Kim's Adventures into Geekspace

I have been using Vuescan from Hamrick.com for a long time, and am a happy camper. My old Canoscan 8600f works perfectly with this, but sometimes I want to use other programs for the scanner, like Paperless from Mariner Software to scan my receipts. It uses the native drivers, though, and the driver for Canon Canoscan 8600f has not been updated since Mac OS X 10.7.

I have tried to install different versions of the Canon drivers, but so far I had not had any luck. Today I found the solution, though: Jan Egil's Twain fixer It works out of the box, probably after installing the old scanner driver. Now, the scanner pops up, when I add it in System Preferences->Printers and Scanners, and it now works perfectly for scanning my stack of receipts! - Thanks Jan Egil!

Update 10 November 2013: after updating Mavericks from GM to build 13A603, everything broke again. After recompiling like specified below nothing was working and there may have been a missing path somewhere in the php.ini-file. While tracking the error down, I stumbled over a new version of PHP with a one-line install on http://www.coolestguidesontheplanet.com. I decided on 5.5 while I was at it.:

easy PHP 5.5-installation

Just running the installation command, a curl, the postgres-connection was working again, even from a non-standard postgres-installation. Thumbs up.

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I updated a few of my computers to Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Everything went fine, or so I thought until my wife complained about a missing blog. I happen to run this blog on Dotclear using a Postgres.app-database. Dotclear is of course using php and Apache.

Soon it was clear that the good folks at Apple have dropped support for Postgres in their php-configuration, so what to do. But I found this rather helpful page:

http://blog.rupey.org/post/63221360055/adding-postgres-support-to-php-on-os-x-mavericks

It was not perfect though, as a few steps were a bit shorthanded: installing autoconf from brew for instance, but that was fairly easy after a bit of googling, so I won’t repeat those steps here. See here, if you like.

I think that Rupey gets it very right for the rest, that is if you have Postgres installed by hand, i.e. that it is comfortably sitting in /usr/local/pgsql/ or similar. Given that I had used the app-version - much simpler to install and run - I had to point the configuration to the right directory. So when doing this

cd ext/pdo_pgsql

phpize

./configure

I ended up with this error:

checking for pg_config... not found

configure: error: Cannot find libpq-fe.h. Please specify correct PostgreSQL installation path

To point out the right installation path I just had to do this:

./configure --with-pdo-pgsql=/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin

before doing the rest:

make

sudo make install

and finally adding extension=pdo_pgsql.so to /etc/php.ini (and changing the time zone) and doing a sudo httpd -k graceful to make php work with Postgres again. Sorry for the downtime, btw.

The wife of a friend of mine had a problem. Sending emails from her iPad would change the sender from something like "wife<wife@owndomain.dk>" to something like: "wife<husband@gmail.com>". This was of course frustrating like hell, as responses to her emails were sent to her husband, even though the recipients saw her name in the email applications. She had no problems with sending correctly from her Mac or iPhone. They had already checked the SMTP-address - repeatedly - so it was a mystery.

To fix this, I checked the SMTP-server list, i.e. Outgoing mail servers. There were a number of servers listed, as the iPad had belonged to the husband, but the correct SMTP-server of the "wife@owndomain.dk" was present. Also present was a Gmail-SMTP-entry, with the husbands login credentials.

The culprit was that there was no password for the login credentials for the correct SMTP-server, so we set that, and removed the gmail-entries. This resolved the issue. The last part was not necessary, but just to be sure the problem will not come again.

My analysis is that the original SMTP-server somehow was unavailable and that Mail on the iPad had (wrongly) asked for the correct password instead of recognizing the offline situation. Handling this error, the wife had somehow deleted the password. Doing this is too easy, Apple! Then the failover for Mail was of course to take the next SMTP-server on the list, and here Gmail does something very strange. It leaves the name of the sender "Wife" but changes the email-address to be the one of the account sending it, so wife@owndomain.dk becomes wife<husband@gmail.com>. Not smart either.

The fix worked, btw.

Running Flash on your computer has always been a nuisance, but with the recent update of the Adobe Flash Player Manager, Adobe has made another attempt of making themselves look stupid. Now it does not only check if there is an update - and interrupt you if there is one, forcing you to quit your browser(s) while doing the update - bad enough - it now also interrupts you, just to tell that it has not found any updates!

Who at Adobe is so pompous to think that the whole world thinks that Flash is so important, that we need to spend time pushing the "done" button every time it has run and not found any updates? If just 10% of my applications behaved like that, I would have nothing else to do!

Adobe, you are becoming irrelevant.

I had two apps that I could not update from the App Store for a long time. I got the message: "Produktets distributionsarkiv kunne ikke bekræftes. Det kan være beskadiget, eller blev ikke signeret." or in English: "The product distribution file could not be verified. It may be damaged or was not signed."

The programs were not that important for my daily stuff, so I left it for some time. I wrote the respective companies, and they replied that I should just wait, as the problem would go away. But it didn't and one day I had enough. First I tried to delete the problematic apps, but to no avail, the problem persisted. Then I turned to google for an answer. The best I found was from the 1Password-makers, and is found here:

http://support.agilebits.com/discussions/1password-in-mac-app-store/18-1passw...

I didn't like their solution though, as it was a bit too hard for my liking, so I had a look myself. After trying to update the one app, this text was in the Console:

08/04/12 15.54.44,678 App Store: FRPurchaseManager: Preflight operation for 463633845 failed with error: Error Domain=com.apple.appstore Code=0 "Produktets distributionsarkiv kunne ikke bekræftes. Det kan være beskadiget, eller blev ikke signeret." UserInfo=0x7ff80c90a9f0 {NSLocalizedFailureReason=Cannot create PKProduct from "file://localhost/var/folders/1x/3vp012k96g1fpj127wg231nh0000gn/C/com.apple.appstore/463633845/preflight.pfpkg" Error Domain=NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1100 "Den ønskede URL findes ikke på denne server." UserInfo=0x7ff80c90b320 {NSUnderlyingError=0x7ff80c90b660 "Den ønskede URL findes ikke på denne server.", NSErrorFailingURLStringKey=file:///var/folders/1x/3vp012k96g1fpj127wg231nh0000gn/C/com.apple.appstore/463633845/preflight.pfpkg/index.sproduct, NSErrorFailingURLKey=file:///var/folders/1x/3vp012k96g1fpj127wg231nh0000gn/C/com.apple.appstore/463633845/preflight.pfpkg/index.sproduct, NSLocalizedDescription=Den ønskede URL findes ikke på denne server.}, NSLocalizedDescription=Produktets distributionsarkiv kunne ikke bekræftes. Det kan være beskadiget, eller blev ikke signeret., NSUnderlyingError=0x7ff80c90c560 "Den ønskede URL findes ikke på denne server."}

The problem, we can see - I have made a line in bold, is at the /var/folder/ somewhere. you can go there with the Terminal or using cmd-shift-G in the Finder. The Agilebits support suggest to delete the 1x-folder from the /var/folder, but it contains a lot of other stuff, so I decided do dig into the folders below. I ended up at the folder:

/var/folders/1x/3vp012k96g1fpj127wg231nh0000gn/C/com.apple.appstore/463633845

This contained two files:

flyingIcon and preflight.pfpkg

Deleting these - even when having the Mac App Store open, made it possible to download the problematic app. - I then did the same procedure for the second app, and it worked flawlessly.

Another year gone so fast. Incredible.

This photo was taken on the Bornholmer Straße Bridge in Berlin on November 9, 2009 at the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.