Windows Network Hell

Having problems getting multiple computers to talk to each other?

I have two XP Windows machines, a Vista laptop, a Mac mini, and a MacBook Pro I wish to network.

Sunthar summarizes some of the setup steps on this post.

For me, these were the important things I needed to do:

1. Make sure all computers are using the same work group. WORKGROUP seems to be the best one to use that is also mac friendly.
2. In the sharing properties for the folders I want to share,  added EVERYONE to the list of people I wanted to give permissions to. Made sure I selected FULL permissions.
3. In  Vista,  in Network & Sharing  Center, I made sure that Network Discovery, and File Sharing was ON. I turned on Public Folder Sharing and set  it to  FULL sharing.   Go HERE for an excellent step by step with screen shots.
4. On  XP machines, I installed the Link Layer Topology Discovery Responder(LLTD).

Sunthar's post and the the linked article and threads include many more troubleshooting suggestions.  It's not for the faint of heart.  I wish I could say that there is a simple or definitive solution but there isn't.  You have to try different things and see what works for you.  The above four steps were all I needed to ADD (who knows what I've done on EACH machine in the past to prepare it to be networked).

Good luck.

On a newly created XP machine, when I went to share a folder it reported that sharing had been turned off and I would have to run Network  Setup to enable this feature.  I did.  Still couldn't login to the PC.  I then ran across this which did the trick:

One other solution which a lot of people miss is that you can not log onto, nor see the shares of, a target PC unless you have at least ONE folder shared on the target. Once you set up the share, on the source PC you will see the target's printers folder plus the shared folder.

Creating Cocoa applications programatically (i.e. NIB-less)

"Why on earth would you want to create a Cocoa application without using Interface builder?"

That's the basic reaction you get if you try to seek out help online in writing a Cocoa application from scratch.

There may not be a lot of valid reasons but if there is at least one reasonable answer, then the question should be moot.

Our applications at DVFilm are cross-platform.  The user interfaces are very simple.  The majority of the code is written in C/C++ and in the business logic.  So I have not given up on the idea that the simple form-based UI can be written in such a way that the majority can be shared between Windows and Mac. 

There, that's my "reasonable" explanation on why I am crazy enough to consider creating a Cocoa application programmatically.  If that doesn't satisfy, here is another reason.

I have inherited a Carbon application (a QT template app, actually) and simply want to add a single dialog using existing Cocoa code. 

If neither answer satisfies, I DON'T CARE.  I do appreciate all the arguments for stopping my Tilting at Windmills but THEY don't satisfy ME.  If you can't bring yourself to suspend your disbelief and offer help, I'll figure it out on my own. 

It's not like it's NOT SUPPORTED.  And apparently, creating applications in Cocoa programmatically might very be well be the norm for iPhone development.

Here is someone with the same goal.

Jane loves Beer

…Always has

Copy a file path to the clipboard on a Mac

The Mac does not support copying a file or folder’s path to the clipboard; weird.  Get Info separates the path from the filename and doesn’t allow you to select either.  There are various workarounds.  This thread discusses some.  I went with this solution which offered a "workflow" file download which I opened in Automater and saved it as a context menu for Finder.

It was suggested that you can drag and drop into a terminal window and then copy paste the path that displays.  You can do this with any program that offers an editbox control.  For example open TextEdit, do File…Save As and drag and drop to the filename EditBox which you can then copy to clipboard from.

BTW, if you ever need to drag & drop into a widget, start dragging then hit F12 to switch to the widgets screen.

Update:  Today an article came out in MacWorld on this subject.  Their first suggestion using Finder Services didn’t work for me.  I just get an icon of a folder or file and when I put TextEdit into plain text mode I get nothing.  Also, the workflow solution I linked to above gives a HFS (colon separated) path,  whereas the article has an example of a script generating a "POSIX" path.  You can download the POSIX version here (thanks Scott) and copy it to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/.

Ready to Use the Mac for video editing?

When I bought my little Canon ZR800 DV camera, the first time I downloaded video it was to Jane’s Mac Mini.  I created a little slideshow of Kristen’s first soccer game using iMovie.  But I didn’t want to standardize on the Quicktime format so I went back to the PC for most of my video editing.  I got along for quite some time with Microsoft MovieMaker.  I actually liked MovieMaker a lot except for some annoying limitations like not being able to assign a transition between multiple clips in one step.  I finally gave up on it when it kept crashing as I started working with longer videos (10 minutes) and adding music to them.

I tried Pinnacle’s video editing software and it was one of the worst pieces of software I’ve ever experienced.  I tried a few others and finally settled on Adobe Premier Elements.  I liked it okay.  I thought it was too complicated but I figured out enough to get by.  This past week it crapped out on me.  It refuses to run. Even when starting with a new project containing no media, it apparently does something in the background and closes down after about 5 seconds with "Something serious has happened that requires the program to shut down".  Searching for an answer I came across this which among other things wanted me to turn off all the startup items in Windows and selectivly turn one item on at a time until I determined if one was causing a conflict with Premier.  Are you kidding me?  Yeah I know that this COULD be the problem and this is they way one can figure out what is wrong but customers should NOT be asked to do this level of troubleshooting.  I think first to blame is the underlining OS (Microsoft) and the fact there isn’t a better mechanism to prevent conflicts and then to REPORT them so we don’t have to run msconfig and take an hour or more to look for a needle in a haystack.

After upgrading, messing with msconfig, deleting various settings file I finally hit on something that worked which is to run it under a different user profile.  I’m not going to login as a different person just so I can use a program that has become unstable in my profile.  So I’m ready to give iMovie and the Mac a try.  I never doubted that using iMovie would not be a pleasure.  And now, after working at DVFilm I’m not so worried about using Quicktime as the output format for my videos.