Recently, I’ve experimented with some new web sites that have made my job so much easier.
I had a group of people where we all needed to schedule a conference call. Trying to synchronize all 4 of our schedules proved far more difficult than I expected. This service, however, allows everyone to look at their calendar and mark their availability. At the end, you can see where all your schedules overlap and what time(s) work for everyone.
Once we had the conference call scheduled, we had to find a service that would allow us to actually make the conference call. Lame, maybe, but I just googled free conference call and this was the first result that appeared. It proved to be quite helpful. With my free account, not only does it allow me to schedule a conference call and send out invitations, but it also gives me a number where I can create a conference call on demand. At the end, as the administrator, I’m emailed a report of the call.
I’ve heard Leo Laporte advertise this service for a few years on his podcast. I had never had any experience witht he service until a couple weeks ago. I was on a call with a freelance client on the other side of the country. He sent me a Go to Meeting invite. It was super easy to set up. Before long, I was looking at his computer screen where he could easily explain the project and what he needed.
So, I’m a little behind the times… I finally installed Snow Leopard last week.
Two reasons: (1) I knew that if I wanted to upgrade to Lion I would need to upgrade to Snow Leopard first. (2) It was getting to the point that I couldn’t use software / versions were no longer be supported because I was still running Leopard.
I’ll start off by saying nice things:
I ran into a few issues. It took me about a day to get all the kinks worked out. I’ve spent more time the past week in the Terminal than I have in a long time. Fortunately, I’ve waited long enough to upgrade that I was able to Google all my issues and find documentation on everything. So, while I might be repeating information that’s already available on the Internet, I thught I’d document my experience as well.
All the websites I work on I first build locally. It’s so much faster than having to upload files each time I make a change, however large or small. A while back, I wrote about running MAMP on your computer. (MAMP actually survived the upgrade.) MAMP is the easiest solution to getting PHP and MySQL running, but I actually have PHP and MySQL installed.
It’s one of those things that you get up and running once and then you can forget about it. It became painfully obvioius that that’s exactly what I had done: forget about it. I hadn’t looked at it since 2008, when I bought this machine. In 3 years, I’ve definitely slept some.
First off, I know just enough about the Terminal to be dangerous. — And the Terminal is dangerous. You accidentally type the wrong thing and POOF, a directory is gone. So, my fear of the Terminal is probably a healthy one.
So, my issue: I got ready to load one of the sites I had been working on. PHP was fine, MySQL was not. I went to phpMyAdmin to check my databases. Everytime I tried to log in, I got the following message Error #2002 – The server is not responding (or the local MySQL server’s socket is not correctly configured). Great!
Everything that I read on the forums and blogs said that my database files were still there, the link was just broken. I tried running a few things to fix the link. I tried updating the MySQL socket, nothing seemed to work. I was able to cut my loses. Then, I found a post on MySQL’s site. Their story sounded very similar to mine. Their solution (which worked): download and install a program called MacPorts. It keeps MySQL up to date as well as fixed the broken mySQL links — Follow the link because you have to run a few Terminal commands after MacPorts is installed.
The hardest part about installing MacPorts was that it had to have an updated version of XCode running first.
I have an Epson Deskjet 5100. I got this printer for free when I bought my first Mac, a G4 PowerBook in 2004. They were running a special deal. Buy a printer for $99 with a mail-in rebate for $99. Sign me up!
As trusty as that printer has been, Snow Leopard didn’t agree with me. I found an alternate driver (GutenPrint / GimpPrint) that I installed. Since, then it will print like a champ, but it still doesn’t like color. This does the trick for now, but I might be buying a new wireless printer before too long.
I got ready to sync my iPad and it wouldn’t show up in iTunes. Really? I tried plugging in my iPhone. Still nothing. I finally found this post: Mac OS X v10.6 or later: iOS devies not reognized by iTunes after restart. It did the trick. If you’re worried, I didn’t loose any of my media. I just had to delete some preference files. Since then, it hasn’t been a problem.
Honestly, I don’t know if this is related to upgrading or not. As a designer, I use Extensis Suitcase to manage all my fonts. For the non designer, it allows me to have thousands of fonts on my computer without bogging it down. I only activate the fonts I need as I need them.
With the version I have, Suitecase Fusion 2, it has to run Fusion Core (whatever that is). If you look under the System Preferences, you can start and stop the Fusion Core. Well, I couldn’t get it to start. When this has happened in the past, I’ve been able to log out and log back in, or restart my computer and it’s fixed it. But, that didn’t work this time.
I found a post on Extensis’s site talking about a corrupted prefernece file. Again, another Terminal solution. I haven’t had any problems since.
Even though I ran into several hiccups along the way, I wouldn’t go back to Leopard. I might get philsophical for a minute, but anytime there’s change that’s bound to be a some pain. — that’s why they call it growing pains. But, in the end, I think we’re all better for it. There were obviously issues with Leopard, otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten 30GB of my harddrive back when I upgraded!
A few months ago, I got ready to back up an external hard drive with my TimeMachine. — TV Timeout Did you know you could even do that?! To backup an external hard drive, go to *System Preferences > Time Machine. *
Click on the Options button
From the list, make sure the external you’re wanting to back up is not listed. If it is, select it and click on the minus button.
—Anyway, I got ready to back up an external, but it wouldn’t let me remove my external hard drive from the list. That’s weird. Come to find out Time Machine won’t back up a disk FAT formatted. It must be Mac Journaled.
So, what do you do? Well, I moved all the files over to another drive. I’ll just reformat this drive from FAT to Mac Journaled, move my files back, not a problem.
To reformat a drive, you can open Disk Utility. Please be extremely careful with this panel. You can easily do more harm than good.
With the correct drive selected, go to the Erase tab. There, you can select the format, name the drive, and click the Erase button. Sounds straight forward enough. But, every time I tried to change it from FAT to Mac Journaled, I kept getting an error. Come to find out, when you format your drive as a FAT drive, it puts some information on the drive, making it difficult to change down the road. Awesome! What am I supposed to do now?
Well, with a little research I found a work around.
Now, I’m good to put files on the drive and back it up with Time Machine.
By the way, any post that I can talk about an actual Time Machine, you know is going to be a good one!
