Posts filed under Software

Microsoft Office 2008:Mac - Office did not install correctly

Come on.... it isn't even Monday. It's Friday for crying out loud.

What happened you ask? Well.....

I got an e-mail with a XLS file attached (I know.. shit happens). So I tried to open it, but I got a reminder that I hadn't (re)installed Office 2008 on my new iMac. But not to worry. I have the official Microsoft Office 2008 DMG (with matching serial number) on my Drobo, so the installation was done in a matter of minutes.

This is when it happened. Starting office resulted in this error: "Office did not install correctly". It even had a link to a Microsoft article explaining I needed an update. But the update wouldn't install since it was for OSX 10.4 (or something). Installing the latest update didn't solve it either.

Well, remove Office and reinstall it then... That didn't work either. Still the same error.

Searching the Interwebs resulted in a suggestion to remove everything Microsoft from the Mac.... And so I did. Especially the locations like:

/Library/Preferences/
~/Library/Preferences/

should be free of everything Microsoft. After trashing the Trash I reinstalled Office 2008. This time I was asked to enter my name and serial number. Something that didn't happen the first times. Then it occurred to me; I had copied my preferences (and other settings) when I migrated from my old to my new iMac. I guess that Microsoft doesn't support that.

It would have been nice if they had an option in the Removal Tool (which they generously supply) to remove EVERYTHING. I think that they didn't forget it. I think that this is by design. Just to screw with us Mac user.

Posted on December 3, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Microsoft, Personal, Software, Tips'n Tricks.

iMac with Multiple Monitors

One can not have enough screen "real-estate" when working with photos, or while exploring your web-development skillz. So, a single display is simply not an option in my case......

Next to my 27" iMac stands a Dell 24" TFT Display. This Dell display is being abused for two things;

  1. extended display for my iMac, and
  2. as a main monitor for my (Windows) work laptop

using the input selector on the TFT display.

Since I'm a guy and I rock at multitasking (*cough*), I have both my Windows (work) laptop and my iMac powered on. In this scenario I have only one active display on my iMac. The second display should therefor not be used, and this is where Apple fails miserably.

Posted on December 1, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Apple, Software, Tips'n Tricks.

Adobe Coldfusion 8 and 9 Vulnerable to Hijacking

Adobe released a security bulletin regarding the Coldfusion web engine. Upgrade / patch your Coldfusion server if you like to stay in control of your webserver. The patch has been classified as important.

An important vulnerability has been identified in ColdFusion 8.0, 8.0.1, 9.0, 9.0.1 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX. This directory traversal vulnerability could lead to information disclosure (CVE-2010-2861). Adobe has provided a solution to the reported vulnerability. It is recommended that users update their product installation using the instructions provided above.

The patch/update get be downloaded here.

Posted on August 19, 2010 and filed under Security, Software.

Vanishing HD Space on Popcorn Hour

Sometimes you think you're mind is playing tricks on you. I have that sometimes. E.g. I have a Popcorn Hour  (Networked Media Tank) which holds movies and series I watch. Bits and Bytes come and go on that machine. Thing you've seen are deleted, and replaced by new content. But over the 'years' it seemed to hold less and less content. Oke, movies have increased in size (10-20GB per movie is nothing nowadays). So I didn't really think much of it....

Until I started transporting the content with Transmit instead of FileZilla. Transmit was configured to show even the hidden files, and hidden files it showed. I found 4 hidden temporary pureftp-upload files of almost 32GB each. The timestamps on those files differed from late last year to a couple of months back

.pureftpd-upload-<some random string>

The problem was that I couldn't remove them from the Popcorn, but I really wanted my 120GD of free space back. Turned out that the FTP daemon on the Popcorn was locking these files. Reboot of the popcorn didn't help.

The way to remove them was to stop the FTP daemon on the Popcorn in the menu, and access the device through SMB (or another protocol you can use), and make sure that you can see hidden files.
Select the files and press delete, and they should be gone. After that you can re-enable the FTP service if you like.

Posted on July 15, 2010 and filed under Linux, Software, Tips'n Tricks, Video.

Getting Around a Wide-Angle Lens

Going on holiday is fun, but it's also a time of concessions on several levels. Especially if you can't bring every lens you own or (in theory) might need. Since the awesome Nikon 5-500mm f/1.8G VR ED N (small, <€1000, <1kg) isn't widely available. This means deciding what to bring in your camera bag.

In my case, I wanted to experiment with primes during my holiday. this also means that you have to use the foot-zoom, and on several occasions that won't work because of certain limitation (walls, buildings, ravines, etc.). In those cases you have 3 options;

  1. Don't make the photo
  2. Make a photo, but know immediately that it will end in /dev/null when you get home (a just-for-the-record photo).
  3. Improvise

So as you might have guessed, I ran into such a situation in Toledo, Spain. They have this great cathedral in the middle of an old town with narrow streets. You need a ultra-wide angle lens for almost anything there.

Posted on July 13, 2010 and filed under Photography, Software, Tips'n Tricks.

Splunk> Making Sense of Logfiles

My area of expertise in the professional world is Network Security. This includes protecting network from intrusions, but also delivering reports about the network status. For the latter we use SIEM(like) environments like the Cisco CS-MARS and the Juniper STRM.
The 'problem' with these devices is that they are great in reporting incidents and creating awesome reports about everything, but they lack the functionality to do some serious investigating.

I have several customers with a SIEM, and most of them still use (Linux) commandline tools like awk, grep, etc. these tools work, but you need to scrape everything together yourself, and building queries can be quite challenging. This is where Splunk> comes in.

Posted on July 13, 2010 and filed under Security, Software, Tips'n Tricks.

Installing Adobe Coldfusion 9 on OSX Server 10.6.4

After Apple updated the Mac mini to it's current form (mid 2010), I decided that it was time to start replacing my 'faithful' Windows 2003 server with something a bit less power consuming. The original Mac Mini was basically a consumer device, but a while back, Apple released a server version of the device. The main differences are:

  • Only 1 CPU model available (2.66GHz at this moment)
  • No DVD drive
  • 2 * 500GB internal disks
  • OSX 10.6.4 Server edition (unlimited clients)

Basically everything you could ever need for a server with a very small footprint.

The installation of Coldfusion is not straight forward. Not that I expected it to be [1], [2], [3], but one keeps hoping on an installer that actually installs the complete package, and where you don't have to edit files yourself to get it to work. It's not that it's the very first version of the scripting engine......

Anyway, the installer guides you through everything needed to INSTALL the software. Getting it to work comes next....

Posted on July 1, 2010 and filed under Apple, Software, Tips'n Tricks.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Released

Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 into the wild. The application can be downloaded from the Adobe website. The trail can be upgraded to a fully functioning version when you enter a valid serial number.

New features are;

  • Flickr integration
    Really nice feature. I do wonder how (and if) it works across multiple computers.
  • Easy sharing
  • Lens correction
  • Support for DSLR video's
  • Image watermarking
  • Tethered shooting
    For Nikon and Canon Cameras
  • etc.

After I downloaded the new version I installed it on my MacBook. The 'old' Lightroom v2.x can be used besides the new version.

Posted on June 9, 2010 and filed under Photography, Review, Software.

Droplets in Photoshop CS5

Every photo I upload to Flickr goes through a watermarking process. To do this, I created a watermarking action within Photoshop (started this in the CS3 days). These actions can be 'converted' to so-called droplets. These are 'shortcuts' you can place on e.g. your desktop. Every image you drag onto this droplet gets opened in Photoshop and the preconfigured actions are applied.

This worked in Photoshop CS3, and CS4 (after some modifications to the original action). But in Photoshop CS5 the droplets won't execute. The action itself runs smoothly within Photoshop, but when you export it as a droplet, the action won't start. You have to start the action manually.....

I even tried to create an action / droplet from scratch in Photoshop CS5, but that one won't run either when I drop a JPEG on the droplet. This is a reason for not upgrading to CS5 on my main machine (which also still runs Leopard for compatibility reasons).

According to the online Adobe Photoshop CS5 helpfiles regarding droplets, the droplets should still function. So I write this of as a bug in the initial release of Photoshop CS5.

Posted on May 5, 2010 and filed under Annoying, Photography, Review, Software.

HDR Processing in Adobe Photoshop CS5

The new CS5 edition of Adobe Photoshop has refined the HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing. Now, you won't need the Photomatix plugin (in theory).

After selecting the 'Merge To HDR in Photoshop' option in Lightroom, the images get exported to Photoshop and it starts doing its magic. Normally (in the earlier versions) you would end up with a 32-bit image, but now you have the option of manipulating the 8 or 16-bit version of the image. Just like in Photomatix.

Photoshop CS5 HDR interfaceInitial experiences are not really positive, but that can be related to my experiences with Photomatix. A quick glance at the controls available, it should be able to produce similar results.
Talking of Photomatix; The plugin used in CS4 won't work in CS5. You need to download the CS5 version of the plugin at the HDRSoft.com website (Mac / Windows). The new version is universal (32 and 64-bit), free of charge to registered users, and works only in CS5.

One thing I didn't expect was that Photoshop started downloading a lens database from the Adobe website during the creation of the HDR. No idea if this is used in the HDR creation, or that this is done only once and used in other Photoshop CS5 plugins / filters

Posted on May 4, 2010 and filed under Photography, Review, Software.