Having spent the day moving several Terrabytes (TB) of data around while doing some management I ran into two really annoying issues.I was getting an error while trying to delete files synchronized from another server by a third party program. As it turns out Windows Server 2003 has a file length restriction, well, it’s actually a file length restriction with NTFS, the file system that Windows Server 2003 uses. File names, including the folder name, must not exceed 255 characters.
The only way around this was to move the files up to the top level of the directory and then delete from there.

Second issue was a related one- I was getting access denied messages while trying to delete a series of folders in explorer even though I had ownership on the files.
I also looked at modifying the permissions in the command line using CACLS files /e /p {USERNAME}:{PERMISSION} in the CLI.
(but having inspected the properties of the files I was the owner so that was not the issue)
Turns out there was a process holding the file open- cidaemon.exe – an indexing service daemon that the windows indexer runs.

Thankfully I found a neat utility called file unlocker – once you install it- there is a shell extension that allows you to right click and choose to view what is going on- (ie what process is holding the file open or what the locking handle is) and then choose a course of action to fix it. Saved me a bunch of time today…

I am the proud owner of an mid 2009 15” Unibody MacbookPro. If you do have one of these machines, DON’T take up the option of the 1.7 EFI firmware upgrade. If you do, your machine will spend a good amount of it’s time beach-balling intermittently while doing just about anything.

I made this mistake, and after some research, found a large group of disgruntled people with this problem too. Found a great fix though. There is an image that you can boot off (after restoring it to a small 1GB flash drive through disk utility) that will allow you to RETROGRADE the firmware. To 1.6 (the default FW that my machine shipped with , under Leopard 10.5.8 )

If you want to download the firmware boot image, you can grab it off my drop here:

http://drop.io/podrush/asset/aluminum-macbook-pro-recovery-dmg

I am now running SL and the beachballing stopped the moment I did this…

I had an odd one this morning and I thought I would share. I had been watching and backfilling catching up series two of “The Wire” and put my MBP machine to sleep half way through the last episode on the disk.

However on attempting to ‘resume’ from sleep the machine simply appeared to start- (you could hear whirring etc and the front light on the device remained on low ‘half power’ but nothing else was happening.

The device had helpfully awoken from sleep in my bag a couple of days ago and was too hot to touch (the battery had finally run out so the bastard had gone to sleep again) and I thought the machine was cooked or badly damaged. I had been pretty wary about it as truly I had never felt it so hot and could not but believe that it had been fatally fired and fried in my backpack.

It appears that the MBP attempts to boot off the disk and if this cannot be done, will simply sit in ‘stasis mode’ for anything up to about 10-15 minutes. It will then eject the disk and carry on booting. Note that all the other means of ejecting the disk (other than physical intervention) had been attempted. I had started up and held down the eject key, the mouse pad button etc…
It is deeply frustrating that apple give you no pinhole or physical mechanism to eject bad drives from the superdrive.

Worryingly you get no screen life or any other indication as to the health or status- nor do you get the option of any other course of action. In my efforts I attempted to put the machine into target mode, tried to boot into EFI etc…but none of those options were successful.

UPDATE- my machine is indeed dead. Down. Just like that…

Despite the fact that most people keep stuff relatively organised on their machines, inevitably you still need to search for mail based documents in a hurry from time to time. Over the last three to four years several factors  have shaped my computer and operating system choices, relating specifically to the capabilities of desktop search.
When I had a wintel laptop I had limited choices. I could only easily run windows XP or 2K (the OSX hack for win was available, but it was a PITA to get working. Linux didn't play well on the desktop with the rest of my stuff or most portables at that point.

I ran XP32 like most and installed Lookout for Outlook to enable searching my burgeoning outlook mailbox and public folders more efficiently. Microsoft bought this in 2004 and since then incorporated some of the acquired technologies (I assume) into their own search tools. But if you ever made the mistake of installing the windows desktop search engine onto your XP installation you would find that it would KILL your machine – not unbootable, just unusable.

You really needed Vista to make the MS search tools work, but who wanted to go there? Vista pre SP1 was a nightmare, especially on slower machines. But having a need to do more OSX based work I switched to a Intel Macbook in early 2006 running Tiger and ran the Mac flavour of MS Office.
Although the office suite was not as good as its windows counterpart  the search results on my exchange mail  were a revelation in Entourage so much so that they caused quite a stir within MS itself when MS devs attended the the WWDC conference way back on 2004 where this was first shown.

So for a long while, I ran Tiger then Leopard with Mac Office (later office 2008) and Entourage relying on it to find what I needed to find quickly.
Snag though, is if you didn’t run at least Exchange 2007 all the other essential outlook stuff like calendar, public folders etc really suck.

Because I run a Windows VM on my Mac too (because I use MS OneNote and Visio a lot, and love them),  I took the leap and installed Windows 7 RC1 as my main production VM on the Mac, running in unity mode where both share my docs on the mac although Entourage and Office on the VM create their own mail databases- albeit that they are identically replicated off exchange...

This time on Windows7 (apart from speed and usability which was awesome) search was a revelation and the boot was so on the other foot.

I did a quick search yesterday for “phone list” to find an office number I seldom dial and returned the following results:

On the mac desktop I found the following: Click to enlarge-

While on the Win7 I found results that actually made sense.

Remember that both machines are actually searching the same resources and mailboxes- just in their two different sandboxes.

This is not scientific, but it sure illustrates which one I am going to use. Internet search may be a problem for MS right now in terms of banging up against the dominant big players er player, but I would contend they are doing an amazing search job on the desktop with 7.
The final sucker-punch? So to view the outlook mail you don’t have to launch the outlook app from the search results window, you just open the message window itself in it’s message pane, not the whole app. KILLER.