
iTunes contacted the iPhone activation server to be sure I had the real deal.

The activation server seemed stalled for almost 45 minutes. I gave up and told iTunes to quit via the Dock and that seemed to goose the thing into action. The  ”Contacting activation server…” modal window went away immediately, the phone rebooted and a new modal window “Waiting for iPhone” took its place.

Soon that was replaced with an “Updating iPhone software…” modal window with progress bar. The actual software update and verification took about six minutes from beginning until the phone rebooted.

Just downloaded the new 3.0 OS for the iPhone. For future reference, the file is kept here:

~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/Phone1,2_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw

On to the update!

I recently moved my user  (including my iTunes library) to a new MacBook Pro and now I get this error when synchronizing my iPod:

“Some of the Audible files in the iTunes library were not copied to the iPod <my iPod> because you are not authorized to play them on this computer.”

It’s a modal window that looks like this:

iTunes Audible Error modal window

There’s a lot of chatter out there as to what this might be. Here’s what I found:

1. This authorization is separate from the iTunes per computer authorization.

2. This authorization has no specific place to enter your authentication information except by clicking on the file that has failed. For whatever reason.

3. In iTunes, go to your Library and choose Audiobooks.

4. In my case, half the audiobooks there seem to work fine, the other half not so much. Oddly, these have all been purchased from Audible.com using the same account. I think some may have been downloaded via iTunes and some directly from www.audible.com. But I don’t really remember.

5. Since the error doesn’t tell me which books aren’t working (aren’t able to be synchronized) with my iPod, I looked in the iPod’s Audiobooks section and compared the books there vs the items in iTunes.

6. Clicking on one of the missing books prompted a new modal window that was simply an authentication dialog.

7. I entered my Audible username and password and now it’s all working fine.

*sigh*

Will I ever commit myself to implementing this fantastic product for The Crucible? It is so incredibly inspiring to see what nonprofits big and small are doing to improve their effectiveness by using great tools offered up for free or nearly free by large corporations that just seem to GET IT.

I feel that I should dedicate myself to ONE WEEK of intensive study and create a plan for improving The Crucible’s data management and quit waiting for someone over there to step up to the plate. I was at a presentation today where one woman, a graphic artist, has completely moved her tiny operation to Salesforce, supplemented by three other API apps and is now doing the work of entire teams of people because of the leveraged power of these tools.

Show, don’t tell.

Nice. The MacWorld IT conference has been pretty lame so far but, finally, here’s a useful topic and an excellent presentation.http://code.google.com/p/puppet-mw08/Hoping I can use this at The Crucible to improve the way we deploy software on all of our machines, especially on the few laptops. Primarily for improving configuration deployments and, I think, maintaining a backup that can be used to quickly repair/replace a bad machine.Looks like the time is coming for me to dip my toe into Ruby. Just learned that Ruby on Rails is part of the Xcode 3/Leopard deployment.

1. /Applications/Utilities/Directory Utility
2. Edit>Enable Root User
3. Log out of current user
4. Login window shows “Other…”
5. User: root, Password: <password>
6. Go to /Users/<username> and rename the home directory to the desired shortname.
7. System Preferences>Accounts
8. Choose account in left column and control+click the account. An option window will pop-up labeled “Advanced Options…”. Click on this.
9. A new drop down window will appear. You may type in the new desired Short Name. You must also rename the Home Directory path.
10. Click OK and log out from the root user.
11. Login with the new short name.
12. /Applications/Utilities/Directory Utility and Edit>Disable Root User

John Hanke demo’d the new Google Street View functionality of Google Maps. Streets have been driven with vehicles with panoramic HD cameras creating a seamless and zommable view of any location along a route. Routes with available imagery are indicated as blue lines and are exposed by clicking the new Street View tab in Google Maps.