Ralf’s Blog

I’m now using Mac OS X since 1,5 years, and something that I always wanted to be able to do is to quickly open another Finder window that shows the same path as another one.

Today I discovered how to do this (not exactly obvious, if you ask me!), and here’s how…

Press Cmd-N to open a new window. With the new window being active, click Cmd-Shift-G to open the “Go to the folder” prompt. Press BkSpc to clear the prefilled content. Now activate the window that you would like to “clone.” Click-drag the Folder symbol in the title bar and drag it into the “Go to the folder” prompt. Click “Go” or press Return.

Presto! You cloned your original Finder window.

If you know more hints like this, please do post them here!

A couple of days ago, I booked a journey to Kuala Lumpur and Bali for my wife and me. When it came to paying the travel agent advised me that there would be a surcharge of 0.3% imposed by the tour operator when you pay with credit card — independent of which brand your credit card is.

I was pretty outraged because of the surcharge, because until then I was pretty sure that this kind of charges were expressly forbidden by card acquirers (an “acquirer” is the party which acquires the transacations of the merchant).

Therefore I visited MasterCard’s website in order to investigate their acceptance procedures. I found something very interesting in the MasterCard rules dated 2009-11-06.

In article 5.9.2. it says about “Charges to cardholders:”

A Merchant must not directly or indirectly require any Cardholder to pay a surcharge or any part of any Merchant discount or any contemporaneous finance charge in connection with a Transaction.

Duh!

When I continued to read I found a section “10 Europe Region Rules” where it said the following in “10A.3 Charges to Cardholders:”

Rule 5.9.2 does not apply in the European Economic Area.

So, why is this? Why does MasterCard reserve the right to discriminate their European cardholders compared to their US cardholders? “What have we done to deserve this?”

To Meier’s Weltreisen, the tour operator: Instead of adding surcharges to customers who pay using a credit card (and that will be the absolute majority of all customers), you should recalculate your prices and refrain from playing such dirty tricks.

I recently installed the upgrade to Thunderbird 3.0 on our main PC. In my account, all was fine afterwards, but my wife had a very strange problem: All previously stored passwords seemed lost. TB 3.0 asked for the passwords of all accounts that she had, both IMAP and NNTP. When I started TB 2.0 (which I reinstalled for investigating this issue), all was fine again — apart from the password for the NNTP account, which was incorrect or missing, so I entered it again.

I noticed that now that TB 3.0 was installed, there was a file signons.sqlite in the Profiles folder in addition to the well-known signons3.txt file. I figured that the SQLite file was probably the new password store, which was migrated from the pre-3.0 password store in the TXT file. I further figured that during the migration something probably went wrong (eventually the missing/incorrect/corrupt NNTP password?), so I removed the SQLite file and started TB 3.0 up again. Upon starting up, it recreated the SQLite file, and this time all worked well.

So, if you folks have a similar problem, try the approach I described here. It should not be risky at all, since the TXT will always be the “master” file when migrating from 2.0 to 3.0, so removing the SQLite file will have it re-created again upon next startup.

Two months or so I ordered the Snow Leopard DVD for my Macbook Pro. Finally I had the time to perform the upgrade from Leopard. Before actually doing so, I tried to create a disk image of my current Leopard installation. So I booted the Snow Leopard DVD and ran “Disk Utility” from it. Because the target of that disk image was an external hard drive shared by my team, I wanted to create an encrypted image.

Regardless of whether I selected “128-Bit AES” or “256-Bit AES” as an encryption method, I immediately received the following error message on screen:

Unable to create "Macintosh HD.dmg" (Cannot allocate memory)

What is this trying to tell me? No space on hard drive? Impossible, since the external hard drive is a 2 TB empty drive. Moreover, “memory” usually refers to “main memory”, or “RAM.” So is Disk Utility actually trying to read the whole 200 GB hard drive into the RAM, then encrypting it, and then creating the disk image from it?! I can’t believe that anyone would be that stupid to design a disk imaging program like this…

I finally changed the image format to “Compressed”, and presto, it worked!

Anyway, why, oh why is it so hard to generate “user friendly” error messages? And why does this happen under Mac OS X of all operating systems, supposedly being the “user friendliest” OS in the universe?

This is not the first time I receive such useless error messages in OS X. Hey Apple, care to finally make your homework???

Kürzlich war ich auf einer Geschäftsreise in Schweden. Die Flüge (insg. vier Teilstrecken) hatten wir über Lufthansa gebucht. Durchgeführt wurden sie aber teilweise durch die SAS bzw. Cimber Air.

Nun wollte ich mir diese Flüge nachträglich auf meinem Miles & More-Konto gutschreiben lassen und kontaktierte daher Lufthansa. Als “Antwort” auf meine Bitte um Prüfung, ob und wenn ja welche Flüge angerechnet werden könnten, erhielt ich ein Schreiben mit folgendem Inhalt:

Ihre Meilen erfassen wir immer unter der Flugnummer des Partners, der den Flug durchgeführt hat (Operating Carrier). Handelt es sich um einen Partner der Star Alliance, schreiben wir auch Statusmeilen gut. Nimmt die entsprechende Airline nicht an Miles & More teil, können keine Meilen berücksichtigt werden. Dies ist unabhängig davon, welche Flugnummer auf Ihrem Ticket vermerkt ist.

Nach diesem Schreiben war ich so schlau wie vorher — können nun Flüge angerechnet werden oder nicht? Wenn ja, wie viele?

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Here’s another Cisco VPN client nightmare for you:

The old 4.9.x.x Cisco VPN client does’t run under Vista anymore. So I downloaded the most current version our organization has available, 5.0.05.290. I started the installer and pretty quickly received an error message that simply said: “Internal Error 2738″.

I thought maybe the install file was corrupt, so I redownloaded it — same error.

Now I read the readme file (which I normally don’t do ;-)) It said you need a Microsoft hotfix in order to be able to install the VPN client. So I downloaded that one as well and retried the installation after rebooting the machine — same error message agin.

Damn!

So I googled for this problem and quickly came across this website — which indeed fixed the problem for me.

Thanks, Microsoft, for making such a lousy job of not registering said DLL. And thanks, Cisco, for not pointing your customers to this problem.

Gaaaawd, how I hate monopolies…

…vor Lachen!

Habe mir gerade bei einem lokalen Händler das günstigste externe Festplattengehäuse gekauft, was sie dort im Programm haben, um bequem alte Festplatten löschen und dann entsorgen zu können.

Nur aus Neugier habe ich dann mal die Anleitung durchgeblättert — dabei bin ich dann vor Lachen fast vom Stuhl gefallen. Der Marketing-Spezialist, der diese Anleitung formuliert hat, versteht sein Fach wirklich!!!

Zitat:

Das Siliziumdioxid-Gehäuse ist ein spezielles Material, das sich besonders von einem konventionellen Aluminium-Gehäuse unterscheidet, da es besondere Eigenschaften unter rauhen Bedingungen oder starken Erschütterungen bietet. Die glatte Oberfläche des Gehäuses vermindert Reibung — wodurch ebenfalls ein hoher Datendurchsatz gewährleistet wird. Der Kernteil des Ausgleichssystems ist ein magnetischer Schreib-/Lesekopf, der automatisch ausgeglichen wird und eine besonders hohe Sicherheit bietet.

Herrlich! Da fragt man sich unwillkürlich, was der gute Mensch wohl geraucht hat?!

I just tried to upload some hundreds of vacation photos from Windows Vista to our gallery which I’m hosting on my own root server. It turned out that this would be a not-so-simple task…

Previously, using Windows XP, this would be as simple as

1. invoking the “Web Publishing Wizard” from the “Folder Tasks” pane,
2. clicking “Publish this folder to the web”,
3. optionally selecting a target size for resizing (a copy of!) the photos before you upload them, and finally
4. clicking “Finish” to start the upload.

Not so anymore with Vista!

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My cousin ordered a Dell monitor SX2210, a 21.5″ 16:9 model with a webcam, dual mike-array, FullHD resolution, HDMI connector, and (supposedly) speakers built in.

Getting the webcam working was a no-brainer, but strangely I had massive problems getting the internal speakers running.

After fiddling around for a while with the soundcard’s internal settings under Windoze XP (which I thought might have been incorrect, altho the old monitor’s speakers were working well,) I had the idea to connect my iPod to check whether the speakers are working at all — duh! No sound output at all.

So obviously the speakers were broken. Consequently, we called Dell to inquire about this. And now comes the unbelievable…

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Meine Frau rief mich gestern mit vor Wut bebender Stimme (so habe ich sie bisher sehr selten erlebt!) im Büro an, um sich bei mir über den Paketdienst DPD zu beschweren.

Was war geschehen?

Durch eine Versandmitteilung wussten wir, dass an diesem Tag ein Paket an uns geliefert werden sollte. Meine Frau hatte sich schon sehr auf das Paket gefreut und blieb daher den ganzen Tag zu Hause, um ja nicht die Zustellung zu verpassen.

Als nachmittags das Paket immer noch nicht zugestellt worden war, ging sie zum Briefkasten um nachzuschauen, ob dort eine Mitteilung des Paketdienstes hinterlassen wurde. Und in der Tat fand sie eine solche vor — allerdings war diese offensichtlich nicht vom DPD-Zusteller dort hinterlassen worden, sondern von einer uns unbekannten Familie, die etwa 300 m von uns entfernt in der selben Straße wohnt.

Die Nachricht besagte, dass wir das Paket bei ihnen oder einer anderen Familie — mit dem selben Nachnamen wir wir! — bei ihnen im Haus abholen könnten.

Wie ist das zu erklären? Read the rest of this entry »