blarg?

I’m not the first person to say this, and I won’t be the last, but you know what the worst part of HP’s horrible website is?

The prize at the end of it is HP’s products.

I’m confident that none of the people who assembled (“designed” is, I think, far too strong a word) HP’s website have ever actually looked at it, much less tried actually using it to get something done.

This is primarily going to be of interest to Mac admins, future Googlers and, er… Amos, I think? The rest of you can just nod and smile until I say something clever later.

So Microsoft treats Mac users as the Provisional Wing of their QA department, and as a result a lot of their stuff doesn’t quite work right with the rest of the Mac ecosystem. For example, Office 2004 turns out to be pretty good, but you can’t silently update it, or bulk-update it via ARD without user interaction.

Which is both less than ideal and occasionally (when you’ve got to, say, update everyone in the building because of a DST change…) very, very sadmaking. You really want to be able to silently and non-interactively update products like Office without user involvement and definitely without, God forbid, actually walking around to every desk in the building.

Here’s how you do that, at least as far as Office is concerned.

You need PackageMaker, which you can get as part of the XCode developer’s tools; it’s 10.4.x+ only, and part of a big download, but truly a must-have. We’re going to use a combination of that and the “find” unix utility to get this done.

So:

1. Install Office on a clean machine, off the install CD. Use the Setup Assistant, don’t just drag-and-drop.
2. Open a terminal window. “cd /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2004”.
3. Now mark all the installed Office files as having been created at some arbitrary point in the past, like so:
   

   find . -exec touch -t 0001010000 {} \;

   Which is to say, find all files, and when you find them use a program called “touch” to set their last-modified time to January 1st, 2000. Needless to say, you should be an administrator when you’re doing this.

4. Now run the Microsoft AutoUpdate tool as many times as you want until your copy of Office is up to date; 11.3.4 is the most recent.
5. Back in your terminal window, now:
   

   find . -mtime +2100 -type f -exec rm {} \;

   Careful, now. This one starts at whatever folder you’re currently in, looks at all the files in that folder and all of its subfolders and deletes the ones that are more than 2100 days, about six years, old. If you should start this process from somewhere else in the file heirarchy, it will do exactly the same thing starting there, without hesitation, mercy or remorse.

6. Exit your terminal window, open up PackageManager, and build yourself a package out of the “/Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2004/” folder; the package that comes out of that process will contain all the files that were created or changed by the update process, and you can silently deploy it to your unsuspecting users at your leisure.

So, there you are – more of an overlay than an actual update package, but being a longstanding fan of things that actually work rather than doing that other thing it’s hard for me to quibble about the terminology.

Bear in mind please that this is a monolingual thing- if you try to apply a home-rolled english patch to a french version of Office, you might very well end up in the merde.

I am amused by the following:

• Typography as criticism.
• Typography as dadaist electronica.
• Typography as brutality
• Mega Robot Returns!
• Katamari Insurance

So, I’ve got a laptop here with a built-in Sonix sn9c201-chipset camera. It’s not working for me, because apparently there’s no Linux drivers for it, but that’s life in Linux-land.

But hey, wierd thing, I do have drivers for it. I’ve got a .rar file that has compiled FC4 drivers for it, but no source code. In fact, if running strings on it is any indication, that file has driver for tons of ostensibly-unsupported webcams in it. Take a look at what the result from strings has in it, if that sort of thing turns your crank. It’s got USB IDs galore in there (Hi, Google!) and as far as I can tell, none of those have existing drivers in the tree.

Of course, I can’t use those, because I’m not using Fedora Core 4.

Somebody created this, and some other people say it works, and I can’t find them. There’s no email address in the readme.txt file or the code, no contact information whatsoever, and my googly efforts have come up totally empty. Help me out here, Lazyweb. Where does this code come from?

I have got an entry for you here that will seize your nerve endings with a musician’s delicate hands and strum them to a rhythm. You will feel a momentary inner stillness, and those parts of your apparatus charged with simple joys will shift and throb in time.

• South By Southwest, SXSW, is a 20-year-old annual music and media festival that takes place in Austin, Texas around, oh, now. This year, they’ve released the SXSW Toolbox, and the first of the torrents they plan to release has 739 songs in it. 3.1 Gigs of music. They’re going to put up a torrent of their film trailers soon, and I’ll keep you informed.
• If you’re a big nerd like me, and you like video game music, Zelda Re-Orchestrated is a good download. It’s fanart, of course, so it’s somewhat uneven, mostly good fun and occasionally great.
• I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s some kind of messed up and you should be looking at it right now.
• I do know what’s going on here, but it’s pretty and good fun, so you should watch it anyway.

Don’t act like I never do anything for you, internet.