Baron’s Blog

I made it and it shall be known as Frogasurus.

Make your own via the creature creator from http://www.spore.com

You’ll need a pretty hefty graphics card and cpu to have fun with the trial app.

I’m not sure what’s up with Apple’s browser Safari. I visited the iPhone Dev Center to learn a few tricks so I could create a couple of little iPhone apps but the dumb page won’t display in Safari. I’m using the latest version on Leopard and it won’t work. But Mozilla’s Firefox works just fine as you can see that it renders the page perfectly. What’s the problem Apple?

The front window above is Apple’s site on Firefox. The back window is a blank white page on Apple’s Safari web browser.

Pretty fun game. Click on the image above to play.

Hints:
* Click and drag on the cat to draw back the bow
* You can shoot arrows while in the air

My crappy score was +8

Very weird email problem today. I have this repeating email error message that I can’t delete. Or to be more precise, I can select it and throw it in the trash and even delete it from the trash but it automatically repopulates in my In Box. I deleted the offending email off the POP-Server but I don’t think it’s a server issue, it’s a weird Apple Mail issue as I’m not getting the repeat message on any other mail client.

A pain in the okole.

*UPDATE* Problem fixed (if not solved). Complicated instructions below for future reference should this problem happen again. Warning! GeekSpeak Below.

It looks like manually getting rid of the offending *.emlx files and re-creating the index will be necessary here. Assuming this is a POP account, proceed as follows:

1. Select the offending messages in Mail.

2. Copy the following script, open /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor, paste the script there, and click Run:

set theFileList to {}
tell application “Mail”
set theSelection to the selection
repeat with aMessage in theSelection
set aFileName to (id of aMessage as string) & “.emlx”
copy aFileName to the end of theFileList
end repeat
end tell
get theFileList

A list of the *.emlx files associated with the offending messages should appear in the script’s Result pane (and in Script Editor’s Window > Result History).

If the troublesome messages appear in more than one mailbox, repeat the steps above for each mailbox and take note of the results.

3. Quit Mail.

4. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/. Make a backup copy of this folder, just in case something goes wrong, e.g. by dragging it to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down. This is where all your mail is stored.

5. In the Finder, go to the ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/ account folder.

6. Move Deleted Messages.mbox to the Trash if there is nothing to be preserved there.

7. For each mailbox affected by the problem, locate the offending *.emlx files within its Messages folder and move them out of there, e.g. to the Desktop. You can open the *.emlx files with a text editor to view their contents and check that they do indeed correspond to the offending messages before getting rid of them.

8. Go back to ~/Library/Mail/, locate Envelope Index and move it to the Trash. If you see an Envelope Index-journal file there, delete it as well.

9. Open Mail. It will tell you that your mail needs to be “imported”. Click Continue and Mail will proceed to re-create Envelope Index — Mail says it’s “importing”, but it just re-creates the index if the mailboxes are already in Mail 2.x format.

Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder.

From the Apple Discussion forums.

You know your life is going to suck for the next few hours when you insert your 4GB CF memory card into a reader and this shows up on the screen. Clicking on the card proceeded to freeze the laptop, subsequent attempts at mounting the card normally via USB reader (two different readers) and a PC Card adapter was futile.

I was out on location and happen to also have my own laptop with me so I ran Photo Rescue (which I highly recommend owning if you’re a photographer to analyze the card and recover the images from the un-readable card.

Laptop buckled-in, Photo Rescue running to recover images as I went back out to the location to shoot new images just in case the recovery attempt failed.

Shot my new images and inserted the wireless card for Verizon Wireless National Access and the laptop doesn’t recognize the card at all. I transmit one image via cellphone while rebooting the laptop, get the card to work then move two more images.

So things weren’t totally FUBAR, Photo Rescue ended up recovering all the images (about halfway back on the drive to the office). Photojournalism is often about problem solving and sometimes the problems you need to solve have nothing to do with taking photos.

NeoOffice is a free and nice alternative to Microsoft Office and unlike OpenOffice it doesn’t need X11 to run. It runs natively in Mac OSX by using Java.

So if you’re in need of an office suite for you Mac OSX machine and have more important things to do with your money (rent, food, childcare, beer) then head over to NeoOffice and download a copy. Just set your preferences to save all files as Microsoft Office format files and you’ll be able to share your documents with all those people that actually added to Bill Gates’ wealth.

If you’re using Windows then just use OpenOffice since that will run natively in XP.

And for those who rather use an online app there’s still ThinkFree Office and the free suite offered for Gmail users in their accounts.

Okay, Google has a search engine, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Earth, etc.

But if you delve into Google Labs you’ll find that they now have spreadsheets , a word processor, a webpage design application, the list goes on and on.

I would think that if I were someone like Microsoft, I wouldn’t be happy. There are now plenty of alternatives to Microsoft Office and this is just another blow to that piece of bloatware. I used to own Microsoft Office, I always hated it so I sold it and I’ve never looked back.

*UPDATE* The latest word is that Google is thinking about buying YouTube. Any big company would have to be crazy to buy this money-pit. They provide tons of server space, tons of bandwidth and tons of videos that break copyright laws. Nobody is really suing for copyright violation yet since YouTube isn’t making any money, but if moneybag Google takes over the copyright attorneys will have a field day going for their deep pockets.