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Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton
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2008-10-08Geek Dinner Collection: 2007-09-12 Hanselman Event
Technorati Tags: orcmid, geek dinner, Scott Hanselman, Redmond, Bellevue Crossroads, bloggers, Microsoft [This 2007-09-13 Orcmid’s Live Hideout Post is being recovered from my Live Spaces blog for improved preservation and consolidation. While it is a way to appear to be blogging more regularly, it is also a serious preservation attempt. I want to move off of Live Spaces anyhow, since I can now accomplish all of the same things in a place where I have complete backup and preservation capability. It also happens that there are some threads that were partly over there that I want to build on over here. I did not know that this was more urgent than I realized. It seems the latest Windows Live Writer (or Live Spaces itself) will not let me retrieve previous posts beyond the latest 20. So I am literally scrapping this one off of the blog page. We’ll see how it goes. Scott Hanselman hosted another of his Bellevue Crossroads Geek Dinners this past Monday, 2008-10-06. It is appropriate to retrieve this message while I stall my preparations for a response to Hanselman on a different topic.]
My snapshots from the casual dinner meet-up called by Scott Hanselman with swag by Charlie Owen. Here I play with the thumbnails that Flickr provides, along with the ease of using photos in posts via Live Writer. I do fancy my Live Writer, yes I do. [update 2008-10-09: Along with movement of this post to Orcmid’s Lair, there is also a confirmable-experience moment concerning these digital photos. They appear much darker than on my previous display. This is a noticeable concern and a complex confirmable experience situation. There’ll be something more coherent about that after I manage to calibrate my new monitor for reliable digital-photography work. Oh, I’m also making use of the categories feature and have abandoned any effort to keep cybersmith posts all in one place. Scary.] [update 2007-09-13: Arun Bhatnagar has put his photo set on Flickr. They provide a great demonstration of how the Crossroads Mall building is unusually inviting for socialization and informal meetings.] Labels: confirmable experience, cybersmith, geek dinner, photography Comments: Post a Comment 2007-10-08OpenOffice.org: Another Hot Tip!
[update 2008-10-13 The installer bug observed here is not specific to OpenOffice.org, it seems to be specific to installers. I have not examined this enough to see which installers do this, but I have seen the identical problem with installers of other software. In all cases, the software will correctly place a single-user install under the user who is running the install. But the dialog identifies the wrong user, apparently always showing the User ID for the first user created on the machine.] Technorati Tags: orcmid, OpenOffice.org, OO.o Installer Bug, confirmable experience, trustworthiness When I installed OO.o 2.3 on my sister's computer, I was disturbed that it kept offering her admin account as the single account it would install under, even though we were not running the installer under that account. At my XP SP2 system at home, I installed the same version and I did not have that problem. This time it did name the account I was using, even though it was not my normal administrator account. It was, however, the first account that had been set up on my machine, as was the case for admin on my sister's machine. So I tried again, this time on my Tablet PC and Windows Vista Ultimate. For variety, I also used the OO.o 2.1 Novell edition, installing from CD-ROM. There, I ran into exactly the same problem. I was presented with this dilemma:
Once again, me is not admin. I am doing this install from my standard-user account (SUA). But just to see what would happen, I took that option anyhow. Guess what: This dialog is lying. It will install only for the account being used. The bug is that it doesn't present the correct account name. The behavior is actually correct. So if you are attempting to install OpenOffice.org 2.3 (or the 2.1 Novell Edition) only under the account you are running in, you can ignore the incorrect account name. It will do the right thing. The next time I assist my sister in adding an OpenOffice.org update, I'll be sure to uninstall the current version and then install the new one only for her standard account. Now, you might wonder what the fuss is all about. If you are as obsessive as I am about computer security, you might want to omit all but pure administrative applications from the administrative account, and only ever use the administrative account for essential administrative operations. This means that to have ordinary applications install properly in the ordinary accounts where it is safest to run them I elevate my standard-user account to an administrator account just long enough to install the software and run it the first time under the standard account. This gyration is required because many programs expect to perform final administrative setup operations on the first execution. Setting of registry entries and creation of application data, plus other details, may be specific to the account that is used for the install. I will usually discover the firewall conditioning that is required upon the first execution. From then on, I can use the program as a standard user. When certain programs (e.g., Second Life) install for all users with no other option, I will remove the shortcuts and links placed on the "All Users" desktop and startup menu and place them in the profile information of my standard user account. This is just a little preventative against my foolishly using recreational software from my administrative account. [update 2008-10-13 Moved this post from Orcmid’s Live Hideout to Orcmid’s Lair for better preservation and tie-in to other confirmable-experience and cybergeek topics.] Labels: confirmable experience, cybersmith, interoperability, software usability Comments: Post a Comment 2007-09-24OpenOffice.org: Installation Hot Tip!
Technorati Tags: orcmid, OpenOffice.org, Open Documents, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org Novell edition, OOXML, ODMA [2008-10-08 Another preservation of an Orcmid’s Live Hideout post. This is to have the collection under one blog roof and also along the proper timeline. These posts will not show up the recent-posts lists of surrounding posts, but they can be found in the category archives. My blog archive list has run out of gas and I need to find a way to bring it forward.] Yesterday, I gave my tale of woes around installation of OpenOffice.org 2.3 on my sister's (and then my) computer. Here's the key take-away as a Hot Tip!
[listening to: Pink Floyd, The Wall (1994 Digital Remaster) from Amazon MP3 in Windows Media Player 11 on Windows XP] Labels: confirmable experience, cybersmith, software usability Comments: Post a Comment 2007-09-23Open Office Not Ready for ‘Just Plain Folks’
Technorati Tags: orcmid, OpenOffice.org, Presumptious Software, Using Office Documents, Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office, Vista Home Premium
[2008-10-08 This is another Orcmid’s Live Space post scraped for placement here so that I have a preservation of it. I have put it back in the Lair at the same date (I hope) because it involves an old version of OpenOffice.org and I have not confirmed whether later versions have the same problem. The lesson is important to retain in case I need to bring it up again.]
Her OpenOffice.org Sweet SpotI did not include any Microsoft Office software when I ordered the computer. It came with Microsoft Works by default. My sister, a retired elementary-school teacher has an occasional need to interchange Word documents and, on rare occasion, documents of other Microsoft Office applications. Even though Works no longer includes a version of Microsoft Word, she didn't find it worth increasing the cost of her system from its under-$600 sale price just to have a version of Microsoft Office. I suggested that we set her up with OpenOffice.org for her routine use and as a way to open and create the simple Microsoft Word and other documents that she encounters in her volunteer work. Now that her system is up and running on broadband, it was time to install OpenOffice.org. Uneasy Moments Installing OpenOffice.org 2.3I took her through the download (the site is not novice-friendly and she was thrown by the donation appeal) of the recently-released OpenOffice.org 2.3 version ( a reminder to me that people come to sites for a particular purpose and distractions are unsettling, especially when they are not sure what is going on). It was also distracting to me that the download page says the current stable release is 2.2.1 when I know the download is 2.3 The download went well over her 7.5 Mbps DSL connection. We created an Internet Downloads folder in her Documents, and added an Open Office sub-folder to store the download and anything else in. It was my sister who asked for the folder organization and named the folders that would help her know what's what. I don't use my documents folder for this, but I realized this would work for her: We already set up Windows Live OneCare to save her entire Documents folder on backups, so the downloads of installs would be backed up too. That's handy. There were a number of odd things in the installation process. But we worked our way through it. I think she might have balked if I hadn't been piloting. She actually reads through EULAs (hey, she's my sister), and the LGPL 2.1 is weird enough for a normal user that she might have been distracted by it. The LGPL 2.1 is not really addressed to users that don't develop software and have no particular understanding or concern for the manifesto that occupies most of the text. (She also knows how to create strong passwords and is very careful visiting web sites and installing software. I am very impressed with what my sister has taught herself about safe computing.) When the option to make Open Office applications be the defaults for .doc, .xls, and .ppt files, we checked those boxes because this is going to be her only means to operate with those documents. Then we stumbled on a bug where OpenOffice.org would not install for just the account we were doing the install under. It kept saying that the "this account only" case was for the admin account and not the personal account we were logged into and performing the install under. Not wanting to have it installed only under admin, we finally had to allow it to install for all users to be sure she could use it from her ordinary account. That is not what either of us wanted. The installation completed successfully. The first-run of OpenOffice.org Writer (with even the names of these applications, with the .org extension, being too geeky for plain folks) forced her through a second acceptance of the EULA (just the LGPL 2.1 license and disclaimer) that requires you to scroll to the end before the "accept" button is activated. If you didn't know that, you'd be stuck right here. Anyhow we did that, and went to the OpenOffice.org site to "register." At the invitation to complete a survey, she closed the browser instead. All right, sis! What's This Crap Here?We did some display-setting adjustments and admired our handiwork on the wide-format LCD display of the new system. I suddenly noticed that there was a folder on the desktop left over from the install. When the downloaded "OOo_2.3.0_Win32Intel_install_wJRE_en-US.exe" file announced that it was going to unpack the installation setup into a folder, I failed to notice that the default choice for the setup files was on the desktop. So we had a stray "OpenOffice.org 2.3 Installation Files" folder cluttering up her desktop. [If Dare Obasanjo reads this on return from his honeymoon, he'll know exactly the trouble I'm about to get my sister into.] Oh Professor, Don't Touch That Button! ... OopsHaving one geek gene (but not two), I saw no reason to keep 109 MB of installation files lying around, especially on the desktop. We are already keeping the original 120 MB download file so that can be used to re-install OO.o 2.3 if necessary, right? I deleted the folder from the desktop. Nothing bad happened (yet). Satisfied, we went shopping, had dinner, and I returned home. Emergency, Emergency, Please Read My Letter!Two days later, after my usual weekly tune-up process, I decided to update my OpenOffice.org 2.0 configuration to OpenOffice.org 2.3 also. I wanted to see if the same glitches happened for me, and confirm that the default for Save and Save As ... of documents opened from Microsoft Office formats was to store back in Microsoft Office format. It is, so my sister won't have to do anything special to round-trip Microsoft Office Documents that land on her computer. But I also found out that those folders of Installation files are needed (well, about 6MB of them are needed) if you ever want to remove or update a version of Open Office. I didn't save mine and my OpenOffice.org 2.3 would not install. Before I managed to get that to work, I had even crippled the existing OpenOffice.org 2.0 software and I could neither remove it, upgrade it, or use it. Three hours later I stumbled back from my near-death experience with a correct upgrade. It was a close call. It is also a very stupid installation procedure. Stupid, stupid, stupid. So, here is how my sister gets out of having any future update or removal of OpenOffice.org 2.3 crippled: From: Dennis E. Hamilton So I installed it on mine (I had an older version already installed) and discovered some difficulties. Here is what you need to do. 1. While in your regular account, open your recycle bin. Just double-click on the icon on your screen. 2. You are looking for a folder with name "OpenOffice.org 2.3 Installation Files" 3. When you find that folder in the recycle bin, don't look inside. Just right click on it. 4. On the little menu that comes down, click "Restore". 5. The folder should then appear on your desktop. That is where I deleted it on Thursday. 6. You need to keep this folder. - - - - - - - It is just stupid that they put it on your desktop and it is also stupid that you need to keep the whole thing around. However, we will do the easy thing and hold onto it. Otherwise, you may have trouble updating OpenOffice.org or even removing it in the future. (I learned this the hard way on Saturday.) Here is my recommendation for putting it away out of sight in a place where it can be found later. 7. Open your "Documents" folder. 8. In that folder, open the "Internet Downloads" folder that we created. 9. Open the "Open Office" folder that we created there (I don't remember its exact name). 10. Shrink or adjust the window that you have open so you can also see the "OpenOffice.org 2.3 Installation Files" folder icon on your desktop. 11. Drag the folder icon into the opened-up "Open Office" folder. (Dragging is by putting the mouse over the icon and holding down the left-mouse button. While still holding down the button, move the mouse cursor over to the document area of the "Open Office" folder above an open space. Release the mouse button. In a moment, the folder should show up inside that folder and no longer be on your desktop. Problem solved. You will need to remember this the next time you install an update for Open Office. We'll worry about that then. 12. If your recycle bin has been cleaned up and the Installation Files folder is no longer there, something more elaborate has to be done. I'll want to come over to work through that with you. For now, I'm hoping that you find it in your recycle bin and that the above procedure makes sense and works for you. If you are uncomfortable doing this, I can talk you through it on the phone and confirm what you are seeing at each step before going onto the next. Love, - Dennis Labels: confirmable experience, cybersmith, software usability Comments: Post a Comment |
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