deKay’s Blog

Horror of horrors this morning: the wireless on my MacBook disappeared. It didn’t get physically removed, it just… vanished.

The icon I have on the menu bar just kept saying “No Airport Card installed”. I thought two things: either it’s physically fried, or my daughter’s “tinterneting” (that is, banging the keyboard) has made it pop loose. Both would require a dismantle, and it isn’t a job for the impatient.

Thankfully, there was another, less intrusive, thing to try first – zapping the PRAM.

Turn off the MacBook, then turn it back on and hold Command-Option-P-R. Keep them held down until you get three startup chimes, then let go.

As if by magic, the card “reappeared” and all is well with the world once more!

We all know that when you want to do conditional formatting in Office, you use Excel. Right? Or maybe Access. But what if you want to merge some data from Excel into Word, then conditionally format some of the fields? Word doesn’t do conditional formatting!

Except, of course, it can.

For this I’m going to assume you have some data in Excel. Two columns headed “Data Number” and “Letter”. The Data Number is just 1 to 10, and the Letter is a, b or c.

Now in Word, I want to merge this data in. Only I want the letter to appear formatted with a red background (if it’s the letter a) and a green background (if it’s not). We create a new Word document, and set it up as a Mail Merge letter. Point Word at the Excel file as the data.

You can insert the fields as normal with the button on the toolbar, and get this:

But how to do the formatting? You need to manually enter the field and make some changes to it. To enter a field yourself, press CTRL-F9 and you’ll get a pair of braces { }. These aren’t normal ones, as you can tell by their formatting. Inside these, you’ll need an “if” command. The format for “if” in Word is:

{ if [CONDITION] [DO THIS IF TRUE] [DO THIS IF FALSE] }

so we can do the following:

Which will show the Letter field if Letter = “a”, and the Letter field if Letter != “a”. Which doesn’t do anything we couldn’t do already. However – you can format individual bits of that command, like this:

Can you guess what this does? Try it and see! Of course, you can also change the fonts and weights for the true and false. I’ve attached a file with the data and template I’ve used. Click here to get it!

I’ve created a helpsheet for everyone who has ever wanted to create digital dress-up dolls! This shows how to import images to use as fills for clothing, so you can scan in some material and use if as a dress or something!

(Download the PDF here: Creating Dress-Up Mannequins)

I realise this may seem like a bit of a random thing for me to produce, but it was something I was asked to do for work. So that’s my excuse. And nothing to do with my desire to dress up dolls. Er, or something.

I tried to format a Buffalo 1TB external hard drive on my Mac today, to HFS+ (journalled). But it failed, over and over again with the error “Volume Erase Failed with the error: The underlying task reported failure on exit”.

It was a brand new drive, already formatted as FAT, so I assumed it was faulty. Turns out, however, there’s a simple reason for it not working: you can’t format HFS+ partitions on certain external hard drives if the boot sector is set to Windows-style “Master Boot Record”. In Disk Utility, when you choose your partition setup, there’s an options button – under which there’s a setting for boot sector. If you choose GUID or Apple Partition Map, you can format without any problems!

I had an unusual query this week. A member of staff wanted to create a line graph that showed the chart position of a song over a number of weeks.¬¨‚Ć It’s an easy thing to do – two columns in the spreadsheet, one for “Week” and one for “Position”.

Problem is, in a chart, the low numbers are at the top and the high numbers are at the bottom, so the graph comes out upside-down. You can’t just make the chart position numbers negative either, as the x-axis would then be on the top of the graph.

Thankfully, there’s still an option: right click the y-axis on the graph and choose “Format Axis”. Tick the boxes for “Values in reverse order” and “Maximum axis value”. While you’re here, you might want to change the Minimum value to 1 from 0, as there’s no 0 position in your average pop charts!

See:

You can also download the Excel file, if you like.

Over the summer at work, we changed the way staff profiles are stored on the network. Having finally got around the “redirected Application Data breaks Internet Explorer” problem (see here for my fix) in Windows XP, we rolled it out to all users. And all was well.

Until they brought their laptops back from the break, and we found they then can’t run various programs or access certain things when not connected to the network. This is because the laptop needs access to the Application Data folder – which is no longer on the local machine.

So you’d think the fix would be to create a new group policy for the laptops where the folder isn’t redirected, right? Well, yes, of course you would. Unfortunately, that won’t work.

You see, the Folder Redirection settings are a User based setting, not a Machine based setting. So if you assign a Machine GP to not redirect, the User GP to redirect runs anyway and takes precedence. Looking around t’tinternets, there were a few solutions – including a second (local) logon for the laptops or nasty registry hacking – but nothing that actually fixes the the problem satisfactorily.

Until I read about Loopback Processing.

Microsoft’s help pages go into great detail about the technical aspects of what this involves, but the overall effect is simple to explain: instead of the User settings “overlaying” the Machine settings and taking precedence, the reverse happens – so the Machine settings dominate.

This worked well, but had a few side-effects. Some of the User GPs we’d set up didn’t “trigger” any more on the laptops. After some tracking, it seems that the “overlaid” Machine settings were wiping them out. Adding the same User GPs to the laptop OU fixed that. Phew!

Oh, and just one last thing – we also had to delete the user folder in c:\documents and settings on the laptops, before getting users to log in twice (once on the network, once off) to ensure all the group policies and everything were applying and being set up correctly.

After what seems like a year of aborted attempts, this week I’ve made a concerted effort to deploy Adobe CS3 Design Premium on our XP network. This morning, I was successful!

There were several problems to overcome, including lack of MSIs, inability to “roll your own” MSI due to the Adobe Licencing Service throwing a wobbly if you do, inserting the serial number, forcing it to install on machines with under a gig of RAM, coping with the sheer size of the install files, and assorted other issues and nonsense.

1. Create Your Network Install Folder

On the server I use to install files from, I copied the contents of the CS3 DVD to a folder called AdobeCS3. This folder is shared as \\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3. I didn’t use a space in the folder name as this was reported as causing problems, but it may not be important.

2. Create The XML files

You need three XML files. Firstly, there’s the “application.xml.override” file, which contains the serial number:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Configuration>
<Payload>
<Data key="Serial" protected="0">00000000000000000000</Data>
<Data key="Registration">Suppress</Data>
<Data key="EULA">Suppress</Data>
<Data key="Updates">Suppress</Data>
</Payload>
</Configuration>

Replace the 000000000000s with your CS3 serial number (without spaces or dashes). The three “suppress” lines stop some info boxes popping up for end users during install. To find out where to put this file, you need to look at the Setup.xml file in the AdobeCS3\payloads folder. There’ll be an entry for¬¨‚Ć “Driver folder=”, and it’s the folder name after that you’re looking for. In my case, it was “AdobeDesignSuitePremiumen_US_Volume”, so the override file went in AdobeCS3\payloads\AdobeDesignSuitePremiumen_US_Volume.

Next you need the install and uninstall xml files. These can be created automatically by running setup.exe from the command line with the record option. Make sure you run it from a workstation, and make sure CS3 isn’t installed already!

\\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3\setup.exe --record=1

You then run through a “fake” install of CS3, where you can choose which components to install. We didn’t need Vue so unticked that. Once completed, it puts two XML files in the c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Installers folder. In my case, they were called “Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium.install.xml” and “Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium.uninstall.xml”, but the actual name may vary depending on which CS3 package you’re installing.

I renamed these files to “install.xml” and “uninstall.xml” respectively, and then copied them to the \\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3\deployment folder.

3. Test The Deployment

You can now check CS3 will install using these settings using the following command (all on one line!) from the Run box:

\\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3\Setup.exe --mode=Silent --deploymentFile=\\servername\deploy\AdobeCS3\deployment\install.xml --skipProcessCheck=1

Nothing will appear to happen because it’s running silent. You can check that it is, however, by opening Task Manager and looking for active setup.exe and mesiexec.exe processes, as well as monitor that files are appearing (and in some cases, disappearing) in c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\ and c:\Program Files\Adobe\. This install may take a little while (like, an hour, depending on your network, setup options, and machine). You may need to reboot afterwards before the CS3 apps will work.

Note that you also may need to open something other than Acrobat (such as Photoshop or Illustrator) before Acrobat will work. You also need to open Acrobat before PDFs are associated with it.

4. The Install Script

Now for the VBS voodoo. You see, you could just run the install command on PC startup (using Group Policies), but this would mean that a) it’d install every time, and b) you get no error logging if it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. So you need a script. And here it is: InstallCS3.vbs

If you have any scripting or programming experience, you should be able to figure out what this does. If not, here’s a brief outline:

1. Checks to see if C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Photoshop.exe exists. If not, it triggers the install. If it does, it skips the install and finishes. Note that if you chose to install somewhere else, or didn’t choose to install Photoshop, you’ll need to edit this line (e.g. to look for the Dreamweaver exe instead). I chose Photoshop as it’s the last bit of CS3 that is installed.
2. Logs the start of the script, the attempt to install CS3, any CS3 installer errors, and the end of the script, all to event viewer.

Put this file in as a computer startup script in a group policy. (Almost) done!

5. Just One Last Thing

Unfortunately, because CS3 takes aaaaaaaages to install, the default domain group policy setting for startup script timeouts kicks in and the install fails. Oops! The default is 600 seconds, but you can change it in a group policy. You can find the setting in Computer Configuration > Admin Templates > System > Scripts > Maximum wait time for Group Policy scripts. Set it to enabled, and increase the value from 600. I chose 6000, as it’s well over an hour.

And that’s it! The install is still time consuming, so you might want to schedule the rollout for some sensible time when nobody is using the network, and you probably don’t want to apply the deployment group policy to all your computers at once.

Phew, eh?

This was useful to me recently. I thought I’d post it here in case I forget how to do it in the future!

It’s a way of letting you run sshd on a port other than 22, or in addition to 22. Be sure to read the comments on how to do the latter easily. Note that although the instructions are for Tiger, it works fine on Leopard too.

macosxhints.com – 10.4: Change the default sshd port

I finally figured out how to fix Pine on my Leopard box! For, well, ever, it hasn’t let me post any news messages to my local leafnode server. Every time I tried, I’d get an error stating my post was rejected due to error 441, which is an invalid error.

I eventually tracked down that the actual invalid header was the message-id header, which was being generated as something like:

Message-ID: Pine.OSX.4.64.098263998623986.75543@myimac

Which is wrong. The bit after the @ needs to be a valid fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), which Pine picks up as the iMac’s hostname. Which isn’t a FQDN.

The solution, then, was to change the hostname. Like this from a terminal:

sudo scutil --set HostName myimac.mydomain.com

That isn’t quite enough, however. In Pine, you need to change another setting too. So, from the main menu (M) go into Setup (S), Config (C), and set “use-only-domain-name” (it’s near the bottom of the page) to No.

And that’s it! Almost!

The hostname changes straight away, but it doesn’t apply to your terminal session until you log out of it and back in. So do that, and then cross your fingers before trying to post with Pine again.

Thanks to the mysterious (and sexy) The Goat Keeper, I’m now the not-so-proud owner of a US version of the Wii stinker “Heatseeker”. Of course, I knew it was going to be rubbish, but that wasn’t the point. No – I needed something to test if my UK Wii could play imports.

And, of course, it can:

I show that the disc isn’t recognised by the Wii, then fire up the Homebrew Channel and from there load Gecko OS. One of the Gecko settings lets you region-free your console, so I pick that and boot the game. Then I play for 20 seconds and crash my plane. Yeah, Heatseeker is crap.

So, how to do it?

Firstly, you need to Twilight Hack your Wii. This isn’t as difficult (or painful) as it sounds – you just need to download a modified Zelda: Twilight Princess save, load Zelda, and the hack takes over. Using this, you can install the Homebrew Channel.

This page here tells you everything you need to know.

Then, once you have the Homebrew Channel installed, you can start installing homebrew apps on your Wii’s SD card. This is made easier if you install the Homebrew Browser first, as it lets you connect to the internet directly on the Wii, and install new apps that way. Simply download the browser on your computer, and copy the files to your SD card (as detailed here).

Finally, install Gecko OS either by downloading it via your computer to your SD card, or by using the Homebrew Browser. Stick your import game in, load Gecko and set it to Region Free, and launch your game!

Easy!

Disclaimer: If your break your Wii, then don’t blame me. These steps worked fine for me and many other people, but if you’ve already modified your Wii in some way, do something wrong, or have a newer version of the Wii firmware than that available as of today, then things may go wrong. You’ve been warned!