Office Mac 2008 service pack 1 install (SP1)

Microsoft are out to frustrate me again.

I'm building a machine for a customer and while trying to install Office 2008 I keep running into this problem.

The initial install goes OK which is version 12.0. Upgrading to SP1 installs about 8 or 12 K and says it's done but none of the apps are updated. I done the remove office and that doesn't clean out the /Library/Receipts folder of the 12.1 install so I pulled those out as well and started from scratch. Still no joy SP1 refuses to install. Any one else come across this? The machine is already up to 10.5.8 to maybe that is too high for SP1.

I've sent office back and we're using OpenOffice for the moment. It's a standby machine and only gets used occasionally but it would be nice to get it sorted. Or maybe I'm missing the jab by karma to move to OpenOffice :-)

5 minutes later...

Typical you always notice something after posting. Clear out the /private/tmp folder of anything to do with the SP1 update and it works. There was Office2008_en_quit_12.1.0.combo.pkg.somehash and com.microsoft.updater/ in mine.

Young Girl-Old Woman Illusion

And now for something completely different...

I saw this again recently and it's always failed to click for me. I can see the young girl but never the old woman..

Then I found the trick: tip you head to the left (right in the northern hemisphere? :-) )and the old woman pops out. Ah ha finally!

This link has several versions.. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/YoungGirl-OldWomanIllusion.html

Normal service resumes..

Entourage and proxies

Grrr.. another Microsoft making their own rules.

I have a customer with Entourage which stopped working. OWA worked through Safari (note this part...) but Entourage just showed not connected.

They have a web proxy and an exclusion for the Exchange server. But not for Entourage it seems. netstat showed connections to the proxy but it does not work via the proxy. At the same time Safari had connections directly to exchange.

Turned out Entourage checks each search domain and then adds that one before checking the bypass list. So everything else worked with the just the host name in the bypass list but you need the FQDN for Entourage to bypass the proxy..

Formula 1 needs viagra

sigh.. I used to love Formula 1 racing. It used to be the pinacle of motor racing.

I still remember the awesoem noise of a Ferrrari V10 doing 17000 RPM pulling out of the hairpin where we were sitting.

Now the FIA have made it a limp pathetic display. I'm not sure how much of this is due the the Max and Steve ego race but it's embarrasing to even say you used to follow F1 now.

Hopefully next year with the teams more of the direction we'll have something better. Open the budgets, let them inovate and put the technology on the cars.

Weird Mac Problem...

A co-worker came to me with a weird one. She said her Mac wouldn't let her delete files unless they were created today.

So we checked it out. Sure enough files and folders on the Desktop and other places we tried gave and error hfs_swapBTNodeoffset 66 and 67 out of order error -36.

The console gave a us a clue: it said on the volume sam. Curious. Further checking showed she was using FileVault and it seems to be a file mounted at login (like loop) that is an encrypted file system. So I tried turning off FileVault and got an error saying we needed another 4053GB to remove it (yes 4TB on a MacBook with a 60GB drive) so maybe there is some corruption there.

However even though it didn't turn off, this seemed to fix the problem. We'll see tomorrow if it still works but it look as if when she logs out filevault does something to the files and they can no longer be deleted.

Gnome screensaver stopped working

This one was weird. I run my home machine on Gentoo 95% of the time and a while back the Gnome screensaver just stopped working. Usual problem; I'd made a few changes at the same time. So was it an update, a change, settings, solar flares?

After some playing and testing it was an update but one that I'd not followed the instructions on and had caused me some other problems. Python had been updated from 2.5 to 2.6 and I noticed a few things wouldn't compile and I had to re do the python modules to make them work.

Turns out there is a nice python-updater program that does the work for you. So give that a go if your screensaver just stops.

Cisco taking on HP...

I think it's going to be interesting in a good way. I like Cisco gear. I push it where possible.

I think the infrastructure Cisco has will be what makes it succeed. If they stick to VMs, blades or rack servers and SANs they should be fine and good competition to add to the market.

I'm a network engineer. If I get on the phone with Cisco I will have a replacement for a dead router on my doorstep usually within two hours. I hear the server guys taking two hours just getting through to the HP call centre in India then then another two hours getting their problem across and it goes downhill from there...