Reliably Broken
Network users and Mac 10.5 archive and install
When upgrading a Mac from Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.5 (Leopard), remember that network accounts are not included if you do an archive and install and choose to migrate existing users. If a network account had its home folder at /Users/jbloggs then it will have been moved to /Previous Systems.localized/2009-11-06_0346/Users/jbloggs (although the date portion will be the date that you did your install).
November 6, 2009
What is wrong with www.saatchi-design.co.uk
Saatchi & Saatchi Design recently updated their Web site and in doing so made some poor choices.
October 8, 2009
Excel scroll bar bug
Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac has an irritating bug where only the active document window has scroll bars. If a second document is open, or even if you only have one document but Excel is not the front-most application then the window has no scroll bars and ignores scroll messages from the mouse. This happens in Excel 12.2.0 (and a couple of earlier revisions behave the same).
October 7, 2009
Working with Active Directory FILETIME values in Python
How To Convert a UNIX time_t to a Win32 FILETIME or SYSTEMTIME: Under Win32 platforms, file times are maintained primarily in the form of a 64-bit FILETIME structure, which represents the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601 UTC (coordinate universal time).
September 7, 2009
Outputting Excel with Django
xlwt is an excellent Python module for generating Microsoft Excel documents (xlrd is its counterpart for consuming Excel documents). I use it in a Django Web application so a visitor can export her data as a spreadsheet.
September 1, 2009
Glow Javascript library
Only just come across the Glow Javascript library that the BBC released under the Apache license a couple of months ago. It looks good, and has excellent API documentation as well as discussions of general usage for the majority of the tools.
August 12, 2009
BBC iCalendar schedules
Jon Udell recently wrote about accessing the BBC programming schedules but was put-off by the lack of time zone information in the iCalendar feeds, which prompted me to fix the quick-and-dirty script I have that generates iCalendar files for the BBC. (I wrote the first, time zone-blind version of my script in England’s Winter and it worked just perfick back then!)
August 7, 2009
Microsoft Update versus Internet Explorer 8
Fun implications of designing your software update service as a pseudo-application that is actually an ActiveX plugin (that needs to guarantee the owning web page cannot be closed) include refusing to allow any web page to come forward when the owning web page is one of many tabs in Internet Explorer 8.
August 4, 2009
Django and time zone-aware date fields (redux)
Previously on 24… I posted a module for handling time zone-aware datetime objects, but I left out all the hassle of dealing with form input. Here is a more complete python package for Django that includes a form field sub-class that can handle a small set of datetime string formats that include a time zone offset.
August 1, 2009
Munki and watchedinstall
watchedinstall by Preston Holmes is a tool to monitor what files an installer actually installs. It works for pkg formats and most interestingly it works for custom install applications (i.e. InstallerVise reactionaries).
July 19, 2009