This is one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time. I think it really says it best. I wish I could claim it as my own.

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels. The trouble makers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
While some see them as the crazy ones,
We see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

by: Philip Hayes

I guess I  am what you would call an IT expert. I am fluent in both Mac and PC platforms and have some large clients which I have helped demonstrate their own security flaws on occasion. Well tonight, it was my turn in the frying pan.

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by: Philip Hayes

How do you store all those digitized photos, scanned documents, research notes and family tree data? As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity of your local hard drive, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. As an amateur Genealogist, I have collected gigabytes of digital data on just my own family that has taken me years to acquire. What would you do or how would you feel if you lost everything you had worked so hard on?

I’m amazed at the number of amateur and professional photographers, genealogists, business owners and individuals who have NO BACK UP STRATEGY. Many people have purchased single high capacity external hard drives, available from retails such as Costco, Staple and Office Depot (such as “Western Digital My Book”) as their extended external storage drive solution. The problem with this solution is that there is no built in-safety mechanism should the single drive fail. I cannot tell you how many people I know whom simply have all of their digital media stored on a single hard drive, hoping that it won’t fail. IT WILL FAIL! All hard drives fail. It’s not a matter of “if” it’s a matter of when. Now some of the more pro-active people may have bought two of the large capacity external drives and chosen to use back-up software to back-up one drive to the other. The problems with this solution are many, including the possibility that your back-up software silently fails to replicate the data.

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by: Philip Hayes

Here it is almost almost MacWorld 2008 Eve and I just dicovered an interesting and provocative article by Robert Cringley for PBS.org entitled: End Game: Why Apple Will Buy Adobe

"Steve Jobs has his Macworld keynote address coming and will no doubt deliver to us a few of the products we’ve all been predicting, presented with a level of showmanship simply not seen elsewhere in the industry. But my job this week is to look beyond products, to take a step back and give a long view of where Apple is headed. And the centerpiece of this analysis is my conclusion that Apple will inevitably buy Adobe Systems."….

and

…."Folks a lot smarter than I have wondered over the years about potential Apple mergers and acquisitions driven by Steve’s bloodlust. Apple-Disney, Apple-Google, Apple-TiVo, even Apple-Sun come to mind, but the only one that makes any sense to me at all is Apple-Adobe."….

and

"If such an acquisition were to take place it would have to be in 2008 while Avid and Microsoft still present credible competition to keep the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission from opposing such a merger. It would go easier, too, on W’s watch. I knew he was good for something."

Well that certainly is interesting and makes you think and wonder (and especially so if you happen to own Apple stock too I guess). This will be an interesting year for Apple that’s for sure.

by: Jerrald Hayes

Wondering about Leopard Compatibility? Philip has written about a Leopard Parental Controls & Simple Finder Bug and the Apple Mail 3.0 Leopard IMAP Issue and I wrote about the issues with FileMaker 9 (FileMaker’s Not Leopard Compatible? What the Heck? and News on the FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 update) but what about all the other stuff out there?

Well the folks over at MacRumors.com have put together a guide that gives us a List of Applications Not Compatible with Leopard and what the current state of the compatibility problem is. If your still on a Tiger system or earlier you might want to check this list before you make the upgrade.

by: Jerrald Hayes

Farhad Manjoo a staff writer on technology for Salon.com writes giving us his take on the Mac-PC debate today:

Once and for all, proof that Macs are cheaper than PCs

Let’s put to rest the myth that an Apple computer will set you back more than a Windows PC. In fact, it’ll cost you less.

It’s time to buy an Apple computer. Indeed, it’s been that time for the past five years, at least, but only now, slowly, are people waking up to this fact. Thanks to Apple’s relentless flash — the John Hodgman ads, the iPods, the iPhones — its Macintosh business is now in league with that of the biggest PC companies in the world. Everyone who’s used it agrees that Leopard, the operating system that Apple released late last month, is to its chief rival, Microsoft’s Windows Vista, roughly as Richard Wagner is to Richard Marx. This simple truth is dawning: If we forget about computer-industry network effects and monopolistic business practices, if we forget Apple’s various ancient missteps — if we’re going just by what’s better — the ages-old Mac-vs.-PC debate is over. Long over. Yell it from the rooftops: The Mac has won.

Read more…

by: Jerrald Hayes

I was excited to load Leopard on my kids Mac Mini so I could take advantage of the awesome looking Parental Controls that are now built into the OS. I have a 3 year old and a 5 year old, so using simple finder is imperative.

I started by doing a clean install of Leopard, completely formatting the hard drive and installing a clean OS. All went easy…. too easy. Then I started loading on the games and educational programs. Of course, I suddenly realized that some of the educational programs required “Classic”, so into the circular file they went. As I am sure you have all noticed, there is no support for “Classic” (OS 9) in Leopard.

I then created a new user for my 5 year old. I chose to make him a user that was “Managed with Parental Controls. Easy enough. I then clicked on the button that brought me to the “Parental Controls”. I chose to use “Simple Finder” and then selected the programs I wanted him to have access to. I saved the changes by exiting the control panel. Then I logged in as him. When I opened his Simple Finder “Applications” folder, I only saw the applications made by Apple. I tried many different things before finally calling for Support.

I spent more than an hour on the phone with Tammy ( a Level 2 Support Technician) who was real pleasant to work with, but she was unable to help in the end. I did have one kernel panic during a shut-down of the computer. She suggested that the KP may have something to do with my problems.

After successfully re-installing the OS, I decided to add just one application. I chose KidsPix. Wah-la! It worked. After adding KidsPix in the Parental Controls (while logged in as me), I flipped over to my sons login and there it was in the “Applications” folder of the Simple Finder. I was so excited. So it must have been the Kernel Panic after all……. NOT!

After adding more than six other programs, not one of them showed up in the simple finder. If I turned simple finder off in his login, they are all there and work.

After much aggravation, I noticed something….

Each and every application that was not showing up, was within a folder within the main “Applications” folder. So I tried dragging the application for the “Cars” game out into the Applications folder. Guess what… it worked! It seems that the Simple Finder cannot make alias to the main application, if it is enclosed within another folder inside of “Applications”. All of the Apple applications were not enclosed within folders inside the “Applications” folder. It was just coincidence that the first time around I had not loaded KidsPix, which loads itself in the root of “Applications”.

Now for some of the programs, I was able to drag the application out of its folder and put it in the root of “Applications”. Others needed the support files that were in the folder along with the application. Separating them caused errors on launch. For now I left them where they are. My kids will just have to do without them until I find a solution.

So if you are having problems with applications not showing up in SimpleFinder, take a look to make sure that they are not within a folder within “Applications”. Other than this issue. all is well with Parental Controls.

by: Philip Hayes

Despite my fears (FileMaker’s Not Leopard Compatible? What the Heck?) the upgrade to the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard had no impact at all on my use of FileMaker Pro. And here it is just a little over a week later and FileMaker, Inc. announced today:

FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 update delivers Leopard compatibility and more

FileMaker has released FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 and FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 Advanced, available now via a downloadable update. The 9.0v2 update provides compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard as described below, and other features, and is recommended for all users.

Here is a list of other fixes in the 9.0v2 update that developers will be most interested in:

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard):
The application no longer crashes when creating files if the system language and region do not match.

General Fixes:
Mac OS X: Get(SystemVersion) now returns the correct version on Mac OS X operating systems ending with double digit revision numbers, i.e. 10.4.10.

The database consistency check initiated on launch will no longer incorrectly report that a database is damaged for some databases that can be opened and used without any problems.

Printing Fixes:
The update addresses issues which cause the application to crash when a page range is specified.

Relationships:
A relationship with a global field now returns all related records if the value of the other key is empty.

For a complete list of fixes please refer to the updater Read Me or FileMaker downloads at http://www.filemaker.com/support/downloads/index.html

Click here for the details and to download the FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 and FileMaker Pro 9.0v2 Advanced
Leopard update now.

Please note that this update does not fix issues with the FileMaker Pro 9 Instant Web Publishing (IWP) feature
running on Leopard. We intend to make IWP compatible with Leopard in an update expected in December 2007.

We expect to deliver a Leopard compatibility update for our Server products in early 2008. FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced currently do not deploy properly on Leopard. In
the meantime, FileMaker Pro 9 and
FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced clients running on Leopard do work with FileMaker
Server and Server Advanced running
on Tiger or earlier versions of Mac OS X.

For timely news on the availability of compatibility updates for IWP, and for FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker
Server 9 Advanced, please subscribe to FileMaker News .

Click here for info on earlier versions of FileMaker software and Mac OS X Leopard.

-The FileMaker Team

Well that’s all good news for the most part but does it let the folks at FileMaker, Inc. (and Apple Computer which owns FileMaker) off the hook? Well maybe not. I think the clumsy way they all handled the news surrounding this upgrade has blown the sheet off of some of the no so nice aspects of how FileMaker deals with developers and users. read Matt Petrowsky’s blog post of Friday, October 26, 2007 – 2:25pm FileMaker Falls Behind for an excellent rant on FM Inc.

How’s all that make me feel? Am I turned off on FileMaker (and Apple) now? The whole story just illustrates that there is still a whole lot of room at the top for a lot of improvement and I’m actually looking forward to seeing those improvements in policy and mananagement one soon in the near future too.

by: Jerrald Hayes

A couple of users over at the Apple discussion boards came up with something that works. Based on what they did, here is what worked for me on several computers:

1. Quit Mail.app
2. Rename the Mail folder at Users/Library to something like MailX
3. Start Mail.app (Appears to rebuild the accounts)
4. Close Mail
5. Restart Mail.app (Appears to re download and sync the directory structure and messages)

ENJOY!

===============UPDATE 10/29/2007 @ 23:15================

Matt Baker of Galaxy Design Pty Ltd reports another possible fix

“I have just deleted the Rules left over from Mail 2.0 and the IMAP is all working.

All of the mail in the folders that were not showing up are there now. Woohoo!!!”

by: Philip Hayes

Ok….  where do I start?

I spent several hours on Saturday waiting for support. Here’s how it went.  After an hour and half of initial waiting, I spoke to a Level 1 Support Technician.  After 15 minutes, I was immediately escalated to a Level 2 Support Technician.  After waiting an additional 30 minutes for Level 2 to pick-up, I got disconnected. So I waited for another hour for Level 1 to pick up again, just so I could be connected to Level 2… again!

Yawn!

Eventually, I did get through to a Level 2 Tech who was awesome, even if he wouldn’t volunteer any inside info about the problem.

He did take all my information and forwarded it to an engineer.  It included info about my OS and the type of IMAP Server I was trying to connect to.  Unfortunately, he could not give me any more information other than that “they are working on it”.   But he did give me his email and told me that if I didn’t hear back from him within 5 days, to give him a call or email him.

Today… 10/29/2007…

The Level 2 Support Technician called me back and asked if I could help by sending some information about my system.  Of course, I was more than willing to do that! I want this thing FIXED!

We spent an hour in a Terminal window and a special Apple utility that does many different things.  Of course… errors were being thrown all over the place so he he didn’t get everything he wanted from me…. at least not initially.   Although he hung up with me, I’m still working on getting him the info he requested.  I’m trying to get him the info from any of  my four computers I upgraded to Leopard.

At least they are “working on it” .

by: Philip Hayes