Mac Office 2008 SP2 Can't Open Some Files

Microsoft has finally acknowledged that Mac Office 2008 SP2 doesn't work, and that a fix will be released 'in August'.

The problem is that .xlsx, .pptx, .docx, etc files, do not work in some instances (quite many instances in my experience). This is extremely annoying since Office doesn't come with a roll-back feature. Not only that, but this is supposed to be a stability release, not the exact opposite.

Here's their mea culpa.

I've used another work around than the ones they list: Numbers from iWork 09.

Mozy Backup - Getting Lost In the Cloud - A Bad Experience

I've been an enthusiastic supporter of using cloud based backup services, and specifically of Mozy for some time. All of my computers at home are backed up using Mozy, and briefly we used it at work as well.

The service worked pretty well backing up, though it suffered from frequent failures (timeouts, machine in sleep mode, etc) and quite pokey upload performance. But I figured, better backed up than sorry.

One of my computers has a drive which had 900GB of data on it, of which 365GB were backed up by Mozy. This monster drive failed, and nothing I did could get the data back.

I've replaced the drive (a month ago) and have been trying to get my data out of Mozy ever since.

First of all, I have no doubt that my data is in their data center somewhere, eager to be restored, and I have no doubt that someday, I'll have it all back, but the trip from here to there has been long, and is still far from over.

Here is my story (stretched over a month):

• Drive failed. 
  
• Started a restore, but struggled to find which part of the archive was up to date.
  
• Picked the wrong part of the archive and started restoring (through the client), which takes forever to get ready (365GB)
  
• Realized I picked the wrong part of the archive, and canceled the restore.
  
• Started a restore on the correct part of the archive, though this part of the archive was still significantly out of date, so I would be losing some recently saved files. (365GB)
  
• Restore kept stopping and not continuing, so I contacted support. (Download speed varied from 400 mega-bits/sec to 1.2 mega-bits/sec on my 24 mega-bit line. Same as the upload speed, even though I have ADSL).
  
• Their recommendation was to cancel the client restore (which was now at about 13% done) because a web restore would be much faster. I questioned the support persons reasoning about 20 times, but eventually gave in.
  
• So I canceled and requested a web restore. This turned out to require some waiting. Actually, a lot of waiting while the download files were generated. In my case, it required about 3-4 days. Thankfully, they sent me an email when it was done.
  
• In the mean time, the client restore which I had canceled, inexplicably started up again, but now listed the restore size as 600GB (with 3-4 weeks to get it all back) and started from the beginning.
  
• With the web restore setup completed, I found 145 .exe files to download, named 1 through 145! I started downloading the first file, and the transfer speed was just as slow as client restore. Given the massive amount of work it would require, I gave up on web restore, especially because I couldn't stop the client restores anyway.
  
• Backups also were starting up during the restore, which slowed things down. So I disabled scheduled backups.
  
• At the same time, my Avira Anti-virus identified some viruses in restore, so that gummed up the works, while a dialog hung open asking for my input. I couldn't sit there for the next 3 weeks, so I disabled the anti-virus.
  
• Even after disabling, scheduled backups continued to run for several days, regardless of what I had requested in the interface, much like the phantom restores.
  
• Eventually I had to reboot the machine because it had lost network connection, one of many reasons a Vista box seems to need frequent restores. This should not have been a problem. But...
  
• After reboot, the client restore had to start from the very beginning again, not remembering where it was (even though most data had apparently been restored)
  
• Am now waiting for restore to complete. It's back at about 3% complete after 3 days.
  

As you can imagine, I am no longer a big fan of Mozy. I think their software quite frankly sucks, and their customer service, though friendly and prompt, led me down a bad path, and hasn't been able to help me whatsoever.

Be curious if anyone else has had a similar experience. Well, at least one person did. Here's some other ideas about how to do this.

Windows 7 Epson Stylus DX9400F over a network with print server setup

This is a quick guide to helping others use Epson printers, or at least the Epson Stylus DX9400F model with the bundled network print server in Windows 7.

I was able to install all the software and drivers perfectly onto Windows 7. The problems arose when I wanted to install the EpsonNet Print software (which allows printing over a network instead of via USB cable -- assuming you have the EpsonNet print server hardware). The software install consistently crashed with the following message: Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library. Runtime Error! Program: E:\COMMON\ENEZINST\EasyInstall.exe. No go.

I searched and searched, but I couldn't find an updated version of Windows 7 EpsonNet Print. However, it turns out you can get all the features of the printer without it.

Printer

I simply went to Windows Menu >> Devices and Printers >> Add a printer, and selected 'Network' printer, and it quickly found the printer, let me name it, and I was done.

Scanner

Equally, I wanted to use the scanner. Well, Windows Menu >> All Programs >> Epson Scan >> Epson Scan Settings let me choose a local or network scanner. I chose network, and again, it quickly found the scanner. I tested and said OK, and that was working as well.

Card Reader

The card reader showed up in my networks listing, so no nead to do anything there.

And that's it. It worked.

Caveat: The printer comes with a ton of other software, and I haven't tested it all, but those were the main features I needed over the network on Windows 7, so now I'm extremely happy.

Hope this helps you.

Windows 7 First Impressions

I've put Windows 7 through its paces, and compared it to a Mac I've been trying out. Here are my impressions.

I've now been running Windows 7 on my laptop at work for about a week. And I've been comparing it on a Sony Vaio SZ from 2 years ago, against a 6 month old MacBook Pro running Mac OS, which I’ve been using for about a month. Before this, I was mostly using the Sony with Vista on it.

On the laptop, the upgrade from Vista went seamlessly, and actually didn't take very long, though I have to say I didn't pay that much attention. Once it finished, I was up and running straight away.

So what are my impressions about Windows 7?

I think it's fantastic. Even though it’s clear that we’re looking at an improved version of Vista, I really wouldn’t want to go back to Vista. The new UI is the biggest improvement, and solves numerous usability problems. Windows 7 has been stable so far in my use of it, and I’m seriously thinking of letting people at work upgrade to it, though I’m worried about the upgrade path once the beta runs out.

Positives

• Library and favourites – This feature is great. I’ve always found myself trawling through explorer dialogs and windows over and over again to get to the same folders. Now you can put any folder you want in a favourite or into a library, and they are always one click away. Big time saver.
• Taskbar – The taskbar is very Mac like, in that both open applications and applications that are pinned to it, are in the same place. But the implementation of showing windows for each application is what makes the feature so good. An application which is running has a subtle box around it, and multiple boxes if there are multiple windows open. Hover over the icon, and Win7 pops up thumbnails to show you each window. Usually that’s enough to, and you can click on the thumbnail and go to the window on one smooth motion. However, hover over a thumbnail, and the full window is revealed with all other windows made seethough. This saves huge amounts of time.
• Window moving key sequences and gestures – This I like, because now with a simple gesture—dragging a window to the right of the screen, I can resize that window to take up half the screen. Same for the left. Now I have two windows taking up half the screen each, and I can compare them. If I drag a window to the top, the window is maximised. Again, big time saver. Together with the taskbar, I can switch between different tasks on my laptop with ease.
• Revealing the desktop – Hovering over the right bottom corner shows the desktop, and clicking minimises all the windows. Again, I can get to what I want with a simple mouse gesture and a click.
• Connecting and disconnecting secondary monitor – this was better in Vista than in XP, but still cause a lot of problems because occasionally the driver would forget what state it was in. Win7 appears to do better, though I’ve had the same Vista problems arise, and I suspect I’m merely benefiting from a more stable driver. I’d really like to see some improvement on this topic, as it makes using a laptop with a second monitor a lot harder than with a Macintosh, which seems to get this one right all the time.
• All Vista drivers seem to work (or Microsoft came up with a new one that work and I didn’t notice)
• Less User Access Control messages – this isn’t huge for me, but it is quite nice not to constantly be clicking the UAC messages.

There were a few smaller problems, so not everything was peachy.

• Once I’d upgraded, I found that the contents of my profile had been moved. This seems to have something to do with the new Libraries, but many of my development tools (Netbeans, SSH, etc) expected some hidden directories to be at the top level of my profile, and didn’t work until I move them back there. I think this is what killed Chrome as well, though I’m not sure (it seems to install itself in the profile instead of in Program Files, so maybe this is Google’s fault, not Microsofts).
• I can still manage to get the secondary monitor into a state where it won’t go to full resolution until I reboot (mentioned this above).
• Sound volume didn’t show up on the taskbar until I fiddled around with it for a while. That was annoying. (I can’t remember how I fixed it, sorry).
• Some of the Sony tools don’t appear to have fully made it through the upgrade, meaning that the Sony Update Manager doesn’t seem to work. But, there haven’t been any updates from Sony in a while, so I’m not too worried.
• Chrome failed to work until reinstalled, as mentioned above.

Compared to the Mac, there’s a lot to like in Windows 7. Here are some points of comparison for me. YMMV.

• Really like the new Win 7 UI much more than the Mac. It’s just more efficient, such as making a window full size.
• Mac wins hands down for the sleep feature, which works instantly on the Mac, and takes plenty of time on Windows. The Mac also barely drains the battery in sleep mode, while Windows last about one night at most in sleep mode.
• This particular (much newer) Mac, performs much better, and the windows machine in general feels it needs to hit the disk constantly. In fact, excessive disk IO is a long standing windows problem, and it doesn’t appear that Win 7 solves it.
• Since I use office products a lot, and Outlook 2007 especially, Entourage 2008 is a pale imitation and literally makes using the Mac much less pleasant than the Windows equivalent.
• But I do like doing my Ruby on Rails programming on the Mac much better, as it has a proper linux-like terminal, where Win7 is still hanging around with the god awful cmd.exe.

In addition to the Sony, I've fresh installed Win7 three more times, in a VirtualBox VM on the MacBook Pro, in a VMWare Fusion VM on the MacBook Pro and on a Pentium D desktop which operates as my main Media Center, with a Hauppauge T-Nova 500 dual tuner DVB-T (freeview in the UK) card. I'll write about the Media Center experience (mixed) in a different post. All installed without significant problems, though the media center didn’t recognize the Linksys WRT54G PCI card, meaning it was a bit of a struggle to get online.

So how did I get on with the virtual machines? Pretty well, actually:

• Though everything installed perfectly, VirtualBox was a real pain to use, as it fails to install its guest tools, so there is no UI and mouse integration. Also, I wasn’t impressed with performance, with the VM occasionally slowing the rest of the Mac.
• VMWare Fusion works fantastically well (I’m still using it), especially in Unity mode, where the applications integrate seamlessly into the Mac environment. I installed Win 7 as a Vista VM, which seemed to work flawlessly. I haven’t see any slowdown in the machine (though I do have 4 GB of RAM which helps). However, there are times when the VM’s UI gets corrupted, especially after the Mac coming out of sleep. And oddly, Fusion seems to suspend the Windows VM when the Mac goes into sleep mode, meaning that when the Mac wakes up, you have to specifically resume the Windows VM.
• However, I’m happy with the Mac now since I can use Outlook 2007 in a Unity mode, which eliminates my problems with Entourage.

Hope this is all helpful. If your experience differed, please let me know in the comments. Any questions, let me know as well.

iPhone3G Six Months On

I've written about my experiences with the iPhone a few times already, here and here. It's been an interesting ride.

I would say that with the release of firmware 2.2, the serious stability, crashing and battery issues are solved. Though I've done 2 full factory restores to get there.

The phone now performs fairly well. And I'm back to liking it, which was in doubt for a while. In fact, when I went to the US in November I had to use my old HTC S620 (no unlocked iPhone), and the battery life on that phone was terrible in comparison. And the iPhone wifi worked very well during my stay there, which somewhat made up for the unlocking issue.

Another big improvement for me, has been the release of the Calling Card application on the App Store. This means that I can make international calls without paying through the nose.

But there are still things that annoy. For one, the lack of cut and paste, which is matched with the fact that you can't forward SMSes. This means someone texts me directions to a restaurant, and then I have to write them down on a piece of paper and type them back in to the SMS that I send on. Annoying!

The GPS is great, but why can't I get turn by turn directions?

And the integration with Exchange works, but I can't send meeting requests.

And the last, most annoying bug is the fact that the iPod plays the same song every time when I put it in shuffle mode. Can't that be randomized?

XenServer 5.0, Feel the Bullshit: Open Storage API

Citrix trumpets openness in their latest press release announcing XenServer 5.0, without delivering the substance. XenServer 5.0 is indeed based on Xen 3.2, an actual open source project. But somehow the openness doesn't make it to the shipping product except in the marketing message.

My current example of the bullshit marketing problem is the Open Storage API. This "unique" API allows us plebians to use the snapshotting and thin provisioning features of our SANs. In a fit of openness, they've added Dell EqualLogic to the list of SANs supporting these features, which includes only NetApp. My company of course doesn't have either. So maybe I can roll my own. I'll just use the open storage API. How hard can that be? They're trumpeting it afterall.

I started with Citrix's press release, which has a sub-heading: "Uniquely Open Architecture Simplifies Management and Improves TCO". They go on to explain that "Unlike other ... closed proprietary systems, the open storage APIs in XenServer allow customers to access and control advanced functions such as snapshotting, cloning, replication, de-duplication and provisioning in their existing storage systems." [my emphasis]  This is unfortunately qualified with: "...from vendors such as EqualLogic and NetApp."

So where can I find the open storage API? I've searched google, the press release, the XenServer5.0 documentation, the community forums and more, and can't find the reference manual for this API anywhere. As far as I'm concerned, it appears to exist only in this press release.

Now, proprietary VMWare, does allow taking advantage of snapshotting and thin-provisioning on supported SANs, and our 3Par SAN is one of them.

So please explain to me how XenServer is more open? Where are these APIs? Isn't it all just marketing bullshit?

Let me know your thoughts.

Find the press release here. The SDKs that are actually available, here.

Be Unlimited Broadband, now with special rubbish service

I've been a happy customer of Be's for a long time (18 months). But the last 2 months have been miserable.

The exchange I'm attached to, along with a good number of others, has been blessed with the following message:
Network Slow browsing/download speeds at the following exchanges: STREATHAM; NORBURY; BALHAM; HENDON; PRIMROSE HILL; BARNET; KINGSTON; SURBITON.

It also has the cute message: Some Issues - Things Could Be Better

Let me tell you how cute I think that mesage is.

Customer service is completely unhelpful: 'Head office haven't given us any feedback on when things will be fixed. You'll find out when it's fixed in the forums.' Apparently there's an upgrade needed, but I suspect there's no cash for the upgrade and customer service has been asked to tap dance with customers.

No refunds or rebates, a weak explanation, and no reduction of my leaving period (3 months). Since it still barely works, and I'm busy, I haven't done much about it. But I'm pretty sure I'm going to switch back to BT. When I had a telephone problem a few months ago, BT were here the NEXT DAY (yes, it was an Openreach guy, but somehow BT has more suction with them). That compares quite favorably to Be's 2 months.

For the geeks: I'm getting as little at 1.9Mbps instead of the 17Mbps the modem is syncing at. And I'm getting 6-20% packet loss on pings.

Aaaaaaarrrrrgh.