Macking 88

Protect your Quicken data
Quicken files can go bad. One of the symptoms is failure to print a report correctly. To make a clean copy of your data, choose Export from the File menu and save the file that ends in .qif to your documents folder.
Create a New File from the File menu. Name it something similar to the one you have now. If it is currently called "Quicken Data" then give it your own name and add "primary" after that.
Ignore the next step which is to create new accounts within this file. Instead go to Import under File and let it bring in the data you just exported. If this import, which should take a while, goes all right you can start using this file immediately. Rename the old file "Archived Quicken Data" in case you will need it again.
I have found the best place to store these documents is inside a folder you will call "Quicken Documents" inside the Documents folder. The program has probably been storing them in the same folder as the Quicken application. This is not wise because if you delete this folder to reinstall Quicken, you lose all your data.
If you get an error message while trying to import all your data into the new file, that will tell you that you had been working on a corrupted document. What you must do next is to reopen your original Quicken data file and export each account separately. Be sure to name the exported file same as the account you are exporting.
This should eliminate any possible corruption and bad data. If you get the same error message while importing one of your accounts, ignore the warning and let it import it anyway. You must then scan all through that account to find errors in entry or other data problems. They should be obvious: maybe a negative dollar amount, or missing transaction. Something will set it apart from the other listings. Delete that entry. You will then need to go over your records to find out what the bad entry represented and create a new entry (with the old date) to replace it. Otherwise adjust your final amount accordingly - meaning if the balance no longer matches your checkbook, make an entry to correct it and call the entry "Adjustment to correct balance," whether it is a deposit or a withdrawal.
Quicken has been pretty good over the years; I have had no problems myself and few calls from clients. But it does happen.

Gateway Lies to our Faces
Seen the latest Gateway series of adverts where their little animated Microsoft clone supposedly runs rings around the iMac? Well, SmallDog Electronics, in their free newsletter, repeated the tests and proved that Gateway was rigging the tests from the get-go.
How do you make a Mac running OSX lose tests such as running a Quake demo and counting the frames? Or opening a large PDF file? Simple. Use old programs that make the Mac run in classic mode! This would slow down the iMac in both Quake and Classic version of Acrobat.
Example: The Gateway claimed that their model could open a 2.4M file in 5 seconds vs. 13s for the iMac 15" and 8 seconds on the iMac 17". The reality: An Apple PDF file of 6.5M opens in in 4 seconds flat on the 17" and a little longer on the 15". But opening a 20M PDF took 7 seconds on the iMac 17 and, after two illegal operations, took 18 seconds on the Gateway - over a minute including the illegal operations.
Price and performance? The Gateway tilts up and down but doesn't swivel. The Gateway is cheap because of what they leave out: modem, $30; CD/RW, $100 (comes with CD drive only); Shipping, $85. No SuperDrive option is available at any price. Quicken is not included so factor in the purchase or upgrade cost for that as well.
Finally, with the Gateway you are stuck with Windows XP which should reduce its value by about 96%. At least it can be redeemed by clearing off the hard drive and installing Linux, but the product is targeted at users who lack the skill to properly exploit the power of Linux, whereas the iMac makes Unix user-friendly while taking advantage of the power and capability of a modern OS.

The Power Cost of Jagwire
I upgraded my iBook to 10.2 recently and, although I got all the notable speed increases, and new software to run on it, my battery life paid dearly for the privilege.
Without changing anything about the way I operate, battery life dropped from three+ hours to under two. The Energy Saver control panel (aka Preference Pane) did not help a bit. I can no longer play an entire DVD to its conclusion if I do anything special with it at all. Cutting brightness helps slightly, but sometimes you need full screen power.
There has been discussion on various Apple web boards, but no cures yet.

Region Coding
One of the ways the entertainment industry robs the consumer is by encoding DVDs by region: Region 1 is US and Canada, Region 2 is Europe, Region 8 is Japan, etc. DVDs released for one region are not playable in other regions.
This seemed particularly anti-consumer and somehow not justifiable in a profit sense but I learned otherwise. Since Japan shares NTSC format with the US, and since the DVD format as played on computers does not suffer from the format restrictions of NTSC vs, PAL vs. other methods of TV, one could conceivably save money by importing cheap DVDs released for India, where the economy would never support the price of $25US per disk. If we could import the same disc for $8US plus shipping, then no one would pay $25, right?
So the disks are encoded and the players won't play disks formatted for other regions. Apex, a cheap Chinese made player had a secret method for not only reading other regions, but also deactivating Macrovision, the scheme that prevents copying a DVD to tape. The MPAA ordered the US Government to prohibit importation of the Apex, and then ordered Ebay to quit selling the players as well.
Don't like it? Too bad. Who do you think runs the country, anyway?
But there is an alternative. The DVD players in Macs can be reprogrammed to play other regions, but only five times. After that you are stuck in the last region you chose. But if you have a PowerBook or iBook and never use it for playing DVDs, then go ahead and reset it for your favorite other region and don't use it for US DVDs.
There is a way to reset the limit of 5 changes. Our friends in the Linux world have bypassed all this foolishness already with a program called DeCSS, the first application that disabled the industry's schemes. For their troubles, the industry threw every lawyer they had at anyone who dared make DeCSS available to the public. But once the genie was released, the program was just a few clicks away from anyone motivated to find it.
A DVD player for Linux called XINE not only bypasses the regional codes but also Macrovision and even enables you to capture screen images from DVDs for your desktop.
There is no version of XINE for OSX yet, but there are some projects going to bring these capabilities to the Mac. Thanks to adoption of BSD Unix, virtually anything written for Linux can be ported with a LOT less work than it took to port programs to OS9. Version Tracker will locate screen-capture utilities for OSX, but they don't work on all Macs (like the iBook), requiring the hardware of the newer nVidia cards used in desktop G4s.
I ask for reader help on this. If you find a good DVD player/copier/descrambler, or most important a way to reset the limit of five changes, please let me know via email and I will pass on the info to the rest of us.

Postal update
Kurt Frye writes, "Just an informal note regarding the posting on the USPS label site...
"I work on a program that is (for the most part) the heart of the usps label site... USPS Web Tools API's. Now because we use XML to interface with our customers we're platform independent! As for why this department within the Postal Service decided to use our platform independent application in conjunction with a platform dependent Java implementation from IBM... well got me. But I would like to encourage any users out there interested in creating their own MAC client app, using our FREE API's to gather rates, labels, shipping info... go for it! Our API's are free, and while the API's cannot apply postage, it's pretty easy to just stick a stamp on the label for most of us! (oh, and did I mention that our labels carry free/discounted Delivery Confirmation barcodes?)
"Anyway, thanks for the support and keep up the fight for MAC support! (and I must come clean, in addition to the platform independent API's we also have a PC only client available as a sample implementation of our API's called "Shipping Assistant" - sorry, dual development would've shot our budget.)"
Kurt Frye
USPS Web Tools Staffer

ViaVoice fix
(From Macintouch) John Eriksen offered a fix for an IBM ViaVoice problem with Mac OS 10.2, which he had to pay to get:
"Broke down and called the 900 support number to get the Holy Grail. After going through their routing system (which took a minute at $2.99/minute). And it turns out the issue is something they know about... but they're not gonna put it up on their technical support website - not when they stand to make $2.99/minute (all told, it takes about 5 minutes of going through the routing menu and the tech guy S-L-O-W-L-Y asking you questions about your system. I'll cut right to the issue - avoiding the ViaVoice Cash Cow:
* In your Applications/ViaVoice/Utilities/Command & Control/Third Party Plug-ins
* A file called VVIEController
* Trash the file. Empty the Trash. You're set.
* Don't forget the system Preferences things - the Speech and the Sound Control Panels set for the microphone
And the tech guy admitted they knew all about this!"

Netscape Can't Read AT&T Bills
If you have AT&T as your LD provider with automatic pay and online billing, you have probably noticed that you can't read the bills off their web page if you are using anything but IE or Netscape 4.x.
They report that this is a bug in Netscape 6.0 and higher, including Mozilla, and that there is no known fix for the problem. It also affects Windows versions as well. They recommend using the older Netscape or any version of IE newer than 4.0.
My guess, and the opinion of others, is that the problem is on their end but none of their Web employees can figure out how to fix it.

The iMirror
I just received a cuuuute little product from Shinza Corp. called the iMirror. It is designed to look exactly like a tiny iMac. Every Macker I have shown it to loves it. If Apple has any sense they will sell this themselves but I fear that when they find out about it they will issue an injunction against it. That's more like the way they act these days. So if you want one, order quickly.

Mindblowing DVD
I discovered this via a Net ad and went to the Animusic site and ordered the $20 DVD. This is some of the best animated music I have ever seen. Although the visuals are produced on Windows boxes (they wrote proprietary software to accomplish the rendering), they use Macs for the music MIDI composition and state in the FAQ that they will be using Maya in future products. Considering that Maya is now available for OSX, they will probably prefer to buy a $2,000 G4 over a $9,000 Sun system, but who knows. Just get the DVD and marvel like I did.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)