deKay’s Blog

In my previous post, you’ll see a screengrab of a PC88 emulator running on my Mac. hat you don’t see, is the 50 pixels or so of drop-shadow and transparency that Apple decided Leopard should add to window grabs not only as a default, but with no option to turn them off. Exactly why they thought everyone would need drop-shadows on every window they take a snapshot of, I don’t really know.

The type of grab I’m talking about is the one I use most often: press Shift-Cmd-4, then tap Space and click on the window you want a picture of. In Leopard (at least, Leopard on my iMac but strangely not on my MacBook), you get this:

It looks fancy and stuff, but makes the image so much wider and taller. For the picture in the last post, I cropped it out manually using Preview.

Thankfully, I’ve found three solutions. None are perfect, but at least I don’t have to do the cropping any more.

1) Use Grab. It’s installed in Applications somewhere, and offers much the same functionality as the normal hotkey-based grabber, but doesn’t add the shadow effect. It also doesn’t save the image to the desktop instantly, which is a slight faff.

2) Use this script here.  This means running a script before the grab, which takes away the simplicity of the hotkey option, but you could always add it to a menu or dock or hotkey or something.

3) Trigger screencapture from the terminal with the command “screencapture -io”. The i says “choose what to grab” and the o says “don’t do the shadow thing”.

Is “Golf Island” for the PC88. JUST LOOK AT IT.

I just got an email from some loyalty card points company telling me some offers they have and how many points I currently have.

“Your balance is 3128 points” it said.

The first thing I thought was, that’s odd - 3128 is the default port number for the squid proxy server.

It would appear so. Questionaut is a charming, brilliantly thought out game for Key Stage 2 kids. That’s 11 to 14 year olds, or thereabouts. There are eight stages, each consisting of a point and click puzzle section, followed by multiple choice educational questions on subjects like maths, chemistry and English.

Yes, it’s for kids to use to revise and stuff, but I felt compelled to play it to completion anyway. Hurrah for the BBC!

Questionaut

I’ve been having a play with the sleep options on my new iMac over the last few days. Since it’s replacing an always-on PC, I could keep this always-on too, but I thought I may as well make it sleep overnight and save the planet from global warming.

As an aside, I don’t believe in global warming. But anyway.

Things weren’t working right, as far as sleeping was concerned, and I asked about in uk.comp.sys.mac for some help. An interesting idea was proposed for making my Mac sleep all the time, except when I need to use it - even if that was remotely. So how do I make it wake up and sleep from another location?

Sleep

Since I can SSH into it from the outside world, I had a look to see what command will put the machine to sleep from an SSH session. Thanks to this page (in the comments), I found the answer to be the following command:

osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to sleep'

Easy!

Wake Up

Now, this is a bit more tricky. Of course, you can set the Energy Saver settings to “Wake for Ethernet network administrator access” - Wake On LAN, basically. Thing is, it’s behind a router on the other side of the internet, and my router isn’t fancy enough to support sending out Magic Packets.

Thankfully, uk.comp.sys.mac had an answer for this too, with this website. You just fill in your MAC address (that’s MAC not Mac!) router IP or full address, and what port you want to sent the Magic Packet on. Of course, you need to tell your router to forward that port to your Mac, but that’s simple enough. Click the button, and rise and shine!

All this was an interesting and enlightening diversion, but it doesn’t really solve my original problem of my iMac not going to sleep when it’s supposed to…

I came across an odd thing today. I have a database with a numeric field and a Yes/No field. If the Yes/No is Yes, a calculation is done on the numeric field (in a query), otherwise a different calculation is carried out.

Lets say the numeric field is “Hours” and the Yes/No is “Extra”, and the calculation is to multiply Hours by 0 (if Yes) or -1 (if No). This may not make sense here but does in the context of my database.

Anyway. Unlike Excel or VB or pretty much anything, Access uses an If statement called “Iif”. With two eyes. According to the Access Help, you use it like this:

=IIf([Confirmed] = “Yes”, “Order Confirmed”, “Order Not Confirmed”)

This suggests you match the word Yes from the Yes/No field, right? Wrong.

If I do this:

=IIf([Extra] = “Yes”, 0, -1)

Then both Yes and No match to give -1. After checking more documentation, and searching round the internets, virtually all examples seem to check against the words Yes or No. Which doesn’t work.

The solution (as I finally twigged) is to do this:

=IIf([Extra] = True, 0, -1)

Now why can’t the examples tell you this?

But having heard nasty horror stories, I’m tempted to send it right back again. And it cost FIVE POUNDS for postage, which took five days. Rubbish.

A while ago, I was debating whether or not to ditch Windows and move over to a Mac full time.  Well, here’s the outcome:

I’m still setting it up, but this new 24″ iMac will soon replace my now-ageing Athlon XP PC. Shiny!

You may have noticed that despite my console’s apparent death, I’m still playing games on it. This is because only a few games actually fail to work, with others playing just fine. One of the working games is Tomb Raider Anniversary.

At least, I thought it was. Until this morning, when I tried to play it. Turned on my 360, loaded the game (it was already in the drive), and started playing. Five minutes later, the game froze. In fact, the whole 360 froze as it wouldn’t respond to the guide button either. I turned it off, left it for a minute or so, then turned it back on.

Green bars. The whole screen was filled with vertical green bars.

I could still hear the start-up noise, and using the pad showed that the dashboard was working (I could hear it “swishing” left and right) - but the screen was completely green.

So I turned it off again, left it a while, and turned it back on. All was normal again, and was fine for the several hours more I used it, and again later in the day. More evidence my 360 is dying?

And other tales.

For the last couple of days, I’ve been struggling to get Server 2003 installed on a new Dell PowerEdge 2950 III server. I didn’t think £500 for the OS and Dell to install it was value for money, when I had some spare licences lying around. Unfortunately, wishing to save this money was a real headache.

First of all, OS-less Dell servers come with… nothing. No software at all (aside from some drivers). When you turn them on, they ask for the Dell Server Setup Disc, which they don’t come with. So I found an ISO of this on Dell’s website, downloaded and burnt it, only to find that when run, it wouldn’t recognise the RAID array in the server. Grr!

It turns out that v5.2 of this software (filename OM_5.2.0_ISM_A00.ISO) isn’t the right disc - it doesn’t support PERC 6 RAID devices. What you need is actually the “Dell Systems Build and Update Utility” v5.3 (filename OM_5.3.0_BUU_A00.ISO). So, with that, finally, I could set up the hard drive and get on with the Server 2003 install. Phew!

Except… I couldn’t. The “BUU” only supports Server 2003 Service Pack 2. Which I don’t have. I do, however, have a vanilla Server 2003 disc, and so began the search for how to slipstream SP2 into it. Many websites had conflicting information, some referring to disc 2 of Server 2003 when my copy is only one disc. Thankfully, I found this page:

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 Released — The NeoSmart Files

Following the instructions there to the letter (well, except for the typo at the bottom where it says “c:\xp”), I managed to get a working Server 2003 SP2 CD, which the Dell software recognised, used, and allowed me to get the server up and running.