Maria’s Guides

Information from Software Update.

This update is recommended for all users and improves the security of QuickTime 7.1.6.

For more information on security updates, visit: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798

Information from Software Update.

Security Update 2007-005 is recommended for all users and improves the security of the following components:

• bind
• CarbonCore
• CoreGraphics
• crontabs
• fetchmail
• file
• iChat
• mDNSResponder
• PPP
• ruby
• screen
• texinfo
• VPN

Security Update 2007-004 has been incorporated into this security update.

For detailed information on this update, please visit http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798.

[composed in a hotel room while on the road with ecto]

Help Google index your WordPress site by setting up a sitemap.

My most recent article for Informit.com is now online: “Add A Google-Compatible Sitemap For Your WordPress Blog.” The article explains the steps you need to follow to set up a WordPress plugin that will automatically generate and update a Google-compatible sitemap. This can help Google index your site and improve your Google rankings.

[composed in a hotel room while on the road with ecto]

Oh. Gee. Thanks.

I got an e-mail message from my editor, Cliff, today. He wanted me to send him a Word 2007 file to test a converter on his Mac.

I don’t use Word 2007 regularly. That’s a Windows program. I’m primarily a Mac user. I still use Word 2004 on my Mac. But I do have Office 2007 installed on my Windows PC, which is running Vista. I needed it to write about Excel 2007 for Windows. Of course, Word is part of the Office 2007 package, so I had that, too. I guess no one else at Peachpit does. But that doesn’t surprise me, because Peachpit is a publisher and uses mostly Macs.

I fired up my PC, started Word, and created a short document with some formatted text. I saved it to my Public folder, which I then opened from my Mac. I called Cliff into iChat, I pasted the document’s icon into iChat, and sent it to Cliff.

The whole time I was wondering why I didn’t know that Word 2007 for Windows files couldn’t be opened from Word 2004 for Macintosh. Could it be because my Word for Windows books were not revised for Word 2007? (Too many other Word books out there.)

The Converter

Cliff sent me a link for more information about the converter. I followed it to an entry on the Mac Mojo blog, “Mac Mojo : Get converted“:

…We are developing the product [Office] for versions beyond 2008 with broad investment in native Mac OS X architecture as well as adoption of a new, next generation document format: Office Open XML.

We’ve made great progress, and as previously promised we’re releasing some of this new functionality in a form that you can start using right away: Beta release #1 of the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is now available for download.

So the converter is just a beta.

I followed the link and found myself on the Microsoft Macintosh Downloads page. A link marked Office File Format Converter Beta (Word) brought me to a page with details about the converter. The information around the Download link told me that the file was 24.9 MB in size and that it would take 2 hours and 10 minutes to download with a 56K modem. Since I only have a 512K connection to the Internet (remember, I live on the edge of nowhere), I started that download right away.

The resulting file is a disk image that, when opened, displays an installer. When I got the installer going, I was quick to notice that it was installing over 8,000 files on my hard disk. Can I repeat that? Eight thousand files.

What ever happened to plugin-like converters that hid as single files in a specific folder where you could find and delete them when you had to?

The application, which is only 3.9 MB in size, is installed in the Applications folder. I double-clicked it, saw a little information screen that told me what it did, and was presented with the Office Converter window. I dragged the Word 2007 file I’d created for Cliff into the window, and waited. About 3 seconds later, I was told that the conversion was successful. (The test file had 18 words in it and two kinds of formatting were applied to some of them.)

The test file was not converted to a Word 2004 format file. That might make too much sense. Instead, it was converted to an RTF file. When I opened it, I found all formatting intact. There was also a blank area for a header and footer, which I didn’t even know RTF supported. Here’s what it looks like in TextEdit.

Why the Wait?

If you can read the sarcasm in this post — I really have tried to tone it down — it’s because I don’t understand why Microsoft had to change Word’s file format in the first place. I also can’t understand why they waited nearly five months from Office 2007’s initial release to come up with a converter for Mac users and the rest of the world. Remember, Word for Mac users aren’t the only ones who can’t read the new Word 2007 format; none of the existing Word converters for Mac and Windows work for Word 2007 files.

Perhaps Microsoft believes that its user base should take the extra effort to save files in previous Word formats when they need to share with non 2007 users. If so, Microsoft needs to understand that the average user doesn’t know the first thing about the type options available in the Save As dialog — no matter how many authors write about it. They save it in the default format and they’re done. What’s worse is that if they open a document created in an older format and attempt to save it with a different name, Word defaults to the new format, then displays a dialog that could easily confuse many users.

In case you can’t read that (I had to reduce its size to fit it in the text column here), it says:

You are about to save your document to one of the new file formats. This action will allow you to use all the new features in Word 2007, but may cause changes in the layout of the document.

Click OK to continue, or click Cancel and select the “Maintain compatibility with Word 97-2003″ checkbox to preserve the layout of your document.

So you do click OK and possibly have changes in the document’s layout? Or do you miss out on the new features? And what about Word 2004 for Macintosh?

Word 2004 isn’t even mentioned here. But if you use the Word 97-2003 format, Word 2004 on a Mac can open the file. (Why didn’t they just call it Word 97-2004 format?)

More Testing Needed

Obviously an 18-word file is not much of a test. But I don’t have any very complex files created with Word 2007 to run through the converter. If I do get some time to create and test a complex Word 2007 file with the converter, you can read about it here.

My first Final Cut Express video project.

After spending three days going through a tutorial to learn Final Cut Express HD, I was ready to create my first video project. I’m sharing it with blog readers so you can see how much effort a person can expend on 25 seconds of video.

About the Project

This particular project features a Gila Monster (pronounced “heela monster”), which is a rather large lizard that can be found in the Arizona desert. If I’m lucky, I see one or two of these in a year, so they’re not exactly common. They are, like so many things in the desert, poisonous, so you don’t want to get too close. But since they’re not exactly fast and they’re definitely not aggressive, you can get photos of them in action if you have equipment with you.

On a backroad trip with Mike and some friends, we happened to come upon one croassing the road. I had my video camera with me and whipped it out to capture some pretty decent footage. This Final Cut Express project cuts out the boring shaky bits, replaces our silly comments with music, and adds opening and closing titles. This is the first in a series of short videos I hope to add to wickenburg-az.com, so make the site more interesting to visitors.

But this is also an experiment to check out video formats and Final Cut Express’s export feature. I had great success when exporting to QuickTime movie format, for iPod, and for Apple TV. But the Windows Media Player export didn’t work right at all and the AVI format was extremely poor quality, despite the file size, so I’m not going to distribute them. I just spent another few minutes using the iPod version of the file to create an e-mail version using QuickTime’s Share command. That worked best of all for the Web view of the file. Only 3.3 MB (which is smaller than the iPod version, and it looks pretty good.

Getting it Online

XHTML purists will tell you that the EMBED tag is a no-no in Web development. I think it has something to do with Internet Explorer which, for some reason, can’t interpret XHTML and CSS like the rest of the Web browsers on this planet.

So this project is also an experiment to see if the QuickTime Embed plugin for WordPress will work. If you’re reading this article shortly after I put it online and there’s no QuickTime movie below (or if the whole site is messed up), it’s because I’m trying this out and debugging. (Check in again in about 30 minutes.)

That said, here’s the movie with a Poster movie. I think I’l leave the iPod file for wickenburg-az.com distribution.

I track down an iSight problem to Firewire.

When I got into a regular back up routine, backing up my hard disk to an external hard drive, I immediately began having problems with my WebCam. My WebCam uses a standalone (i.e., not built-in) iSight camera and EvoCam software. The problem usually manifest itself by creating a “split screen” image like the one you see here.

The only way I could correct this problem was to disconnect the camera, quit EvoCam, relaunch EvoCam, and reconnect the camera. That usually cleared up the problem for the day, but sometimes it would come back.

My Setup

Part of the problem is likely my setup. Here’s the important stuff:

• I have a Dual 1.8 GHz G5, which I believe is about 3 years old now.
• The computer has 2 Firewire 800 ports: one in the front and one in back.
• The iSight is a Firewire 400 device.
• The backup drive (at first) was a FireLight Firewire 400 portable disk with no power supply. Later, I bought a Seagate Firewire drive with an AC adapter for power.
• I was connecting the iSight to the second Firewire port on the hard disk (I tried both), the Firewire port on the front of the computer, and a Firewire hub (which was powered).

For the longest time, I thought the problem was related to power. That’s why I tried the powered hub. When the problem didn’t go away, I was stumped.

And then I had a logic board failure.

I can tell you what a logic board for a dual processor G5 costs, because I paid for one. It’s about $650 plus installation. The computer was only a year and a half old, but I didn’t have the AppleCare protection plan (which I now buy with every Apple computer I purchase). It was too new to replace with a new computer — I like to hang onto my desktop machines for at least 3 years — so I replaced the board.

I figured that the bad board was causing the Firewire problem. But when I got the computer back, I got caught up in other things that kept me too busy to mess around with a Webcam. I set up another Webcam on my server (which was in my office at the time) and let it go at that.

The Problem Returns

Time passed. I moved my office back into my house (and now wonder why I ever moved it out). The server computer went to KBSZ to handle automated podcast recording and database hosting tasks there. They have a studio Webcam but that poor eMac’s RAM is so stretched with the tasks it already does, that I couldn’t see setting up a second outdoor view Webcam on it. So the View Out My Window (also known as SaguaroCam, because of the tall cactus in it) was gone.

This week, I tried again. I had it working for about 24 hours, then the same problem returned.

Now I was concerned. Perhaps the logic board problem hadn’t caused the iSight problem. Perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps continued fiddling around with this would cause another logic board failure. I certainly didn’t want that.

But it was bugging me that I couldn’t resolve the problem. So I decided to troubleshoot it.

Troubleshooting the Problem

Troubleshooting is a logical process. You need to isolate various parts of the problem, analyze the results, and repeat the process until you figure out what the problem is.

(I used to teach a troubleshooting course for Mac users. Over the course of two days, every time my class left the room, I’d screw up their computers. When they came back, we’d troubleshoot to find the problem. It was a lot of fun and had me flying all over the country, staying in crappy hotels and meeting great people. Ah, the days.)

My first task was to see if there was any help online for the problem. But I came up blank both on Apple’s support Web site and with a Google search. Either I wasn’t putting in the right search phrase (highly likely) or I was the only person in the world with the problem (possible but not very likely).

I suspected the problem had to do with Firewire. So I performed the following tasks, checking to see if the problem returned after each step:

1. Replace the cables. I’m fortunate enough to have spare Firewire cables. (In fact, I think I have enough cables to start my own cable supply outfit. How does that happen?) The problem continued.
2. Replace the iSight camera. Believe it or not, I have a spare one of those, too. Still had the problem.
3. Try plugging the hard disk into the front Firewire port and the iSight into the back one. This made a mess of the cables, and I still had the problem.
4. Plug the hard disk in with USB and plug the iSight directly into the computer. Ah! Everything worked!

I was fortunate that the Seagate external hard disk had a USB 2.0 port. After fiddling around to find the right USB cable (I have ton of those, too), I got it plugged into my powered USB hub. The result: everything works as it should.

Conclusions

The conclusion I’ve drawn from all this is that my computer, for whatever reason, simply does not like running an iSight — either one of mine! — with any other Firewire device connected, no matter how it’s connected. My solution — which I believe is a compromise — is to use USB, which is slower than Firewire, for the hard disk. Since the disk is used for backup and the backup occurs just once a day at about 5:15 AM, that isn’t a huge hardship.

But what may be a hardship is importing video from my digital video camera. I plan to do more work with video in the upcoming months, and I wonder whether I’ll have to disconnect my iSight camera each time I want to bring some video into my computer.

I’m scheduled to get a new production computer in October, when Leopard comes out. I just hope that computer’s Firewire bus doesn’t hate my standalone iSight camera as much as this one apparently does.