Day-to-day use of the Mac doesn't require me to use special characters like ©, ™, and ® but when the need arises I need a reminder how to access them. It's easy and this Apple Pro Tip shows how to do it.
Archive for 2008
One of the hassles with Office 2008 Mac and Office 2007 Windows is the new document format which ends in the letter X: DOCX, XLSX, PPTX. These new formats cannot be opened in older (and perfectly usable) versions of Office without installing a special (and free) plug-in from Microsoft.
A question recently came past me about Office 2008 for Mac and using old file formats as the default. Fortunately, the folks at MacLife confirmed you can use DOC, XLS, and PPT as the default format.
One of my clients needed a floating toolbar in an Excel worksheet for quick access to macros. Creating the toolbar was easy but trouble began when file names began to change.
The toolbar worked properly in a file called WORKA.XLS and a copy of the file was made as PROJECTA.XLS. The moment the toolbar button in PROJECTA.XLS was clicked, Excel opened WORKA.XLS and used it to store the relevant data. Whatever tactics I used to re-create the toolbar, Excel insisted on using WORKA.XLS for everything.
Next I changed the name of WORKA.XLS to WORKX.XLS. Opening PROJECTA.XLS and clicking the toolbar button generated an error along the lines of "cannot locate macro." Excel was still trying to open and use WORKA.XLS.
After a bunch of research, including numerous references to PERSONAL.XLB files, I couldn't find a solution to make the toolbar independent and portable between XLS files.
What finally worked was using Visual BASIC to dynamically create the toolbar. Not an elegant solution (nothing seems to be with Microsoft software) but this solution did the trick. Scroll down the page for the VB code.
The project I’m working on is recording picture and sound onto separate devices. Actually, reference audio in the form of a mix-down is going to camera’s channel 1, and the actor’s mics are recorded to a four-track wave file.
Because the camera audio won’t be used in the final mix we’ve had to sync our own dailies in Final Cut Pro 6. How exactly does a person take two different media files, audio and video, and combine them in sync as a usable clip? After much searching and asking around this is what we came up with.
Final Cut Pro has a feature called Merge Clips which combines multiple clips into one based on In, Out, or Timecode. Because our timecode is not synced to camera we used In/Out Point. Mark each clip, select them in the Browser, then use the Merge Clips command in the Modify menu.
The result is a new master clip (but not media file) which includes all audio tracks of the other clips in sync with the video. If the clip lengths are different Final Cut Pro will insert black slug as needed.
More details can be found in the Final Cut Pro manual under the term “merge clips.” You won’t find anything under “audio sync” or “dailies.”
Changing the location of a WordPress installation isn’t as harrowing as it may sound. Although no tools exist to do it automatically, some knowledge of the Linux command line and MySQL makes it do-able. This post is a summary of the steps I performed to relocate my blog folder; this assumes you are hosting under Linux, MySQL, and cPanel. Take a gander at the official Moving WordPress documentation before you begin.
Make a Backup
Be sure to make a backup of your installation.
Change the Current Blog Folder
Rename your existing WordPress folder (i.e.: /journal) to the new name. FTP or ssh (i.e.: mv journal blog) can be used for this.
Update the blog path settings within the admin panel.
Updating Paths in the Database
If your blog posts contain images or links using the old folder they must be changed. There is a simple SQL command which performs a search and replace. I suggest using phpMyAdmin instead of MySQL’s command line.
Take a look at your wp_options table in phpMyAdmin. You may find that plug-ins are using your old path in their settings which may be not accessible through the admin interface.
Don’t Break Trackbacks
If anyone is linking to your blog they’ll be using the old folder name. To ensure those links don’t break with your folder we can use a symbolic link and a 301 redirect.
Login to your Linux hosting account using ssh and navigate to the root folder of your web site such as public_html. Enter the following command:
ln -s /path/to/new /path/to/old
Replace /path/to/new and /path/to/old with the absolute folder names. For example:
ln -s /home/your-domain/www/blog /home/your-domain/www/journal
You may be tempted to add a redirect using cPanel but don’t – the symlink above is doing this for you.
Unfortunately, permalinks still won’t work. For example, a permalink of http://your-blog/journal/2008/06/my-post will generate a 404 Not Found instead of redirecting to http://your-blog/blog/2008/06/my-post. Don’t bother with the Redirection plug-in because it doesn’t build a library of prior permalinks.
Instead, use Alexandra’s technique to modify your .htaccess file and all of your old permalinks will 301 properly.