MikeChick.net

After recovering my Macbook Pro using the OS X Archive and Install. I had to manually restore all my documents and settings by dragging and dropping everything from the Macintosh HD/Previous Systems/Previous System 1/Users/mike to my new user’s directory.

Once I got everything in place I was having trouble working with my files on my admin account. I was unable to make changes or rename the recovered files, without giving “Everyone” Read & Write access through the Get Info menu, which obviously wasn’t the solution.

For example when trying to rename a directory; Users/mike/Sites/PSD I would get this Error Message:

Although when I checked the info of the PSD directory, it looked fine (see below):

So OS X was contradicting itself because it was telling me “You Can read and Write” but at the same time telling me “You do not have sufficient access privileges to rename the item “PSD”. I tried a series of things as far as running the Repair Permissions within the Disk Utility, creating a new admin account to try to reset all the permissions enclosed within the Users directory. Nothing was working.

So since the notebook is very new, I still have some free telephone support from Apple so I gave them a call. Spent about an hour on the phone with Tech support and we finally got it working. Here are the steps that we took.

1. Boot your system from the OS X 10.5 install disk. To do this put the install CD into your computer, restart the system while hold the “c” key on your keyboard. This will force a boot from CD.
2. Once you select your language from the Installation wizard, you will notice the menu bar appears at the top of the screen, from here go to Utilities > Password reset.
3. From this screen, select your user account from the combo box. Then without entering a new password, go down towards the button and you will see a “Reset” button that will reset this accounts Privileges and ACL libraries.
4. Once this is done you can Quit the OS X Installation, and reboot your system to your HD. You may need to remove the CD from your machine.
5. once the machine boots, open a Terminal and enter the following two commands, entering your password when prompted. (be sure to replace “Mike” with your own Short Name)
   • sudo chown -R Mike ~
   • sudo chmod -R 755 ~
6. The last steps are simple, open up Macintosh HD/Users then command+click on your Home directory (in my case this was mike) then go to Get Info. In the info screen, Make sure the admin group is in the list, if it’s not then add it with Read & Write Access. Also change everyone in the list to “Read & Write” access temporarily. Then click the tiny Gear icon to and chose “apply to enclosed items” which will apply these permissions to all the files within this directory.
7. Once this is set, go see if you can now make changes to the files. If so then your just about done, you need to only go back into the Get Info screen you were just in for your home directory and change the permission of “Everyone” to Read Only access. Then Apply to enclosed items again.

Hope that works for anyone else having similar insufficient access privileges. After doing a bunch of research on this problem it appears there is quite a bit of issues out there with permissions on OS X Leopard, so if this did not help take a look at these two links:

• Leopard – File permissions | ACLs | User Group Issue
• Administrator privileges gone

I’ve never really been into gaming, years ago I was highly addicted a computer game called Subspace A.K.A Continuum, which was a very simple game similar to the classic game Asteroids. You would battle your 2D spaceship online against people from all around the world, there were teams/squads and even a competitive league. Other than that I had a PS2 that I would occasionally play Madden with friends or Socom II online, which was pretty fun. Until I let a friend borrow my PS2 and never seen it again, so I pretty much stopped gaming at all.

These last couple weeks I’ve heard a lot of hype about the new GTA IV. I remembered the game from PS2, it was pretty cool, but didn’t look like anything being advertised as far as graphics. So I decided I would try it for my self on a new HD gaming console. I was indecisive on weather I wanted a PS3 or an xBox 360. I picked up a PS3 used form Gamestop for $350 with GTA IV, brought it home plugged it in to my HD TV to discover the picture was really dark and very difficult to read small text. This obviously wasn’t acceptable since the PS3 + HDTV cost around $2,000. So I tried the PS3 on another TV, this one wasn’t HD so I used standard A/V hookups and the picture was still dark, this time there was even a horizontal shadow that crawled up my screen. So I decided to bring the PS3 back and get my money back, with intentions on picking up an xBox 360 off the internet for much less than i paid for the PS3 from Game Stop.

I found an xBox 360 Premium console on Craigslist for $300 that was brand new. Apparently the seller had issues with his original unit so Microsoft sent him a new one, which he decided to sell. I also ended up buying Call Of Duty 4 off him and was able to swap my GTA IV for PS3 for the xBox version from Game Stop.

So now I setup on my TV, turn it on and the picture looks amazing! Way better than the PS3 did. Now I’m not trying to dog on the PS3 I’m sure it’s a great console, I may have just gotten a defective one, since I did buy it used, or maybe it didn’t like my older HDTV that does not have an HDMI input.

Anyways both of the games are truly amazing, I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of work put into these games. I like COD4 very much, the missions are so real and I can literally sit there and play it for hours on end without getting bored. GTA IV is needless to say awesome beyond belief. The multi player for GTA IV is great, you can get a group of your friends together and have battles with other gangs, take over territories or just have death matches. I like jumping into a car with like 3 other live players and doing a drive by while your talking to them over a headset. That’s another reason I’m glad I got the xBox 360 over PS3, I know a lot more people with an xBox live account then I do with PS3. Although Live costs like ~$20 every 3 months, it’s pretty cheap and well worth it.

So if you have an xBox Live account, you should add me to your friends list.
Gamer Tag: mikecicc

Last week my Macbook Pro crashed. It would hang on the startup screen with the Apple logo and the spinning gear for about 5-10 minutes then restart it self, and continue to loop. The culprit may have been a recent firmware update from Apple, but I have a hunch it had something to do with me messing around with the permissions on the HD.

Ever since I setup Leopard I was having problems installing software on my main admin account, mike. So I made an alternate account to install software, I figured this had something to do with permissions, so I decided to try adding a custom permission on the entire Macintosh HD to allow “mike” Read & Write permissions. It took like 20 minutes for the permissions to apply to the enclosed items, after it finished I rebooted, and was never able to recover.

Steps to Recovery
First thing I tried was the obvious, Safe Boot, which is Mac’s equivalent to Microsoft Window’s Safe Mode. To do this as soon as you power on your computer start holding the Shift key down. I had no luck with Safe boot, so I was hoping I could boot to CD still in order to run the Disk Repair utility thats built into the startup disk that came with my Macbook, or at the very least reinstall the operating system.

To boot from CD, the steps are similar to Safe Boot only as soon as you power on your computer start holding down the “C” key, once your CD is in the drive of course. This was successful, So I proceeded to load the startup disk. Without Clicking next on the Setup Wizard I chose Utilities from the Menu at the top of the screen and went into the Disk Utility. From here I was able to run a “Disk Repair” and also a “Permissions Repair” both returned no errors, so I was pretty sure the problem wasn’t fixed.

I eventually came to the conclusion I needed to reinstall OS X. Although I didn’t want to lose all my files and settings only thing I wouldn’t be able to recover was my Thunderbird e-mail and folders. As i started the setup wizard I notice the installation method chosen for me by default was called “Archive and Install” after doing some research I discovered OS X will make a directory of all your user’s files and settings from any previous installations of OS X. This is completely new to me, when reinstalling Windows everything will be erased during the re-installation, unless you chose to do a repair install, which I guess may be similar to the Archive and Install. Anyways the installation took a little over an hour, when I was finally up and running again I opened Macintosh HD to find a directory named “Previous System 1″ that contained all my users’ directories, and application folder. So I was able to drag and drop the contents of my old Libraries folder, Documents and Applications over to my freshly installed OS.

So everything is back and better then it ever was. I can now even install software on my main user account. Only problem I had was with Adobe Photoshop CS3. Apparently if you do an Archive and Install on OS X, then the system doesn’t copy the Adobe Unit Types file to the ScriptingAdditions folder, you can read more details in this Adobe Technote.

Conclusion
After this experience I will no longer procrastinate setting up Time Machine to get a backup of my system as frequently as possible. I also know that if all else fails, the Archive and Install method works great and makes it simple to recover files and settings from a previous installation of OS X.

This afternoon I decided to restore my iPod Mini back to default factory settings. During the process iTunes suggested that I “Upgrade my iPod to the latest software” so I went ahead and answered yes to the upgrade. After a couple seconds all I seen was a little “plug iPod into the wall charger” icon thing.

After doing some research, apparently to complete a software upgrade on most iPods you have to plug your iPod into the wall charger. This is so the iPod doesn’t die mid-firmware flash, in result turning your iPod into nothing but an expensive paperweight. Probably a good call on Apple’s part, but what if you don’t have a wall charger handy? In most cases you would be out of luck.

Besides the obvious (borrowing a wall adapter) there is a surprisingly simple solution. If you’ve ever looked closely at a FireWire or USB cable you’ll notice that two of the pins stick out a little farther than the rest. Those are the pins that carry the electricity to charge the iPods while the other prongs are used for data transfer (right?).

The Fix:
Trick is if you plug in the USB or FirmWire (while the other end is connected to the iPod) into the computer just a little bit so only the two charging pins touch the accompanying pins on the computer, you should be able to fool the iPod into thinking it’s a wall charger. The firmware will update, and you’ll have a working iPod again.

A good friend of mine from Buffalo moved out to Vegas a couple years ago. I was originally suppose to move with him but it didn’t work out for several reasons. Ever since I’ve wanted to go visit him, just been busy with work and other things.

On top of my buddy having a house there, I’ve been working with a few people from Vegas, that I’d like to meet in person. So I finally scheduled some vacation time and booked a flight to Vegas for this Summer.

My cousin and a few of her girlfriends are planning a trip to Vegas as well around the same time as me, so it’s going to be a riot and I can’t wait.

There were a few laptops in the office that shared a similar problem, the mouse cursor would go beyond the right of the screen. So instead of the cursor/pointer stopping at all 4 edges of the screen, when you moved it towards the right side of the screen it would continue on past the edge of the screen, in result losing the location of your cursor.

I figured out that the culprit was the display adapter that is installed along with the software required to use our Epson projector. It was a simple fix all I had to do was the following:

1. From the desktop right click and open the properties window, then the settings tab.
   
2. There will be a number of “displays” shown as numbered boxes. Your main display (1) and one or two others (2 & 3).
3. click on the secondary displays and uncheck the “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor” setting towards the bottom. That should fix the problem.
   

One of the only things I missed about working on Windows XP was the convenience of accessing other machine’s folders and files, that were on the network, from my desktop via Windows Explorer. I knew this was more than likely possible on OS X, I just didn’t know how to do so. Until recently I got fed up with the idea of emailing every change I make to a website file to my XP machine in order to update the web server. So I decided to do some research so that I could simply access the web server, along with other network resources from my Macbook.

I’ve always used this path: \\webserver\e$ in Windows Explorer to access the web server’s E:\, Or say if I wanted to access a user’s desktop I could do: \\ACCOUNTING1XP\C$\Documents and Settings\jondoe\Desktop to view the contents of Jon Doe’s desktop from my own desktop.

The process is just as Simple in OS X. The following steps are how I gained access to the webserver from my Macbook. Remember to change “webserver” to the name of your network resource, as well as the drive letter, in my case I’m using E:\

• In the Finder, select the GO menu
• then the Connect to Server command
• Enter into the box: smb://webserver/e$
• Enter your username and password for the Windows Network
• To remember the login details, check the box to “Remember this password in my keychain”
• You should now get a Finder Window with all the folders on files on that machine

If that didn’t work, you can try removing the trailing drive letter (/e$) or you might also want to try:
• smb://192.168.1.1.. Where this is the IP address of the machine you are trying to access.

I am super happy that I didn’t lose this convenience. I had a bad feeling that Mac OS X and Windows networks wouldn’t get along so smoothly, I was obviously wrong, so far so good.

Wordpress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems(CMS) on the web. It’s a great application supported by a great community. I use Wordpress for many of my own websites, I also recommend it to others looking to start a website that need to manage their content with little programming knowledge. I always thought the lack of e-Commerce plugins for Wordpress was odd, but never really needed to implement any shopping carts on a Wordpress site. If someone required more of an actual shop than a standard website, I would steer them towards an actual e-Commerce application (ZenCart, Magento, OS Commerce etc.).

I decided to try out WP e-Commerce, one of the only free shopping cart plugins for Wordpress. My client’s website was already up and running the latest version of Wordpress. So instead of selling her the idea of switching applications or using a simple shopping cart solution like e-junkie, I decided to familiarize myself with some e-Commerce solutions for Wordpress.

Unfortunately WP e-Commerce is not very stable out-of-box, even though I purchased the Gold Cart which was suppose to be more feature rich then the standard free version. It required some work to get it working properly with Paypal, which is the default payment gateway. Authorize.net was the preferred payment gateway of my client, mainly because she already had an established merchant account with them. Although it didn’t work right away, once I got it working properly I think it is the best gateway to use with WP e-Commerce.

A big turn off from using Paypal as the gateway is the fact you get redirected off the website you are on to make the payment. This isn’t all that bad, especially if you do not wish to purchase an SSL certificate for your website and will be handling your customers financial information, being redirected to a secure paypal site will cover that for you. The biggest issue I noticed with Paypal is users making payments are now required to have a paypal account, which leads to a dead-end for those customers without an account. During the checkout process Paypal requires you to create an account even if you select the options “I do not have a paypal account and would like to make my purchase using a credit card”. I proceeded to signup during my testing, my account was opened simply using the email address I provided, all appeared to be well, then before my card was charged, I was required to verify my new Paypal account by waiting for a specific paypal charge to hit my credit card. This would be fine if the sole purpose for creating my account wasn’t to make a purchase right at that moment. Who is going to wait 3-4 days to verify their Paypal account in order to make a simple purchase I should be able to make instantly.

So although I moved on to Authorize.net which was giving me this error whenever I proceeded to checkout:

refId:
resultCode: Error
code: E00003
text: The ‘AnetApi/xml/v1/schema/AnetApiSchema.xsd:length’ element is invalid – The value ” is invalid according to its datatype ‘Short’ – The string ” is not a valid Int16 value.
subscriptionId:

I decided to get this working and share with anyone else wishing to use authorize.net as their payment gateway. The problems were located in wp-shopping-cart/gold_cart_files/merchants/authorize.php. Instinct, who wrote the script, left references to their own credentials which were hard coded in the script. They probably forgot to swap out their hard coded logins and names with the proper variables of the input boxes you have set in your Payment Options. So in the end no matter what you have set on the options page, Instinct’s API access and login credentials are being passed at checkout.

Fixing the Authorize.net Payment Gateway

1. download the updated authorize.php file
2. extract the .zip archive to: wp-shopping-cart/gold_cart_files/merchants/ overwriting the old authorize.php file
3. upload the new authorize.php file to your server
4. make sure your Authorize.net credentials are set in the Payment Options
5. You should be all set, reset your browser cache and make a test purchase

If your still having problems with the Authorize.net checkout, remove both your Authorize.net account and the WP e-Commerce plugin from “Test Mode” and try again with $1.00 item.

I’d like to give a a big thanks to Shayne Sanderson, who I found on the WP e-Commerce Support Forums. Shayne went out of his way to help me with this, he was able to contact the lead developers at instinct for me and was very persistent on finding the problem. Shayne will soon be launching his own website to support the WP e-Commerce plugin.

So if you interested in adding a shopping cart to your Wordpress site here are a few options that I know of:

• e-junkie – a simple shopping cart solution for selling basic products on any website. Adds an “Add to cart” button on your products page, then you are redirected to your cart on e-junkie when your ready to checkout.
• WP e-Commerce – A free Wordpress plugin for e-Commerce, very convenient and much potential but is very young and needs some work. Only works with Paypal for payment processing.
• Gold Cart – An additional module to be used with the WP e-Commerce plugin that opens more features and give you the ability to use more payment gateways. Only $15 an absolute most buy if you intend to use WP e-Commerce.

Since I’ve been talking a lot about cell phones lately I figured I’d share some knowledge I gave to a co-worker that saved her Blackberry the other day. I got a call on Monday from Kristen, She apparently had dropped her Blackberry in the bath tub while it was filling with water. The Cellphone was lifeless with no display or LED lights.

I instructed her to remove the battery asap, and use a blow dryer on both the device and battery until they were dry. After doing this for a few minutes, she put the battery back in her phone, tried to power it on and nothing happened, still dead. So at this point I told her to either leave it out in the sun in attempt to remove all the moisture form inside the battery/device, try a replacement battery and hope the actually Blackberry is not damaged or there was one last thing she could try that I recently just learned. Apparently leaving a soaking wet cell phone in a bowl of uncooked rice over night would suck out all the moisture and bring life back to the once lifeless cell phone.

Since there wasn’t any sun light available, she proceeded with the bowl of uncooked rice trick. The next morning her phone powered on and everything appeared as it was prior to the dip into the bath tub. She was thrilled and thanked me a million times.

Obviously if you are bringing your cellphone anywhere where you could potentially drop it into water, just be extra careful. In the unlikely event you do happen to submerge your cell phone into water and it no longer works, I would try the following steps before spending the money on a replacement.

• Remove the back of the phone and battery right away.
• Try to get both the device and battery dry as possible with a cloth.
• Use a blow dryer to remove the moisture that may have gotten inside.
• Leave your cellphone in a bowl of uncooked rice overnight.
• Leave the battery and the device with the back off out in sun light for an extended period of time.
• Try a replacement battery before replacing the device. Hopefully you have a friend with the same phone or maybe your provider has a shop nearby that would let you use a battery while in the store.

Up until last week I’ve always had to carry around 2 cell phones. A Blackberry 7250 for work which was payed for by my employer, then my personal Motorola Q which I was paying for myself. I was happy with this arrangement because the Blackberry had an unlimited data plan so I could get all my emails (personal and business related) on that device, so it wasn’t necessary for me to have data on my personal phone, which in result kept my personal cell phone bill reasonable.

One of my responsibilities at work is to maintain all the Blackberrys for our reps worldwide and I’ve been doing a good job at it for the past 2 years. Our company recently changed their expense policy so that reps can no longer submit their personal cell phone bills at month end, since we would end up paying for 2 cell phones per rep. We decided to pay for one device per rep, in result saving the company a lot of money. My boss told me to go ahead and port my personal line over to our corporate bill, upgrade my device to the latest model Blackberry and disconnect my current Blackberry. Which was needless to say great news, considering I wasn’t submitting my personal cellphone bill for reimbursement.

So now I have the latest model Blackberry (8830) with voice and unlimited data. I was able to keep my personal phone number which I’ve had for years now, and the best part about it all is I no longer have to worry about paying a monthly cell phone bill.