A friend just found this while troubleshooting a system at work that was using Microsoft Outook client in IMAP mode. The message is “Your IMAP server has closed the connection. This may occur if you have left the connection idle for too long.”

He installed a program called Ook which can be set to automatically close this error message every time it appears. Here is the link to Ook (it is free). Thanks Ook developer guy for making our day with Outlook and IMAP one step less frustrating.

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At age 4 our son built his first computer. It is a simple laptop system using OS “O” for Owen. He sits next to me opens it up, and starts typing along while I work on my laptop.

Here are some images:

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It took 11 minutes to copy over my applications, settings and accounts. I ran into problems with Macromedia 8 like it plain out told me to reinstall so I did. Once it was reinstalled all my website info was there. I had to do the same thing with Parallels. It complained about driver issues so, rather than figure out why, I just reinstalled it, and my Windows XP-Pro sp3 image was there along with all my goofy old programs I use. I had to select my two home printers; our HP Laserjet 1300n, and our Xerox Phaser 8550 DP. I use IP printer ports instead of Apple’s Bonjour option, because my house is still a mix of Apple, Windows and Linux machines, and Samba and IP printing are easier to deal with mainly, because, I am more familiar with it than Apple’s french sounding thingy. MAMP and all my test websites worked perfectly. MAMP lets you run PHP-MySQL&Apache locally, and separately from the default Apache web server that is built into Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5.1 Leopard. After Time Machine completed, I did check for Software Updates, and I had about 10 to install, but after that, and the issues with the printers and Macromedia and Parallels were resolved I had a fully functional system again.

So Time Machine actually works.

I am very impressed with the Apple MacBook Pro and OS 10.5.2. So impressed that when I went to Best Buy to exchange my 2.4GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro, because the lower LEDs in the display were randomly turning off, and the sales guy said the store had run out of my version, but had the next higher version of the 15-inch MacBook Pro in stock (2.5GHz). My choice was wait a week for the replacement to arrive, or spend an extra $500 and get one now, I looked to my left, no wife, and then to my right, no wife there either… In in fact, the wife sent me to the store by myself… I said OK give me that one then.

Granted, I did get a thrashing from my wife for spending an extra $500 when I was supposed to exchange the laptop not upgrade it. So now I have the 2.5GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro, and have some indentured servitude to the wife for like the rest of the summer, but hey, it was well worth it.

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It took Time Machine 49 minutes to back up 26 GB of data on my new 2.4Ghz 15-inch MacBook Pro in preparation for returning it to the store for a replacement. The device I chose to use with the Time Machine in OS X was the 500GB My Book Home Edition External Hard drive from Western Digital. I first formatted the drive using the Mac Disk Utility into 2 partitions, one for time machine, one for dumping and sharing files. I used the default disk format for both partitions: Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I also used the fire wire cable that came with the Western digital hard drive. With Macs you can copy from an old Mac to a new one via fire wire and now I have a fire wire cable just in case.

The MacBook Pro only has two USB ports, one of which, I use for my USB mouse, a Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical to be exact. Why the mouse when I have the ultra cool Mac touch paad? Well, all the years in Unix and Windows made me very comfortable with multiple mouse buttons. Back to USB ports, Like I said there are only two so I sometimes throw on my USB pen drive, the SanDisk 4 GB Cruzer Titanium USB Flash Drive with U3 on the other USB port. The third port -D’oh! There is not one.- is for my multi-card reader for my camera’s memory cards, so having the fire wire capability allows me to access stuff on the external disk without having to eject one of the USB components.

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I went ahead and purchased a MacBook Pro from Best Buy last week. After a couple days I saw ten vertical dark areas rising from the bottom of the display. On restart they go away. They also go away if the display goes to sleep and you wake it up again. The pattern of when the back light for the lower portion of the display fails to initialize appears to be random. It sometimes comes up after a reboot and sometimes after being off for several hours. Apple Support had me reset the powersystem by removing the battery, and unplugging the system from the wall and press control r and p simultaneously after pressing the power button, and then waiting for apple start sound twice.

Anyway, it happened three times over the weekend, so I called Best Buy and I am returning the system on Tuesday for a replacement one. Thanks Apple Support, and Thanks Best Buy Geek Squad you guys were really helpful.

On the positive side to all of this, I get to check if the Time Machine in OS 10.5.2 really works. 

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Well our Dell Inspiron 8200 we bought back in 2001 is getting fussy. We love our little laptop and kept plugging along with it through 3 battery changes, two hard drive failures, one power supply replacement and then there was that incident with our son popping off the keys to the keyboard. Somehow we lost the letters L and E. Dell support was very good at sending the parts I needed, and it never more than 3 days to get it fixed. Lately, the laptop has taken to shocking me whenever I pick it up. So it is time to change.

When I buy laptops I go for the middle of the price range and avoid “el-Cheapo” brands. I prefer to buy online and have the laptop delivered, because if the laptop can survive the delivery process then it has a chance of surviving traveling with me. I did buy a bottom line dell laptop once. It was for my mother in law back in 2001, and though it did last longer than my mother in law, it did not last much past the 1year warrantee. About my mother in law not lasting; it was cancer, we bought the laptop for her so she had something to do while in the hospital during chemotherapy sessions.

I am looking at Dell, Apple and Gateway. Here are my favorites:

Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch $2,518
SYSTEM COLOR: silver/brushed aluminum
DIMENSIONS: 1.0″ (H) x 15.4″ (W) x 10.4″ (D) 6.8lbs
BATTERY OPTIONS: 68-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery
OFFICE SOFTWARE: none usually office test drive
PROCESSOR: 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 800MHz frontside bus, 6MB L2 cache
OPERATING SYSTEM: OS 10.5.1 and or Windows XP pro via Parallels
DISPLAY: MacBook Pro 15-inch Widescreen Display (1440 x 900)
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB
MEMORY: 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM – 2x1GB
HARD DRIVE: 250GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
OPTICAL DRIVE: SuperDrive 8X (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
WIRELESS NETWORK CARDS: Built-in AirPort Extreme EEE 802.11n draft specification
INTEGRATED WEBCAM: Built-in iSight camera
SOUND OPTIONS: Built-in Stereo Speakers
NETWORK CARD: 10/100/1000BASE-T (Gigabit) no modem
ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE: none
PHOTO AND MUSIC SOFTWARE: iLife
BACKUP: .Mac service option
DIAL-UP INTERNET ACCESS: none
ADVANCED FEATURES: Multi-Touch trackpad (http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features.html)
COOL OPTION: Apple Remote
CONVIENIENCE FEATURE: Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS – U.S. English
WARRANTY AND SERVICE: 1Yr and 90day phone tech support

Dell Inspiron 1720 $1,800 -after rebate
SYSTEM COLOR: Sunshine Yellow
DIMENSIONS: Bigger and heavier than the Apple Yup:( 1.5″ (H) x 15.5″ (W) x 11.5″ (D) 7.62 lbs)
BATTERY OPTIONS: 56Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell)
OFFICE SOFTWARE: Microsoft® Office Small Business 2007-includes Publisher + Outlook2007
PROCESSOR: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T9300 (2.5GHz/800Mhz FSB/6MB cache)
OPERATING SYSTEM: Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition
DISPLAY: Glossy, high contrast, widescreen 17.0 inch display (1440 x 900)
VIDEO CARD: 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT
MEMORY: 3GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz
HARD DRIVE: Size: 320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
OPTICAL DRIVE: CD / DVD writer (DVD+/-RW Drive)
WIRELESS NETWORK CARDS: Dell Wireless 1505 Wireless-N Mini-card
INTEGRATED WEBCAM: Integrated 2.0 Megapixel Webcam
SOUND OPTIONS: High Definition Audio 2.0
NETWORK CARD: Integrated 10/100 BASE-T Network Card and Modem
ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE: Trend Micro Internet Security 15-months
PHOTO AND MUSIC SOFTWARE: Whatever Vista has
BACKUP: Included 3 GB DataSafe Online Backup for 1Yr
DIAL-UP INTERNET ACCESS: 6 Months Risk-Free Trial AOL Advantage Internet Access
TV TUNER & REMOTE: Dell Travel Remote Control, IR
WARRANTY AND SERVICE: 1Yr In-Home Service, Parts + Labor, 24×7 Phone Support
COOL FEATURE: Reader 8-in-1 media card reader

Gateway C-141XL Series $1,560 -after rebate
SYSTEM COLOR: Blackish grey
DIMENSIONS: 1.26″ (H) x 13.58″ (W) x 10.51″ (D) 6.2lbs
BATTERY OPTIONS: Primary 8-Cell Lithium Ion battery w/ 1 Yr. limited battery warranty1
OFFICE SOFTWARE: Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 (Excel, Powerpoint, Word, OneNote)
PROCESSOR: Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor3 T8300 (2.40GHz, 800MHz FSB, 3MB L2 cache)
OPERATING SYSTEM: Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (32-bit)
DISPLAY: 14.0″ WXGA TFT Active Matrix (1280 x 768 max. resolution) w/ Gateway® Executive Stylus (by WACOM™)
VIDEO CARD: ATI Mobility™ Radeon® X2300 HD 256MB PCI Express Graphics (128MB GDDR3 Dedicated Memory with up to 256MB using HyperMemory™ Technology)
MEMORY: 3072MB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (1-1024MB & 1-2048 MB module)
HARD DRIVE: 250GB 5400rpm Serial ATA hard drive w/ 8MB cache
OPTICAL DRIVE: 8x Multi-Format Dual Layer DVD-RW with DVD-RAM
WIRELESS NETWORK CARDS: Integrated Intel® 3945 802.11a/b/g
INTEGRATED WEBCAM: None
SOUND OPTIONS: System Makes Noise
NETWORK CARD: Integrated Intel® 10/100/1000 Ethernet
ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE: Norton Internet Security™ (60-day live updates) plus optional Norton Internet Security 2008 – 15 Month Subscription (included in price )
PHOTO AND MUSIC SOFTWARE: Whatever Vista has
BACKUP: Cyberlink Power2Go and Windows Vista® Home Premium Backup Media (32-bit)
DIAL-UP INTERNET ACCESS: Whatever Vista has to offer…
WARRANTY AND SERVICE: 1 Year Basic (Tech Support – Parts – Factory Labor) optional 3 Year Basic (Tech Support – Parts – Factory Labor) (included in price)
MODEM: Integrated V.92 56K modem
CONVIENIENCE FEATURE: Fingerprint Reader
SHOVELWARE: Software Microsoft® Works® 9.0 & Microsoft® Office Home and Student 2007 (60-day complimentary trial)
COOL FEATURE: Reader 7-in-1 media card reader

They all have USB 2.0 ports

Apple has DVI and lots of refined neat to talk about features like: multi touch, cool power cord break away feature and the “yeah I spent a lot money on this thing” principle that Apple devotees expect is there too. It can run both Windows and OS 10.5.1 using software like Parallels.

Dell offers lots of choices while Customizing your system the one I like is Microsoft® Office Small Business 2007-includes Publisher + Outlook2007. It has a 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT video and if you really want to spend a lot of money they are selling Alienware gaming laptops, which are insanely cool and expensive, but totally worth the investment.

Gateway offers Wacom stylus and flexible tablet display. I think the tablet display is a great feature for graphic artists. I suggest the advanced warranty on this system just because the extra movements involved in using the display as a tablet will eventually cause a failure down the road. Buy a spare stylus too.

Dell and Gateway both offer built in media card readers for your digital cameras. With Apple you will need a USB media card reader tag along.

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Test upload:
 It worked.

Well I use WordPress to blog on graffitimasters and the latest version  of it (version 2.5.1) is a bit dodgy. I found I could upload images OK from my Mac Mini (OS 10.5) using Firefox. But when I tried from my Windows XPpro machine using IE 7.0.5730.11 I can not upload images. When I tried with Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12, I saw a note at the top of the browser window saying “Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page”; selecting “Download plugin” updated flash for Firefox, and got the ball rolling for file uploading through that browser. I had also just installed Safari 3.1 for Windows and I can upload images through Safari 3.1 so the Flash update helped both Safari and Firefox for Windows. My linux box X-server cratered earlier this week so I have not tested Linux browser flavors yet. I have been using ubuntu 7.10 lately. I am using ubuntu as a LAMP test server, so having a cool graphic desktop is not as important on the system. 

WordPress support had this for IE7 http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/7573 Apparently IE7 did not like those comas. I used Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 to edit the files to remove the comas and then I uploaded them back to my server. Now I can upload in Safari, Firefox and IE7. If you are nervous about editing the files on your server try Safari or Firefox until and update arrives from the WordPress support team.

Thanks WordPress support guys!

After the wordpress guys make an update to 2.5, I will make a note here This was issue was corrected with latest update on April 25, 2008.

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