Breaking Windows

Man, when it rains it pours! We have had major hard drive issues this summer, but that is another blog post. We just got AdManager Pro 4 installed, and have been using it for about two weeks, though only one week of "real world" use.

Yesterday it started making an odd noise, and crashed. I got it working again but this morning it was not working; blinking question mark icon. It must have crashed again before 11 PM, because that is when the automatic database backup goes off, and we have no backup for 8/16.

After BGSU ITS replaced the hard drive, I was on the phone to MediaSpan to get FrontBase and the AMPServer all setup and running.

What a long day, especially after being in the newsroom late making sure the Freshman Edition went out the door smoothly.

Sadly we have to re-enter a day's worth of ads. And yesterday was about the busiest day of the year.

There is no reason for that iMac hard drive to go bad in two weeks. Like I said, when it rains it pours.

So Brandon just wrote on my Wall (on Facebook, about a week ago now) asking if I left the news. Must have seen my Status about working for myself now.

Me leave the news? Come on, you have got to be joking!

I do work there less, yes, but I am still working for Student Publications.

It just so happens that the majority of my time is spent at my office in downtown BG (133 N. Prospect St. -- stop by!) and not in the newsroom.

I work with two print designers, and I handle web and database development. I have finally, after five years, taken my company (Meancode Media, LLC) out of my apartment. I could not be happier with the arrangement.

So, if you need a web site or web hosting, you know who to call :P (Shameful plug, I know)

Last week was a long work week for me. Not only did I have training from 9-5, but then I had to get web work done after that. MediaSpan training went well though, and now our Advertising department is out of OS 9, which is such a blessing.

It is going to be great to not have to support OS 9 any more, I cannot express how much I have been looking forward to this day.

Of course I will now get a lot of OS X questions, because it is very new to those working in our Advertising department, but it is much easier to support something that you use every day. Especially considering I have not used OS 9 for at least six years now.

I was not present when they did the training in 1997 for AdManager Pro 2 (I had to chose between learning Editorial or Advertising, and I chose Editorial) so now I have a much better understanding of how AMP works.

Two big jumps at once, AMP 2 to 4 and OS 9 to X, similar to when Editorial jumped from Quark and OS 9 to InDesign and OS X.

We are also getting Liners Online, which will allow people to purchase classified ads right on our site. This will be installed soon.

I sure love this desktop replacement program the university has. Eight more of our oldest machines get traded in, and we get new iMacs.

This time they are dual proc, 20" Intel 2.16 Ghz, with 2 GB of RAM. They will be distributed as needed around Student Publications. The most needed spot is for our Advertising, which is getting a substantial upgrade next week.

The oldest of the old we gave back was a pink iMac. That is a 233 Mhz G3 with maybe 512 MB of RAM (which is a lot for that old system).

Not only did I get a raise, I got a raise on my birthday. How cool is that? And it looks like a lot is going on this summer at Student Publications. We will be upgrading our advertising software out of Mac OS 9 (thank God) and moving away from FoxPro (thank God). The new system will be running under OS X and a MySQL database with a Tomcat server.

Sure, you might not have a clue what I just said, but let me make this much clear: Mac OS 9 died at WWDC in 2002. For those playing at home, that was five years ago. I hate supporting Mac OS 9 almost as much as I hate Flash sites.

We are also set to get new computers thanks to the university's desktop replacement program - though I am not yet sure how many will get replaced. Usually its about six computers.

There is also this super top secret project that I can't talk about yet. But its gonna be a lot of fun. More on it when the time comes.

The BG News has a blog! They are only five years late! Yay!

I have been pushing The News to get blogging for years now. They are finally testing the waters. I hope that I am not the only one who contributes. So far, five staffers have access to the blog, other than me. Only time will tell.

It is powered by Word Press, which is something I like, even though I am much more at home in Movable Type. But hey, it wasn't in charge of which blog platform the College Publisher network uses.

The other new feature we (and by we, of course I mean I) added to the site is a co-branded video site featuring video from the AP.

Hit up The BG News' site and scroll past the navigation. You will see a rotating Flash clip with the top videos.

At first the site didn't work on a Mac, then it crapped out in Safari. I was not happy. I am quite happy the site now works on a Mac, and in Safari too. Check it out, because we make money off of it (and by we, I do not mean myself - sadly).

Matt Clark made this video. He did a great job!

Last week was a FUBAR. That is the only way to describe it. Without going into detail, and boring the hell out of all you, our file server crashed -- hard.

I had to replace the internal drive that had the operating system. I also had to use DiskWarrior to resurrect the main firewire drive. The only way to salvage data off of one of the other external drives was Data Rescue II (DiskWarrior could not even help me with that one.

Yea, good news! That was the subject of an email I got on 8/28. Let me kindly remind you that mtvU bought out Y2M (College Publisher) on August 3. Nice work keeping your clients in the know guys.

What follows is the dry email, but it does contain some good info of what we can expect soon on bgnews.com.

We (and by we, of course I mean I) are rolling out new features on bgnews.com. We are now comfortably moved into the College Publisher system (albeit reluctantly) and now is a great time to introduce new things. Once I get all the new stuff online, I will have the paper write a nice feature about our web site!

Starting a couple weeks ago, when semester started, is the inclusion of "Today's Cover" posted at night, before the paper goes to press. This is a PDF of the front page, so that people up late can see the next day's front page. It is like a bonus for those who surf late.

The following day, that PDF is replaced with the full PDF of the paper, making it even easier to find the entire paper in PDF. I have effectively reduced finding the daily PDF archive to zero clicks.

Be sure to check it out, it is under the main navigation in the left column.

I have logged over 40 hrs. in just four days this week (today was a short day, as I only worked 12 hrs.). No, I am not trying to break a record, or kill myself -- I had exactly three days to take a design comp for a newspaper, complete production, and implement it for The BG News.

The paper went down tonight. It looks great. There are still some styles that need tweaked and added, a bulk of the library created, and I still have to fix up the almost useful style book, but the brunt of the work is over.

I love it when stuff like this is dropped in my lap like this. At least if I knew it was coming, I would have prepared for it.

This week we got four new-to-us iMacs. And this time they are scott free. Usually with the desktop replacement program, we have to give up an old one.

We were going to purchase four new Intel-based iMacs, we even put in the order. The university said they could save us the money as they had four G5-based 17 inch iMacs.

That is quite possibly the nicest thing they have ever done, especially this summer.

Yes, it is still Sunday. But I just put in 12 hrs. at Student Publications. What a way to start the week. This might explain the lack of blogging.

MTVU, an MTV Networks-owned channel geared toward college students, has purchased Youth Media & Marketing Networks (Y2M). Y2M owns College Publisher, which provides Web-based publishing and content management software geared toward online student newspapers. It counts approximately 450 colleges among its clients

Source: CNET News.com

BGSU is one of those clients. As you might know by reading this blog, I have been involved with bgnews.com since it launched in 1997. We have never really switched service providers. They always get bought out by someone else.

Because of BGSU's Desktop Replacement Program, we recently got six new Intel iMacs. We had to give up six iMacs to get them, but those were seven years old! I don't mind that trade one bit.

These are 2 Ghz Dual Core Intel, 2 GB of RAM, 20" display, AirPort Extreme, ATI X1600, and SuperDrive. This is a step up from our 2 Ghz G5 17" iMacs, but I wonder how the Adobe and Macromedia software will run emulated.

The only bad news is that I have to configure them all separately. For "security reasons" the university will not give me the install discs to make my own image, which is what I do with all of our PowerPC based Macs.

Less than 20 minutes and I can clone any of the computers here at Student Publications. This is also how I handle troubleshooting, at least with the PPC based Macs. If one computer has a problem, I do not waste time trying to fix it, I just re-image that computer. It looks like I will not be able to do that with these new Intel Macs because of a change in university policy.

If we had more than six, the IT department would help out with making a Radmind image, but with only six, there is no help. This is total BS, but something I will have to live with.

Of course this means I have to install all of Student Publication's software, including six user accounts each, on every stinking computer. Now that just sounds like fun.

Oh, they also will not give me the main admin account password. Again, for "security reasons." So now the computer is cluttered up with two different admin accounts. Thanks.

University bureaucracy is really wearing me thin, to be honest.

Last week I got to see the new bells and whistles in the new version of Rhythmyx Percussion. I don't know the exact number, but I believe BGSU upgraded one full version cycle, I know it was an immense leap.

Ahh yes, it is good to get back to the geeky posts, isn't it.

I just found this out the hard way. I use Carbon Copy Cloner (thanks so much Mike Bombich) and Apple System Restore in my day job a lot. It allows me to clone a new Mac in about 15 minutes, and that is with about 10 GB of data.

Mac OS X 10.4.6 prevents me from even using 'sudo' to execute the 'asr' command in Terminal. My handy AppleScript even fails.

It turns out that you need to run the 'asr' command in a root shell, or login to the system as root. If you ask me, this is something that you should not have to do. As any BOFH will tell you, using root to do anything is not a good idea.

And I am not about to leave a root password in a "do shell script" AppleScript, as I don't even like putting in an admin password in there. Even though adding "user name "username" password "password" with administrator privileges" to the end seems to work if you enable root in OS X, and use that user in the script.

Using root allowed me to continue my ASR cloning as I always have in every previous iteration of OS X.

To make matters worse, you get an odd-ball error. The "Permission denied" error makes sense, but not the "Validating target" error. Why? Because in this case the Target had nothing on it, it was in fact a newly formatted HFS+ volume. The "The target volume will not be bootable" is also a little odd too. I chalk this up as another oddity of OS X/BSD integration.

See the entire CLI dump after the break.

This is as simple as they come. After a week of trying different things when we got a new HP 5100ntd, we had flaky printing from any number of applications.

After calling HP, the solution was to force the printer to use the HP 5000 Series drivers, as there are serious issues with the 5100 Series drivers for OS X. I was told that HP had no plans yet to address the problem. But hey, if you want to call and complain that wouldn't hurt.

Using the 5000 Series drivers is our only option, and have had no problems at all.

On a technical note, we have had better success with LPD printing with the 5100, even though IPP printing worked fine with our 5000 Series printers.

As soon as the Xbox 360 game console was released in the United States last month, the media filled with reports of widespread problems with the system overheating and crashing — but those reports may have been overblown.

Source: BG News

I posted this here for two reasons. I think Dan did a good job on it, and Matt was interviewed for it. And as much as he though he was, he does not sound like an idiot in his quotes that Dan used. So good choice of the quotes Dan!

I have to say, I am still getting the error messages telling me to put the game disc in a Xbox 360. I have to give it 20 minutes with XBL Arcade, that or twiddle my thumbs, then I can play my next game. That is just lame. The next time it happens I am going to call Microsoft.

This is quite old news, but I wanted to post it anyways. During Homecoming weekend this year (September 30th - October 1st) The BG News held their 85th Anniversary Reunion with festivities Friday and Saturday.

Every fall we start with two rather large newspapers. It seems odd that you would put a fresh staff through such torture, but it is when we have the highest readership and therefore the most ad revenue. For the new writers and designers it is a gantlet.

This is my first web site using Movable Type as a back end. MT is great to work with, as it is much more then a blogging tool. The BG News Alumni Society was recently formed, and now they have a site. It has been up in some form or another for a couple months now, but it is now mostly complete. The last thing I need to do is make the MailMan templates look nice. Plus some other small tweaks.

It took the most work to take the SMARTY templates of The BG News site and convert them to MT templates.

The BG News is having its 85th anniversary this year. I put together my first PayPal shopping cart for this site. PayPal is really great to use for Point Of Sale (POS) work.

I know it is almost time for a new school year when we have our annual training session. It is time to train all the new people on how to use InDesign and our work flow to put The BG News together every day.

This time went better then others. In the past year I have been doing a lot to make the News' staff job a lot easier. Last year I overhauled out style guide, as well as supplement the InDesign library with even more drag-and-drop parts.

I still have a list of things to edit before we start classes in three weeks.

Dashboard Widgets in Tiger are really easy to create. Especially when there are so many examples (400+ according to Steve Jobs) you can take apart. If you install the Tiger Developer Tools, you get a blank Widget, as well as a folder full of examples.

Making an RSS reading Widget is pretty simple. Just rip apart another RSS widget. I will make one for Breaking Windows soon enough. First here is one for The BG News. I will post it on bgnews.com soon enough.

BG News.wdgt.zip

Every couple years the University's IT department (ITS) has a Desktop Replacement Program. We give up old computers and get new ones. Its a sweet deal. As we put a little more then $10,000 into new computers two years ago, its nice to get seven brand new iMac G5s and not have to pay for them. This is the second time we have received new, free computers.

We recieved three free computers in the ITS Replacement Program in July of 2004. At that time my boss only thought we would get one. I asked for three, and got them. Yep, I was happy.

Chelsea Snyder, opinion editor of The BG News, was fired early Wednesday morning for plagiarizing much of her column on Tuesday, April 26.

This was brought to the attention of Editor-in-Chief Carrie Whitaker late Tuesday evening by an online reader, who found distinct similarities in an opinion post on www.somethingawful.com.

Source: BG News

This is wild, it is just so shocking. Earlier this week I had to pull her column off the web site, I got a call from Carrie and it was something I thought I would never hear! You can only read Chelsea's column in the PDF archive for the 26th. You can also read Chelsea's apology in today's letters to the editor.

I have bought two Nikon Coolscan V ED film scanners for Student Publications. This has been a long time coming. We have a couple SprintScan 35s that we bought off of eBay years ago. The SprintScan is SCSI, and we now only have one SCSI capable Mac in The BG News currently. And one more in The KEY Yearbook. Not to mention that OS X does not really like SCSI. Add to that the fact that Polaroid does not even make OS X drivers, and you can start to see my headache with the SprintScan 35.

Harris & Baseview on Friday released IQue Server 4.0, an editorial solution that includes a MySQL database, a JBoss application server and a cross-platform NewsEditPro IQue client.

Source: MacCentral

We do not use IQue at The BG News, it simply costs to much. We use the non-IQue version of their NewsEdit Pro editorial software. It is great that they finally ported IQue over to MySQL and JBoss though. The previous version uses FoxPro and I have, unfortunately, had *fun* experiences with that. It should also be a lot more stable under MySQL and JBoss, though if you know how stable NEP and iQue are, you are not holding your breath. We can all hope, right?

The more important change here is that you can run MySQL and Java under Mac OS X very well. This will allow a lot of small and medium sized newspapers that use Harris/Baseview's workflow to upgrade to OS X. I know if I was running IQue Server, I would not want to be running them under Mac OS 9.

I cannot wait to get this new design live for bgnews.com. There are a few more small things to fix up. I need to attend to the CSS for the Classifieds module.

We are running a national ad on bgnews.com right now for Bush-T.org. Digital Partners does not have to tell us when a national ad campaign is running, but it was nice to allow us to opt-out if we choose because of its political nature.

The image of Bush pissing on the world is a little crude, but it is humorous. We are running the ad on the site, by the way. Our Advertising Manager didn't care for it but the Advisor green lighted it.

The site sells T-shirts for $15 and 50% of net proceeds will be donated to MoveOn.org to help Kerry defeat Bush.

So go buy a Bush-T!

This fall I have 2 classes. Art History 146 (Western) at 8 freaking 30 in the AM on M W and F. I took that over the 3 hr. class one day a week. The second class is Economics 200 at 10:30 AM on M W and F. I am not gonna complain about that 8:30 Art History class (too much) as my classes are done by 11:20. I haven't been posting much lately because we have just put out the 2 biggest papers of the year. Both the Freshman and Welcome issues of the BG News are 36 pages. The new system works, and works well. This is a major success for me as the hardware, software, and new templates and libraries were all overhauled by me this summer. The process for both editorial and production is also new. It all went well. These 12 and 14 page papers will be a walk in the park after two 36 pagers! I am just so proud of all the students involved, because they had to learn a new workflow and a new software package, InDesign, in a very short period of time. The students have done great, and these first two papers look great. I have to give them a lot of credit on a job well done, and I think they will do even better work as they become more familiar with InDesign. I originally though that teaching InDesign would be harder then Quark. I was wrong. Teaching InDesign is so much easier. And I am very thankful for that. I keep tweaking the templates and libraries. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but as I found out the templates and libraries we use needed a lot of work. I still have things to fix, and I find more little things as we produce more papers. I made a long list of things to fix Thursday when we put together the Freshmen issue. I will fix those this week. If that isn't enough for my first day of college this fall, our Student Publications graduate student is starting work today. I have plenty of work that she can help with, mostly web sites that need attention. More on that later.

Technically moving documents from Quark 4 to InDesign CS (IDCS) is an easy transition. Quark 4 files open in IDCS just fine. Styles and Libraries are a different thing all together. However some of the objects on the documents came over to IDCS with some weirdness to them. This is a "real world" account of moving from Quark 4 to InDesign CS. Just because we are a college newspaper does not mean our production process is any easier or less complicated then a newspaper with a much larger circulation in a small or large city. I have seen first hand newspapers in different markets, and that myth is not true at all.

You may want to read the first part of this series.

DOCUMENTS: We use many templates for front and inside section pages. Opening these in IDCS had all but no ill effects. The one problem was the weird runaround on objects. Even though the Text Wrap palette in IDCS says there is none on the objects. This happened on both text and picture boxes. I had a lot to do, so the things that did not absolutely need to be recreated didn't get special treatment. Later I might recreate all page objects "the right way." This amounts to about 4 points of margin on the inside of the text boxes. That is not good when you are trying to align headlines with body copy, photos, and other page objects that need to align to a strict grid. I checked in Quark, to see if the original objects had a small runaround value on them. None of them did. This weird runaround was on all objects, not just ones on the templates themselves, but also objects from our library. For objects that are center aligned, this 4 point "margin" is no problem. I had to, however, recreate all objects that have left or right aligned text in them. The picture boxes that were brought over from Quark to IDCS had runaround applied to the outside, not the inside like the text boxes. In most cases that is not a problem, so I did not have to recreate many picture boxes. Now here is another wrinkle in this mess. Some text boxes came over to IDCS with no runaround (the way they should) but this was too few and way too far between to be called a trend. I do not know if this peculiar runaround (now called text wrap in IDCS) is something that always happens when moving Quark documents to ID, I cannot imagine it happens all the time. I have not had the time to test this myself by making a new document in Quark 4 and bringing it into IDCS. I imagine when I get a chance to try that out, I will not see runaround on the objects. I will have to see. I don't even have OS 9 on my TiBook much less Quark 4, so I will have to try this out at work tomorrow. In this case, I had to pretty much recreate every template. That was not a fast process. But then none of this went by quickly. Recreating most all text boxes on the templates took the least of my time, however. LIBRARY: Quark documents will open in IDCS. Quark libraries on the other hand, will not. I also have a rant about how the IDCS library works, but that is another post. The only solution is to drag all the objects from the Quark library into Quark documents. Then opening those Quark documents in IDCS and creating a IDCS library. We have many, many items in our library. Mostly everything needed to create the newspaper is in our library. After making the IDCS library I realized the runaround problem on all the text objects. Of course it happened in that order. Minor details. STYLES: All the styles had little disk icons next to their names when brought into IDCS from Quark 4. This means the style is an imported style. Imported styles are bad, very, very, bad. I had to recreate every style. We use somewhere between 40 and 50 different paragraph styles. We used no character styles. Yet with all the imported Quark 4 templates and normal documents I now have a Normal character style. It is set to Helvetica (which is the default font in Quark 4). Everything that is not set with a paragraph style is assigned this Normal character style. This means all the objects used to recreate our library as well, all have Normal assigned to them. This would not be such a big problem but when I go assigning paragraph styles, or an actual character style, I get weirdness as the paragraph styles do not work because it is competing with Normal. I had to go through and kill the Normal character style all over the place. CONCLUSION: I now know of many of the side effects when bringing a document from Quark to InDesign. I know there are many more, but these are the problems I faced while getting everything ready to publish the paper in IDCS. I now know that the first thing to do is delete the Normal character style first. Doing that first, not third, is the way to go. I don't know how to prevent any of the other headaches I encountered taking our newspaper from Quark to InDesign. As much of a pain in the rear this was, it was needed. I have not done so much as touched InDesign before this summer. So to that end, I needed to learn IDCS hyper fast. The Total Training DVD's we bought help, but not as much as fixing up these templates to work smoothly. More to come on this transition soon...

Today was the first of two 4 hr. training sessions I am conducting for the students who will be putting the paper together this fall. Paul, from Unigraphics and Carrie, our Editor in Chief this fall, also helped a lot during the training. I am obviously not the only one who hates using Quark. They were all eager to learn the new software and new system. The thing I am amazed at so much is the fact that the students are picking up InDesign very fast. And more important than that is the fact that they like using InDesign. Its not that I don't have faith in our News staff, I have just never taught InDesign to anyone before, and I have heard from different sources that InDesign is much harder to teach then Quark. I think that statement is wrong, completely wrong. Monday our two production interns come in for training. Hopefully that will go as smoothly as the News' training has. Wednesday we have our second training session for The News. Hopefully those who could not make it to today's training can make it Wednesday. The best part about today's training, besides getting the students feet wet in InDesign, is having folks in the newsroom that can tell me what I forgot to make. I missed a few library items and a couple paragraph styles. I hope Wednesday's session will turn up a couple more items I missed. There is always something. But right now I have all of the templates, styles and library complete. That is a great feeling.

I have been wanting to refresh the site design for a while now. I want a CSS based template. But I have no time to do this right now, just like I have not time to work on the Unigraphics Invoicing System at the moment. All my energy is being spent on this InDesign switchover and all that entails (another post entirely). Those folks at Digital Partners are making my life a bit easier. They have a bunch of new template designs. While I do not like using cookie cutter designs, the BG News site needs a revamp because a) I don't like how it looks anymore and more importantly, b) the IAB has some funky new ad banner sizes. Please tell me which template you like the best. My current favorites is Layout 4: Skin 5. I can put the BG News flag in the upper left, since it is not a wide flag like most the other designs accommodate, and I will use orange and blue as the colors. The only thing I think the template needs is a tile to the RSS feed under the AvantGo tile. Is there another template you like? Let me know, post a comment.

We did it. No I did it. And I am very proud of all the hard work. I have put in long hours each day. But the main transition, or phase 1, is complete. I have revamped both the layout process of the Editorial and Production of The News. If that isn't enough, Mac OS 9 is out for Mac OS X, G3's are out for G4's and a G5, and Quark 4 is out for InDesign CS. And if that isnt enough, all our Baseview software (newspaper software) had to be updated to work in OS X, and I also updated out file server to Panther (10.3) Server. This recipe consists of: 2x 500 GB Lacie Big DIsk Firewire Hard Drives 13x 800 Mhz eMacs for BG News, Production, Obsidian, Gavel, and Unigraphics 1 PowerMac G5 for Production 20 seat of Adobe CS Premium with PageMaker Plugin Pack 5 seat of Extensis Suitcase X1 Baseview upgrades (NewsEdit Pro, Admin Pro, DragIn, CopyTools, WireManager Pro) Panther Server upgrade Retrospect Server upgrade Total Training for Adobe CS apps, plus Acrobat 6 The eMacs and G5 were purchased last summer, when this transition was originally going to take place. Everything else was purchased this summer. We originally were going to buy the software last summer, but ended up spreading it out over 2 summers. As you can see from the above list, this is a heck of a lot of variables to be changing at once. I seriously suggest to never attempt any transition with this many variables. Unfortunately (or fortunately) this is one of those all or nothing type deals. Going in I did not think it would work. Not that I do not have faith in myself, but because I know there is never enough time to do things "the right way" and corners are usually cut to get things done. Now that all is complete I am amazed that it all worked without problems at all. Some small snags reared their heads, but all in all everything went A OK. Server Panther Server was the first thing to get working. I have been running 10.1 Server since it came out a couple years ago. It has not been updated just because it has ran and not needed kicked (imagine that, its a Mac). I got to the point where using 10.1 was slowing me down. You cannot administer 10.1 Server remotely via the Server Admin software when the client machines (and more importantly my laptop) are running 10.3). Panther Server is a lot faster, and the Admin apps are far superior to those found in 10.1, hands down. Of course there is no direct way to import users and groups from 10.1 Server to 10.3 Server. That would have been too easy. I got over that fact and recreated all the users and groups. After so long at letting 10.1 Server sit, I needed to clean up the users anyway. For a period of about 6 months we were growing dangerously close to not having enough disk space for all publications and Unigraphics. We were deleting or burning files on Friday to have room on Monday. The file backup process was also becoming out of control. We were using an AIT tape drive, which can take 30 GB native and 60 GB compressed. Our backup had become a 3 tape backup, ballooning from a 1 tape backup in short order. Since we bought the AIT tape drive the cost of Firewire drives has come down so far it is no longer cost effective to use AIT tapes. Not to mention that a 3 tape backup is not the most convenient thing. Now the most important files (60 GB or less) are put on AIT tape, and the full server backups are done to Firewire disk. Three Freebies Thanks to the University's Desktop Replacement Program, we had to give up a PowerMac 7100/66 and 2 Beige 266 Mhz G3's for 3 shiny new 17" Flat Panel iMacs, 1.25 Ghz with SuperDrives. This ended up great as I need to run a new (OS X) version of WireManager Pro because the tagging of the AP News is different into InDesign then the tagging is in Quark. And a 7100/66 would not cut it for too much longer anyhow. Of course since we no longer have a ADB (Serial) Mac, I need a Keyspan Serial to USB Adapter. That has been ordered. The AP Wire will be back up and running soon. Luckily we have access to a AP News Rerun web site that is as current as the text that comes down the satellite. I tell you it was not hard trading those 3 Beige Boxes. Oh the new FP iMacs each came with a 256 MB USB thumb drive too. Gravy. To Be Continued...

Just in time for Tiger Server, I have installed Panther Server at Student Publications. We bought a "Quicksilver" 733 Mhz G4 with 10.0 Server and I quickly updated it to 10.1 Server when it came out. Things have been busy, and since it has been working, I have not updated the server to Panther until now. I just got flipping tired of using 10.1 on our file server. I also saw the new admin tools in Panther Server (they are a major improvement).

Finding the time to upgrade the server is an entirely different matter entirely. Making the purchase was the easy step. You cannot (easily) take users and groups from 10.1 to 10.3 Server. I do not know why this is, but thats the way it is. No lost sleep here, I am simplifying user log ins anyways.

It is SO NICE to have Panther Server up and running for our file/print server.

Did you ever thing that a 1 TB (yes, terabyte) firewire drive would cost only $1200? That is a pretty good cost per MB price, isn't it. Well when we needed the drives Lacie was not selling their 1 TB drive yet, but they were selling their 500 GB drives. Same price, imagine that.

We were getting severely low on HD space. Throwing files out Friday to be able to work Monday. Not fun at all. We have 120 GB in the Quicksilver (10K RPM), and 2x120 GB external. You might think that would be enough space but when you have a dozen publications being produced at some point during the year plus Unigraphics, there are always space problems. But now Unigraphics has the room to really have their photo archive and graphics archive they really need to have online.

The next time we need another TB, I bet the price will come down by at least 1/3. Since I have so much file space to work with now, I am no longer backing up to AIT tape, I will probably be putting that up on eBay. It is alot nicer backing up to firewire, it is a lot faster for one. I recycled our two external 120 GB drives and they are now our backup drives. One of which can always be taken out of West Hall.

These 500 GB Lacie drives have Firewire 800 on them, and because of some voodoo magic that Lacie does with their firmware, these FW 800 drives are screaming fast compared to the competition. I didn't just go by the bar graph on the side of the box, I did some tests myself (I mean we have a 500 GB drive thats not really being used for much right now). Since we have a G5 for Production, I could test the drive with FW 800. I found a couple other FW 800 drives on campus to test against. Lacie FW 800 wins, hands down. They stripe the drives (its not really a 500 GB or 1 TB drive, they are smaller drives that once one gets filled up, it goes to the next HD and fills that one up. Whatever Lacie is doing it is nice.)

Needless to say I ordered a FW 800 PCI card ($50) for our Quicksilver and the speed over the network is well worth the $50 of that FW 800 card.

Panther Server is so much faster then 10.1 Server was, and now we have breathing room on the file space front. *phew*

Harris & Baseview has announced that it will debut Jazbox 3.0 at the NEXPO newspaper technology trade show being held in Washington, DC June 19-22. The new version of the company's flagship content syndication system adds support for Adobe's InDesign and InCopy CS and features OnePlan, a tool for managing budgets and resources. In addition, version 3.0 brings Mac OS X compatibility to the Jazbox page design client, allowing page designers to work on Macs even when reporters and editors are using Windows computers. Harris & Baseview has not released pricing nor system requirements for the new application yet. Source: MacCentral I saw this in action at an Adobe - Baseview dog and pony show three months ago. At that time they would not even tell me they had an OS X version in the works, I wish they had because that could have changed my suggestion. This system is very nice. It lets multiple people have the same layout(s) open. It lets you jump text over multiple documents - something I really wish could be done. The database backend to this system looks really great. There is a reason they did not give MacCentral a price. You will not find prices on the Harris/Baseview site either. It is really expensive. But its also really worth it for those who need it. I was very impressed with the presentation, even if it was done on Windows. I did not understand why they did not have an OS X version (I asked at the show) since most newspapers are Mac based.

It is recommended that you backup your projects and reinstall Version Cue from the CD that came with the Creative Suite.

Click Continue to start the backup process.

I have, twice now.

I do not think anyone can get Version Cue to work. I got this above message after I:

Tried turning on Version Cue
Got a message that said it would not start up, told to look at the log file
Was asked, and accepted the offer for it to fix itself.

I hear it is a problem with using Tomcat. At least that is the only thing I can find on the multitude of boards I searched.

Lets look at that log file shall we (look in the extended entry)

Oh my, what? Error writing plist file? That couldn't be a file permission error could it?

I am trying one more time then giving up. It would be nice to have Version Cue to work for the different publications here. We will see.

The first step of the transition ot InDesign and OS X has come to pass. Today we got our upgrade package of Baseview software. Baseview makes software for newspapers, we use Baseview software for editorial, production, and advertising. We are upgrading editorial and production this summer. Upgrading advertising would cost too much, as we would also need to get new computers to be able to run Mac OS X. Last summer we got new eMacs and a dual 2 Ghz G5 for production and editorial. This summer we are upgrading the software, Baseview and Adobe being the two components of that. We are also doing a cross-grade from Quark Xtentions to InDesign plugins. There are two plugins we use- DragIn and CopyTools. I have never used these before, but as I saw in Chicago these plugins look and act like their Quark counterparts DragX and QTools. We also use a MS Word like text editor called NewsEdit Pro that works with InDesign (in the same way that InCopy CS works with InDesign, well sorta). We use a Xtension called ClassFlow to flow our classifieds. Baseview have not ported this to InDesign yet (Grrrr) so we will still need to do the classifieds in Quark 4 and OS 9 somehow. This is something that we need to figure out how to handle until we get a native InDesign version of ClassFlow. Hurry up Baseview! WireManager is the last application we use in the daily production of the newspaper. WireManager grabs the AP news from the satellite rack down the hall, through a serial connection of all things! Currently the computer WireManager runs on is a PowerMac 7100/66. I remember when those computers were blazing fast! Thanks to the University's Desktop Replacement Program, I can replace that 7100/66 with an iMac that can handle OS X. I need the OS X version of WireManager because of our move to InDesign (I was hoping we could just use our OS 9 version of WireManager, but alas, things are never that easy). We have 20 seats ordered of Adobe Creative Suite, which is for BG News, Obsidian, Gavel, Miscellany, Unigraphics, and Production. It sure will be nice having CS everything at all desks. When that arrives I will get to have fun learning how to use the new Baseview plugins for InDesign. Then also comes creating InDesign templates, styles, and libraries out of all our Quark templates, styles, and libraries. Thats a lot of work! Paul and I get to tackle that job soon.

Monday Paul and I went to this SkillPath workshop: Managing Multiple Projects, Objectives and Deadlines. It is even worth 0.6 credit hours! It was a full day workshop, and I learned a lot. I bought some of the books they had for sale, they were at a big discount, so what the hell. If I ever get through them I might just review them here. Now we just have to see if we can put to use what we learned. We have a lot of things to accomplish this summer, and only three months to do it in! Originally my boss suggested that I go to this, mainly due to the fact that my responsibilities here have escalated in the past semester, and he wants me to learn how to handle things better. And so do I! I showed the pamphlet about the workshop to Paul and he wanted to go. Our instructor was great! His name is Robert Wangen and he has his own training and consulting business. I would highly recommend this workshop to anyone who works on multiple projects at once, and who doesn't do that? Not only was this workshop beneficial to my work here at Student Publications, but ironically it is helpful to my own business, imagine that! I am glad I took the day off to go.