With my hubby’s help I managed to figure out where the files had disappeared to and sort it out. I backed a lot of data up in the process before moving too much around, and so figured this was a good time to upgrade to Leopard, since a lot of the iPod Touch apps I was interested in (or their desktop counterparts) require Leopard for certain features. Basically, Leopard is required for more and more stuff, so… I took the plunge.

I’m happy to report that mostly everything is working well for me. …

My printer works, which is what had scared me off of the upgrade in the first place. I’d heard about so many people who did the upgrade and then couldn’t print. Well, plus that happened to both my daughter and spouse on their laptops when they did the Leopard upgrade a few months back.

There are some interface changes, though. Some things just don’t look or behave the same in a very nice way. I’m particularly annoyed with changes to iCal’s interface. Below is a feedback I sent to Apple, for whatever it may be worth (probably not much). I’m adjusting, I guess. I’ve been using the weekly view a lot more than I used to. Whatever.

Subject: Re: Leopard’s iCal “improvements”…
Feedback Type: Design/Ease of Use

I have been using Mac OS X since and I have used iCal extensively and loved it.

But I just upgraded to Leopard 10.5.4 this past Friday, and I am now finding it extremely painful to enter new events in iCal. Why in the world did the info drawer get removed? Now on the Month view, which I use almost exclusively, it is a PITA to enter new events. I used to just right-click and pick “New” and it would let me tab through all the entries on the info drawer and easily enter them. But no more. Now I have to command-E to get to an edit. Or if I right click and select “Get Info” I have to click a button to edit. 2 clicks to get to edit. It should just put me straight into edit mode in the first place in order to enter new events. As soon as I pick “New” I should be there. That means what used to take me one click now takes me a minimum of 2, or up to 3.

Also, when I do get to the edit screen, and tab through, when it gets to the date/time it skips on the first time entry to AM/PM and skips right over hours and minutes, and if I keep tabbing it skips down to the hours on the end time. What the heck? How am I supposed to edit the hours/minutes on the start time. Tabbing skips right over those. So now my fingers have to leave the keyboard and go to the mouse. I don’t want to have to pick up the mouse in the middle of entering keyboard data.

The week view doesn’t seem any better to me, or day view. I can’t see any way to start a new event in the middle of one that already exists, unless I turn off all my other calendars? But I want to see my other calendars, so I can see what’s going on. The fact that I’m working doesn’t mean my daughter can’t have Tae Kwan Do class during that time. How do I enter from the week calendar a new event that starts in the middle of my work day?

I’m very unhappy with these changes in iCal 3. PITA. You have made things more difficult for me and I don’t appreciate it. Hiding data isn’t helpful. Bleah.

I tried this in order to make a copy of a DVD from Jennifer’s teacher on the class’ “Famous American” presentations. For some reason it produced an image that only partially played. I didn’t put any time into figuring out the problem or how to correct it. Instead my hubby burned the DVD on a different computer because we just wanted to get it done.

Anyhow, here’s a link to the Slashdot page, and also the content of the article.

Create ISO CD/DVD image (.iso) with Mac OS X Tiger (10.4)

1. Insert CD/DVD source
2. Fire up a Terminal, you can then determine the device that is you CD/DVD drive using the following command:
$ drutil status
 Vendor   Product           Rev
 MATSHITA DVD-R   UJ-835E   GAND

           Type: DVD-ROM              Name: /dev/disk1
      Cur Write:    8x DVD          Sessions: 1
      Max Write:    8x DVD            Tracks: 1
   Overwritable:   00:00:00         blocks:        0 /   0.00MB /   0.00MiB
     Space Free:   00:00:00         blocks:        0 /   0.00MB /   0.00MiB
     Space Used:  364:08:27         blocks:  1638627 /   3.36GB /   3.13GiB
    Writability:
      Book Type: DVD-ROM
3. Umount the disk with the following command:
$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
Disk /dev/disk1 unmounted
4. Create the ISO file with the dd utility (may take some time):
$ dd if=/dev/disk1 of=file.iso bs=2048
5. Test the ISO image by mounting the new file (or open with Finder):
$ hdid file.iso
6. The ISO image can then be burnt to a blank CD/DVD.

But what if you don’t want to use a third party service like that with the accompanying advertising? Well tonight I learned how to make my own movie for my site…

It seems that the common recommendation nowadays is to use a flash video movie for your site instead of other formats.

There are free ways to do this, as opposed to buying commercial software for the task. The link above gives directions for Windows users. I have an iMac, so I used ffmpegX to encode a short QuickTime clip that I had into .FLV (Flash) format. Then I used the FlowPlayer player to play it on my website.

Additional information and resources:

• Video Blogging using Django and Flash(tm) Video (FLV)
• ‘Streaming’ flv video via PHP, take two

The code I enter into IDLE and the results back are as follows:

>>> import smtplib
>>> smtpserver = ‘mail.HennepinPublicHealth.org’
>>> AUTHREQUIRED = 1
>>> smtpuser = ‘TheUSERID’
>>> smtppass = ‘ThePassword
>>> RECIPIENTS = ['ulandreman@msn.com']
>>> SENDER = ‘urban.landreman@co.hennepin.mn.us’
>>> mssg = ‘This is a test message.’
>>> session = smtplib.SMTP(smtpserver)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “ “, line 1, in -toplevel-
session = smtplib.SMTP(smtpserver)
File “C:\Program Files\Python\lib\smtplib.py”, line 244, in __init__
(code, msg) = self.connect(host, port)
File “C:\Program Files\Python\lib\smtplib.py”, line 307, in connect
(code, msg) = self.getreply()
File “C:\Program Files\Python\lib\smtplib.py”, line 348, in getreply
line = self.file.readline()
File “C:\Program Files\Python\lib\socket.py”, line 340, in readline
data = self._sock.recv(self._rbufsize)
error: (10054, ‘Connection reset by peer’)
>>>

I’ve changed the User ID and password to some dummy ones for this posting, but I think the error comes from the
session = smtplib.SMTP(smtpserver) line.

Any ideas?

Urban Landreman