The most common solution is pressing the eject key on the keyboard.

If that fails for some reason (in my case the key was not working properly) you could always drag the DVD icon to the trash or right-click (ctrl-click) it and click “eject” – as long as there is a CD or DVD in the drive. But what if it’s empty and you want to insert a disc?

Open a terminal window (Terminal.app) and type drutil tray eject. To close type drutil tray close accordingly.

Have you ever tried to embed video files in PowerPoint? If you managed to do that, have you ever tried to play that presentation on other PCs or even on a mac? It’s a pain in the ass. I haven’t yet reached the point to say it’s impossible, but at least I can say it’s far from being easy.

The background: If you want the presentation to work out of the box, on every machine, you need to choose a video format that every OS can play by default. This means:

• you can’t use MP4 or any other QuickTime format because QuickTime might not be installed on Windows PCs
• you can’t use WMV formats for the same reason, just on the mac side this time
• you can embed SWF files and flash can be played back on Windows and Mac OS, but because it relies on third party software as well, PowerPoint can only embed SWFs in the Windows version, using ActiveX controls. These are not available on PowerPoint Mac which means the embedded SWF in a PPT created on Windows won’t play when you open the PPT on a Mac
• Of course you can’t use Matroska/DivX/Xvid/other special codecs because that would require a codec pack, otherwise the video won’t play
• You can’t even use MPEG2 because at least Windows PCs can’t play it by default

So I think the only way to do it is to use MPEG1. This means big file sizes and low quality – which clearly sucks.

Do you know a better solution? I don’t…

Trying to integrate Zimbra calendars in Lightning, I ran into a couple of problems. So far I’ve found four different ways to do it in the internet:

1. ICS: http://zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
2. ICS: webcal://zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
3. ICS: webcal://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@zimbrahost.example.com/home/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME
4. CalDAV: http://zimbrahost.example.com/dav/USERNAME/CALENDARNAME

Now the ICS solutions don’t work properly for me, the calendar entries are loaded but Lightning is unable to write to the calendar (when editing entries, deleting entries, creating new entries).

CalDAV is working, but only when using one calendar, as it seems. I created a second calendar in the Zimbra Webinterface though, and when I try to add the second calendar the CalDAV way, I get a yellow warning sign next to the calendar name saying “The calendar <name> is not available at the moment”. So CalDAV seems to be limited to one Calendar per user or server.

I didn’t find a solution yet.

Now this was a weird one. The user said he was unable to work because every 20 seconds, his programs in which he was working were hidden and the desktop would show up. He told me he already rebooted the machine. So I opened the End Tasks dialog with Cmd-Alt-Esc and forced a finder restart. Still the same behavior.

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To all other sysadmins out there in the world: Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day 2009!

My boss is working with tons of mails every day. Part of his workflow is to use the “followup” -> “add reminder..:” function in the right-click menu of messages. When I upgraded his Outlook from 2003 to 2007, he asked why that function was gone. I did some investigation, including a phone call at Microsoft tech support, and found out the following:

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I use a little tool to manage my MP3s called “MP3 tag tools“. It’s quite powerful, it allows you to mass edit some or all ID3 tag fields, fill them from a file name scheme and vice versa (create folder structures and/or file names from the ID3 tag fields). Now when I recently cleaned up my collection using that tool, I noticed that I had about 400 double entries. I just didn’t notice before because the file names were different. Now as this tool tried to rename the files and put them in the appropiate subfolders, it threw error messages that existing files can’t be overwritten.

So I had 400 files that I could safely delete, which I did. Now I had 400 dead entries in the iTunes library (marked with a !) which I wanted to get rid of easily. Apparently, iTunes does not have a function to remove dead/broken entries, I’d have to try to play every song from my playlist so iTunes would mark all missing entries and then… then what? iTunes doesn’t even let me sort by the ! column. That’s really stupid.

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Recently, I had a support query where a colleague had three “Flash Player” items in the open with menu when he right clicked onto a .swf file and I was asked to remove them. I learnt that it’s not as easy as it often is with Windows, where every file extension has an entry in the registry which you could edit. Mac OS X uses the so called LaunchServices database to assign applications to file types.
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Hi folks!

I have that ultraportable notebook, a HP 2510p. It features a 12.1″ LED-backlit screen, ambient light sensor, fingerprint device and so much more. After about one year of usage, I can say that I love this device and wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. However, it’s not perfect. Battery runtime is pretty acceptable, about 5 hours w/ wireless LAN enabled. The CPU, an Intel Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage @ 1.2GHz is surprisingly fast.

The only big problem is the harddisk. Read the rest of this entry »

These are my post-installation steps in Fedora 10.

After I read that Fedora 10 is out on heise.de, I thought, let’s give it a try. Here I’ll describe what I did to set up the fresh install for my needs.
Note: I installed Fedora 10 from the full i386 DVD (not live CD!) on my HP 2510p notebook, just in case you’re interested about hardware.

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