Journaling Disks using Drive Genius 2 December 27, 2008
Posted by judismith in Macintosh OS X, Utilities.Tags: OS X, Utilities
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I snagged a copy of Drive Genius 2 in the recent MacUpdate Promo bundle. If you have never bought into one of the promos, I recommend that you check it out the next time it comes around. You get a lot of great software at a significant discount. Drive Genius alone was worth the price of admission.
Yesterday, in the December 26th, post Christmas sales, I purchased a new terabyte drive to house my burgeoning photo and media collection. While I had already used Drive Genius to “slim” my existing hard drives by eliminating duplicate files, unused localizations and older cache content, this would be my first use to initialize a hard drive.
One thing I noticed immediately was that the interface for initializing the hard drive was rather spare. It lacked all of the different initialization options that Apple’s Disk Utility provides. Normally this would be a good thing. However, I was curious about selecting whether or not the drive would be journalled – a process that Apple uses to track drive activity to use in case of a failure.
According to all of the documentation that I could find, including the Drive Genius user manual and most blogs “reviewing” the software, the check box to select journaling is under the “Repair” option. However, after searching through the Drive Genius interface, the Journaled option check box is located under the “Information” section in the details tab. This seems to me to be a more logical choice for placement. I hope they updated the user manual soon.
<RANT>As a side note, bloggers who purport to “review” a piece of software should actually look at all of the features that they are writing about and contribute something original instead of copying whole paragraphs out of the product’s user manuals.</RANT>
iCal, Exchange, GCal Sync Update December 21, 2008
Posted by judismith in Calendar, Google Apps, Macintosh OS X, iCal.Tags: Exchange, GCal, iCal, Sync
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Well, its that time of the year again when I revisit the state of iCal syncing. This time there is a lot of progress to report.
First up – who could miss the announcement that Google Calendar now officially supports CalDav – the same open calendar standard that iCal speaks. This means that your Google calendar can be right on your OS X desktop in iCal. Changes made in iCal sync to Google and vice versa in a matter of seconds.
On the Exchange front, as predicted in my last post on this topic, the release of Exchange 2007 with its use of more standardized web services has allowed at least one company to come out with a product that will sync your iCal with Exchange. Sync’Em is in version 1.15. According to their website, Sync’Em will sync more than just your appointments. It will also sync your contacts, tasks and notes. For those of you who still have to live in a place dominated by Microsoft technologies, this just may be your ticket. (Thanks to all who commented about Sync’Em).
Of course those same Exchange 2007 web services have enabled Apple to promise out of the box Exchange interoperability with Mail, Address Book and iCal. So you may not want to throw down the cash for those Sync’Em licenses until Snow Leopard debuts. If you just can’t wait until mid to late 2009 to access your Exchange data natively in iCal, Sync’Em looks to be your only choice at this point for iCal/Exchange syncing.
Mail.app – Using Advanced Search Logic in Smart Mailboxes December 21, 2008
Posted by judismith in Email, Mail.app.Tags: Email, Mail, Mail.app, OS X
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Today I was looking for a way to execute complex queries in Apple’s Mail to create a “smart mailbox”.
You may already know that Mail has some of the power of Spotlight’s search syntax. You can read about some of the details of searching in Mail at the excellent Hawkwings blog. Basically you create a query in the search box in Mail. Once you have your query getting the results you want, you click on the “Save” button to create a smart mailbox with that search. Its just like creating a saved search folder in the finder.
You can take your queries a step further and combine the power of Spotlight syntax with search items that are only available in Mail such as limiting the mailbox that the message is in. The magic is using Spotlight queries inside the smart mailbox dialog.
Let’s use a simple example. Say that I want to create a smart mailbox that has all the mail either from or to a particular person and is in the inbox. So the logic would look something like this: ((from:aperson OR to:aperson) AND in:inbox) With the standard functionality in smart mailboxes or in Mail’s search box, this query is not possible. But Mail can combine both the spotlight syntax and the smart mailbox filters to allow us to create complex queries that combine both.
To use the Spotlight search syntax, select “Entire Message” then “Contains”. In the box following, enter your Spotlight search query. In this example I used “from:mikel OR to:mikel” which would find all messages where mikel was either the sender or a recipient. Then I wanted to ensure that only messages from the Inbox were returned, not any of the other IMAP folders. So I used a Mail only feature to limit the search to the Inbox and set the search to match ALL conditions.
So what happens is that first the Spotlight query is run, returning all messages from or to mikel. Then those messages are filtered leaving only those that are in the Inbox. Pretty cool.
We’ve Changed Our Name! July 20, 2008
Posted by judismith in Uncategorized.add a comment
You may have noticed that we’ve changed our name from “Bitstream” to “Unofficial Technology”. This is to better coordinate with our branded consulting efforts for non-profits and small businesses. We recognize that smaller organizations have unique challenges and we specialize Google and Macintosh – the simplest, best and most cost effective technologies to meet those unique needs.
In this blog, we will continue to focus on collaboration and interoperability issues as well as Mac and Google technologies. We will be broadening our scope to include content that is specific to how non-profits and small businesses can best use those technologies to cost effectively increase their reach.
Use Google and Exchange Calendars in the Same Domain July 20, 2008
Posted by judismith in Calendar, Exchange, Google Apps, Interoperability.Tags: Calendar, Exchange, Google Apps, Sync
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I can hear you asking already, “Why would you want to do that?”
Well, the problem is if you use shared calendaring and you want to migrate your organization off of Exchange on to Google Apps, everyone has to get moved over to Google Apps at the same time, and in one weekend. Not too bad if we’re talking about 10 people. If we’re talking about 600 people or thousands of people, that’s another story. If you have a fairly large organization like mine – that’s not going to happen. Well, while maybe technically it could happen… there’s that whole human side of the equation. You have to roll out training. And then there’s fear of the unknown. You have to help people see that they can do the same things they used to do, just better and faster. Of course we all know that Google rocks, but as far as everyone else is concerned, we’re just the geeks and our opinion on matters such as these is not to be trusted. So we have to find a way to get some internal champions who aren’t techies. Unless you want to create a riot and send productivity into the toilet for the next couple of weeks or months (not recommended if you want to keep working), you have to do the migration gradually. That means at least for a while you’ll have users on both systems.
Generally, everything works fine across two different systems – email, tasks, instant messaging, and so on, even with Microsoft® involved. The folks in Redmond have give the occasional nod to adhering to some standards. Even sending appointments between the two systems generally works – if only because Google took the effort to make it work. But shared calendaring – seeing the free/busy information, now that’s the issue. If you are on Exchange and I’m on Google Calendar, you can’t see my schedule and I can’t see yours. If we’re in the same organization, we’ve just moved back to the dark ages. I’m calling you to see if your schedule works with mine to get a meeting – OK, well maybe we’d be using IM, so we’re not quite back to the dark ages. This folks, is a show stopper.
Enter Google Calendar Connectors! If you have a premiere Google Apps account (or an Educational/Non-profit account) and at least Exchange 2003, you’re in luck. Over at Google Code, you’ll find the Google Calendar Connectors project. You’ll also need a Windows 2003 server with .NET 2.0 to run the Connectors.
From the Google Code Project website:
This open source project is a developer and partner release and is not targeted for direct customer or end-user installation. The Google Calendar Connectors represent a set of tools and should not be considered native functionality of Google Apps Premier Edition.
* Google Calendar Connector Web Service: This connector allows users in Google Calendar to see free/busy information for users who maintain their calendars in Exchange. It is a .NET web service that takes requests sent from the browser with Google Calendar and returns free/busy obtained from a Microsoft Exchange 2003 server.
* Google Calendar Connector Sync Service: This connector allows users of Microsoft Exchange to see free/busy information for users who maintain their calendars in Google Calendar. It is a Windows Service that periodically queries the Google Calendar GData API to get updated free/busy information and publishes this information as free/busy information in Exchange.
* Google Calendar Connector Plug-in: This connector allows users of Microsoft Exchange to see free/busy information for users who maintain their calendars in Google Calendar. This product is an Exchange plug-in that adapts Exchange requests for Calendar free/busy information into a request to the Google Calendar GData API. This has the advantage over the Sync Service of not needing to poll Google Calendar and the free/busy information is more current. However, installation requires modifications to the Exchange server environment, which some customers are not comfortable with.
We have the Connectors up and running in our organization. It took a little work to get them going, but once up, we are happily co-existing on two systems.
Now, with Google, I can potentially share my free/busy information with the world. If a vendor wants to schedule an appointment, they can just check my Google calendar. Of course, if your calendar is like mine, good luck with finding the “free” part of that free/busy information.
One other thing I forgot to mention, there is a little foo that needs to happen in order to have Exchange happily share a domain. For those users who you migrate to Google Apps, you need to set up Exchange so that it will forward their emails to another server when it see that they don’t have an email address in AD. Normally, if someone in the organization sends an email to someone else in the domain, Exchange assumes that Active Directory is the only place to look for the email address. If the email address doesn’t exist in AD, Exchange normally assumes it doesn’t exist anywhere and send the appropriate error message. A little work has to be done to teach Exchange how to share nicely.
With that hurdle overcome, I’m back to thinking about what we’d be missing if we moved off of Exchange and whether we really can use Google Apps as an Exchange/Sharepoint/Blackberry Server replacement. See my initial thoughts on that in may post on Google Apps as a Viable Replacement for Exchange.
Microsoft’s death grip on the desktop just got a lot weaker.
Resolve GMail Undefined Issue July 19, 2008
Posted by judismith in Firefox, Gmail.Tags: Better GMail 2, Firefox, Gmail, GMail Conversation Preview, GreaseMonkey
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Resolve GMail Undefined Issue – Firefox
I’m fickle about browsers. Safari has some very nice features such as the ability to resize text boxes in forms. It also syncs bookmarks to my .Mac Mobile Me account to my other Macs and my iPhone. On the other hand there is much to love about Firefox 3. The biggest thing I like is the ability to have multiple home pages that open when I launch the browser. I know in Safari all I need to do is Command-click the bookmarks folder that contains all of my preferred pages. Still, if I can, I prefer to skip that step. I also like Firefox’s ability to use GreaseMonkey scripts to tweak certain webpages.
GMail Undefined Items
Because of the different features I will switch between browsers, using each one until I get frustrated with the its limitations.
Recently, I’ve been using Firefox and I noticed that my GMail messages would show “undefinedX” where the To: and the From: address as well as a number of other items are supposed to be displayed. I quickly checked in Safari to see if it was a browser specific issue. Sure enough, when I view the messages in Safari, all the information is where it is supposed to be.
Firefox Add Ons
In Firefox, I use a number of add ons to enhance my GMail experience. I use Better GMail 2 by Gina Trapani of LifeHacker.com fame, to make a number of tweaks to GMail. The Redesigned in Better GMail 2 skin is very eye pleasing and almost fools me into thinking that I am using a desktop client. I also use the GreaseMonkey to enable a variety of additional JavaScript tweaks in Firefox. One of these was the ability to preview conversations in GMail by right clicking on the message.
GMail Conversation Preview Script
One of the GreaseMonkey scripts that I use is the GMail Conversation Preview. I have to say that the one thing I really miss in GMail is the ability to see the message in a message pane without having to essentially open up the message. GMail Conversation Preview was a bit of a work-around for this.
A bit of searching on the web revealed this conversation over at Digg where user Kenley pointed out that the issue is caused by the GMail Conversation Preview GreaseMonkey script. By disabling GMail Conversation Preview all the information items return to normal.
To disable a GreaseMonkey Script in Firefox for Mac simply go to the menu bar and click on Tools -> GreaseMonkey -> Manage User Scripts… When the window opens, highlight the GMail Conversation Preview script and uncheck the “Enabled” button that is in the lower left corner of the Manage User Scripts window. Close the window. To see the results, use the refresh button in Firefox to refresh GMail and see the changes.
Hear from the Readers – How Do You Do Mac Calendaring May 9, 2008
Posted by judismith in Exchange, Interoperability, Macintosh OS X.Tags: Calendar, Entourage, Exchange, iCal, Mac
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With the recent non-event of the release of Entourage 2008, we haven’t seen much of an improvement in the Mac calendar landscape. Apple has released the iCal Server as part of Leopard Server. But Outlook doesn’t work with the iCalendar standard.
So I’d like to hear from all of you Mac users that work in a mixed environment. How do you deal with calendaring?
Exchange Support Coming to the iPhone? December 21, 2007
Posted by judismith in Exchange, Interoperability, iPhone.Tags: Exchange, iPhone
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User cash7c3 over on modmyifone noticed this very interesting job posting on Apple’s website:
| Requisition Number | 3161520 |
| Job title | iPhone Windows Outlook/Exchange QA Eng |
| Location | Santa Clara Valley |
| Country | United States |
| City | Cupertino |
| State/Province | California |
| Job type | Full Time |
| Job description | The iPhone Quality team is looking for a motivated, highly-technical Exchange test/sync engineer with excellent problem solving and communication skills. You will join a dynamic team responsible for qualifying the latest iPhone products. Your focus will be testing Exchange and Outlook functionality with Apple’s innovative new phone. The successful candidate will complete both documented and adhoc testing to ensure high quality releases.Required Experience: * BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience * Firm knowledge of Exchange 2003/2007 including configuration and troubleshooting * Ability to investigate and debug difficult problems on Windows * Creative thinker and problem solver * A passion for user-focused design & high quality technology * Comfortable and adaptable in a fast-paced and informal environment * Thorough knowledge of the Windows operating systems Preferred Experience: |
Information Organizers for the Mac November 20, 2007
Posted by judismith in Macintosh OS X, Productivity Tools.add a comment
In my job I have to do a lot of research and I usually have multiple simultaneous projects. What this means is that when I come across information that I need, I have to store it in a way that I can reliably find it later. Storing is not the hard part, finding it later is.
If you are like me and tend to gather gigabytes worth of information on almost a daily basis, you know the struggle of keeping it all organized. There are numerous information organizers that take different approaches to keeping your bits of information organized. I have tried a number of them: DEVONthink Pro, Circus Ponies’ Notebook, Bare Bones Software’s Yojimbo, Chronos’ SOHO Notes, and Journler.
For me the key feature of an organizer is that I need it to be present without being intrusive. Syncing ranks fairly high on the needed features since I work across multiple Macs. Finally, it must be easy to gather, categorize, search and retrieve information. I don’t ask for much.
DEVONthink Pro, for me is the least intuitive for collecting information. It does have great integration with the OS and has scripts everywhere you look. There are lots of really nice features like updating the content in your database from the file system or the web. It also has quite a number of ways to view your information, search, index and so on. If you are a professional researcher, this is the tool to get. However, there is no sync and it is the most expensive of the lot.
Notebook, by Circus Ponies, takes a page approach to storing information, just like a spiral bound notebook. This is a great little app and one that I used for about two years. I really liked the way it handles media of all sorts. One of my requirements is to know the page where I clipped a particular bit of information. Notebook captures those URLs. In the end, I found the page metaphor too limiting.
Yojimbo is a sleek, pretty, and very functional application. I love the little Drop Dock panel that sits at the side of your monitor. There is good OS integration with scripting support and a Quicksilver plugin – yes for me Quicksilver is a necessary part of the Mac OS. Best of all Yojimbo uses .Mac syncing. The bad news is that in Yojimbo you cannot have nested folders. They say that this is due to their strategy of using tags. That would be find, except the ability to add tags at the point of information capture, such as dragging to the drop dock or capturing information with the Quicksilver plugin, is missing.
SOHO Notes has all of the great features of Yojimbo, but in fact too many great features. SOHO notes just adds way too many things that I don’t think I would ever use. This makes the application cluttered. On the good side, information capture is easy at every point. There is the ability to have nested folders, to sync with .Mac and they also have a drop dock implementation. They go one better than Yojimbo in that their drop dock works even when SOHO Notes is not running.
Finally there is Journler. Journler takes aunique approach. It is more of a writing application that also allows me to store reference material. Journler makes it easy to acquire and interact with my reference material. In fact it assumes I am going to write something about items I enter so it creates a blank journal entry that the reference item is attached to. You can have multiple reference items per entry. It couldhave much better OS integration. While it does have good scripting support, at the moment there are a dearth of scripts. I like the iLife integration – as someone quipped, “Journler is like iLife for your writing”. Journler also has a great price and licensing strategy – if you are making money with it pay for it, otherwise its free to use. The biggest drawback for Journler is that it does not sync.
Overall, Journler tends to fit the way I need to research and write at the moment. If I have to get more serious about this researching and writing thing, I’ll probably look at DEVONthink Pro and just do all of my research work on my laptop.
“Sync” Journler across Macs with Automator November 20, 2007
Posted by judismith in Automator, Productivity Tools.1 comment so far
A possible way to perform something similar to a sync using iDisk or some other storage is to create two Automator actions.
1) Quit Journler Automator Application This workflow has three actions
a) Quit Application – Journler
b) Get Selected Finder Items – select your Journler folder
c) Copy Finder Items – in the to box, select the place on your iDisk or USB stick where you would like to store your Journler folder. Make sure you select “Replace existing files”
Save this as an application. Drop it in the ~/Library/Scripts/Journler folder.
2) Launch Journler Automator Application This workflow has three actions
a) Get Selected Finder Items – Select the Journler folder on your iDisk or USB stick.
b) Copy Finder Items – in the to box, select the containing folder of your original Journler folder (you are overwriting the whole Journler folder).
c) Launch Application – Journler, Save this as an application and put it in your Dock in place of the original Journler Icon.
How this works: When you are quitting Journler and you want to send your files to the sync location (iDisk or USB Stick) instead of Cmd-Q or Journler -> Quit, you select the Scripts menu and then the Quit Journler application that you just created. This application copies the whole Journler file to your sync location.
Then when you Launch Journler, you use the newly created application that first copies the the updated Journler folder from your sync location to your default location. Then it launches Journler and you have all of your updated files.
For me its a little easier than having to remember to drag over the folder. I also dress up my Launch Journler action with the Journler icon so it looks nice in the Dock.
