So anyways, I figured out how to get the update to apply in 3 easy steps.

1. Create a script called find_office.sh and put the following contents in it:#!/bin/sh
echo "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008"
exit 0
   1. Make sure it's executable by setting its execute permissions:chmod a+x find_office.sh
   2. Make sure that you put the right path to Office 2008 in the 2nd line, if you didn't install in the standard path.
2. Go into the .mpkg folder for your updater and move the real find_office program away. In my case, I had put the updater on my desktop, so these commands looked like this for me:
   cd ~/Desktop/Office\ 2008\ SP1\ Update\ \(12.1.0\)/Contents/Resources
mv find_office find_office.orig
3. Copy your find_office.sh script to that location, and remove the .sh from its name. E.g.,:
   cp ~/find_office.sh ./find_office
4. Now double-click the Updater. It will work. (At least it did for me)

Incidentally, this made it much faster, since the standard find_office program roams all over the hard drive looking for Office installations. It took about 3-4 minutes on my system to do that. My no-op script, obviously, takes a fraction of the time and works fine, as far as I can tell.

As far as I can tell, this doesn't work if you format your hard disk with a case sensitive filesystem. Case sensitivity has been available since Tiger, but Leopard was the first time I actually played with it. If I share my home folder (as shown in the graphic above), have all lower-case paths and file names, I can see them in Windows. Otherwise, not a chance.

Furthermore, if I create a folder in Windows on my shared drive and I call it "TestFolder," the folder will actually be named "testfolder" when it gets created.  So: all lower-case paths are half-way usable. If you're like me, though, and you use mixed case in your folder names and such, you're just out of luck.

Before I run Parallels, I run this command in a terminal:
sudo SystemStarter restart Parallels

Likewise, I can kick Cisco’s VPN extensions with a similar command:
sudo SystemStarter restart CiscoVPN

Then I wrote a shell script to move over any applications from my backup of my Applications directory. This just checks to see if the app already exists. If it does, then it ignores it. If it doesn't exist, then it moves it over.

cd /Users/paco/Desktop/Backup/Applications
for app in *
do
  if [ ! -d "/Applications/$app" ]
  then
    mv "$app" /Applications
  fi
done

Making Users

Once I had the applications moved over, then I needed to create users. I found a few decent references online, and ultimately I needed to make my own little shell script. Here's a script that creates an admin user:

#!/bin/bash
NEWUSER="doofus"
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER}
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} UserShell /bin/bash
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} RealName "Doofus Admin"
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} UniqueID 503
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} PrimaryGroupID 20
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} NFSHomeDirectory /Users/${NEWUSER}
dscl . -passwd /Users/${NEWUSER} *for i in staff _lpadmin _appserveradm "com.apple.sharepoint.group.1" _appserverusr admin
do
  dseditgroup -o edit -a ${NEWUSER} -t user "$i"
done

I got the list of groups in my script by looking at the list of groups a properly created user (i.e., by the System Preferences) had.

This user has no password (see the last dscl command?). I did sudo passwd ${NEWUSER} to set their password. Since I only had 5 or 6 users, and I knew all their passwords (wife, kids, sister, etc), this worked for me. I can imagine that any real system administrator would have trouble with this step.

Finally, I made the non-admin users. Here's an example of that:

NEWUSER="video"
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER}
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} UserShell /bin/bash
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} RealName "Video User"
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} UniqueID 506
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} PrimaryGroupID 506
dscl . -create /Users/${NEWUSER} NFSHomeDirectory /Users/${NEWUSER}
dscl . -passwd /Users/${NEWUSER} *
dseditgroup -o create -g 506 "${NEWUSER}"
dseditgroup -o edit -g 506 -a ${NEWUSER} -t user "${NEWUSER}"

Those last two commands are wrong. They're an attempt to get the "video" group to be GID 506, the way it had been in the original system. It doesn't work. To this day I have GID problems where users aren't in the right groups for stuff. Generally speaking, though, things work fine.

• Download the whole movie content without watching it. (Therefore I don't use up all my Instant Viewing minutes for the month)
• Remove the DRM from the content, so that I can watch it offline.
• Convert the WMV crap to MP4, which is more compatible
• Drop it into iTunes and sync it to my iPhone.

Get the Movie

The first step, being a Mac user, is to fire up Parallels for the Mac, where I have a working Windows XP instance. You must use crappy Internet Exploiter and Windows Media Player with all its DRM crap. No other choices here. I go to the "View Instantly" page and start watching a movie. While I'm watching it, I'll see a progress meter like this:

This shows that I'm watching a 23 minute movie. The grey bar is the play head (i.e. where I am in the movie, and the dark bar to the right shows me how much of the movie has been downloaded so far. It's only a fraction of the total movie. Can't do anything until that whole bar is full! Now, The surefire way to get the whole movie to load is to just watch it. You don't have to, however. You can move the play head to the right (but not really far) and it will start downloading movie you haven't watched yet. It's not linear, though. Remember that Media Player can download random bits from the middle of the movie. So, if you pull the play head all the way to the end of the movie, that doesn't mean it will download the whole thing. It can skip ahead and download just the movie near the play head. This is the part that's annoying. You have to pull the play head around bit by bit and get it to download the full movie.

Once the download is done, and I can freely view any part of the movie, then I'm ready to make a copy of it and remove the DRM. Let's make a copy. My Windows Login is just "Administrator" (security, shmecurity!), so I find the WMV file in the following location:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp\AxPlayer\pbuffer.wmv

Note: Don't let the file size fool you. Moments after my file download begins, the file will be full-sized. I.e., if I do dir pbuffer.wmv I will see something like this:

09/20/2007  07:08 AM       372,471,801 pbuffer.wmv

Now there's no way I have downloaded 372 megabytes in 15 seconds. It's just a buffer. I only have the full movie when that progress meter shows that the whole movie has loaded.

At this point I make a copy:

copy C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp\AxPlayer\pbuffer.wmv "..\..\..\My Documents\movie1.wmv"

Remove DRM

For removing the DRM, I use well known tools for doing it. I didn't write these things, I didn't write the instructions on how to do it. I just followed the instructions. One good web site is this one. I found a mirakagi.zip using BitTorrent.

Generally, this stuff works as advertised. The only notes I have for this step are:

• I had to upgrade to Windows Media Player 10 by using this link from Microsoft. I had WMP version 9. There are various warnings about compatibility of mirakagi with different variations of WMP 11, so I stayed with 10. It works fine.
• I have to start the WMV movie playing and get the license window that says "Press Play to play your movie." I don't close that window, or press Play. While it's open, I have license keys to the file, and the FairUse4WM program can do its thing.

I'm not sure what it means, but since I save the WMV files, I have the DRM-protected versions of the movies and can watch them later. I don't know if Netflix tracks my usage and records the hours spent playing if I don't play the movie in my web browser.

Convert to MP4 for iPhone

At this point, I have an unprotected WMV file, which usually has a file name like [NoDRM]-movie1.wmv. When I'm running Parallels, my virtual machine's C: drive is available to me as a folder in MacOS. To convert it for my iPhone, I use a program called iSquint. It's fantastic. Just point and click. I browse my virtual machine's C: drive, pick the NoDRM file, and then tell it to convert it and store it somewhere on my Mac. Done. If I use MP4 encoding, the 23 minute movie that I tested would convert in about 7 or 8 minutes. If I used h.264 encoding, it takes about 20-21 minutes.

Sync to iTunes

Finally, iSquint has a "add to iTunes" checkbox. So, when it does its conversion, it automatically notifies iTunes of the new movie and puts it into my library. I have to manually go into iTunes and give it the information for the episode number, show name, etc. None of that's in the WMV or the MP4.

In the end, I got a pretty reasonable password (15 characters, just alpha numeric) and WPA encryption/authentication. And now my iPhone gets reception all over the yard, just like the MBP does.

I feel like I'm essentially in an arms race with my neighbors. Whoever gets the biggest Wi-Fi antenna wins.

This driver worked out-of-the-box for me. I've had a few minor glitches, which you can read about below.

Before I could figure out how to update the driver to understand my version of this device, I had to use the Apple System Profiler to find out what information it sends to the OS. When I find it under USB Hardware in the System Profiler, I see:

Note that 0x2008 is hexadecimal. Using the calculator, I turn that into 8200 decimal. Likewise, I turn 0x0557 into 1367 decimal.

I perform the normal system installation as per their instructions. I don't restart my computer. This is MacOS, not Windows. Even a kernel extension doesn't require a reboot.

I use Cmd-Option-Esc to kill the installer after it gets to the "Restart" button.

Then I open a Terminal and run a few commands:

cd /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext/Contents
sudo cp Info.plist Info.plist.dist
sudo vi Info.plist

The cp command is simply to keep a copy of the original. I like to be neat and have it for reference.

When I edit the Info.plist file, I change two integer values. I change <integer>8963</integer> to <integer>8200</integer> and <integer>1659</integer> to <integer>1367</integer>.

Now I want to load my kernel extension. I type the following at the command line:
sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext
Easy, huh? I don't understand why installers won't do that. They insist on making you restart.

To confirm that you have the driver properly installed and configured, run ls /dev/cu.usbserial. If that file exists, the driver is correctly installed. If that file doesn't exist, then you need to try something else.

The simplest fix is to find the tmac.vgrind file and put it in the right directory. As it is, the file exists but in the wrong place. So when it's time to invoke troff, it isn't found and vgrind fails.

• sudo ln /usr/share/groff/tmac/tmac.vgrind /usr/share/groff/1.19.1/tmac/

That's the simplest way to get up and going. It's not very good on C++, though. There's another file called vgrindefs that tells vgrind how to recognize the syntax of various languages. I find that FreeBSD's vgrindefs file is better. I recommend downloading that file and copying it to /usr/share/misc:

• /usr/bin/ftp -o vgrindefs \
'http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/usr.bin/vgrind/vgrindefs.src?content-type=text/plain'
• sudo cp vgrindefs /usr/share/misc

Paper size: It turns out that the default paper size setting for all things troff related is A4. If you use a4 paper, lucky you. If you don't, then you need to change your paper size. The following bit of perl magic will edit every file named DESC in your /usr/share/groff/1.19.1/font directories and set the papersize from a4 to 'letter'.

• 
perl -pi -e 's/^papersize a4/papersize letter/' /usr/share/groff/1.19.1/font/*/DESC


Using vgrind

To use vgrind, simply provide one or more code files on the command line. It spits out Postscript on standard out, meaning that you have to capture that output to a file. Then you probably want to convert it to PDF so that you can view it with Preview and print it.

I do it this way:

vgrind wtf.cc | ps2pdf - wtf.pdf

Now I can open wtf.pdf and print from Preview. Note that I used the ps2pdf command there. That's part of Ghostscript, which you can get easily using Fink Commander. In theory, Preview can convert Postscript to PDF, but I've never seen it do a credible job. It either takes forever or it just hangs.

If you're interested, here's an example:

• The C++ file: wtf.cc
• The corresponding PDF file: wtf.pdf

This particular example illustrates a bug in GCC that I found on the gcc mailing list. I've duplicated this behavior on Intel Linux (Fedora Core 1), but on no other platform. FreeBSD/AMD, OpenBSD Intel, MacOS X PPC, Solaris Sparc, etc. None exhibit this floating point issue. But that's beside the point...

1. Boot to single user mode. There's lots of advice on how to do this. Basically, hold down ⌘-S while the system boots until you see text on the screen.
2. Mount the filesystem read/write. I just type mount /
3. Normally I'd use niutil to modify netinfo entries. In single-user mode, though, that doesn't work. The netinfo daemon isn't running. Rather than figure out what it takes to run the netinfo daemon, I figured out what it takes to do this stuff directly on the netinfo database files.
   1. Verify that you can read the netinfo database. I use:
      nicl -raw /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb -list /users
   2. Clobber the password. In my case, I just wanted to destroy it. That way I could log in as this user with no password at all.

      nicl -raw /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb -destroyprop /users/joesmith passwd

      Where joesmith is the userid that I needed to access.
      If you don't know the short user name of the user you're trying to manipulate, the list from the previous step will show you the short names. Non-system (i.e. real people's) user accounts will be listed last. Intuition will usually tell you
      which one you want.

4. Type exit to finish booting normally into multi-user mode. I was able to login as the user and just press "enter" for their password.

I did this on Panther, but I have tested the nicl command on Tiger and it seems to behave the same. I can't see any reason why this wouldn't work exactly the same on Tiger as it does on Panther.