Using a Polycom CX300 USB Phone with Communicator for Mac 13 in Office 2011

Where I work we have the option to use Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007R2 (now known as Microsoft Lync). When Office 2011 for Mac came out, I and other Macintosh users rejoiced, as we could now join the ranks of people sending and receiving phone calls from our computers (in the previous version, Macintosh users could receive -- but not send! -- calls).

After due diligence it looked like the Polycom CX300 USB phone was a great replacement for the desktop phone. Another alternative was to use a headset, but many people are loathe to move from a handset to a headset.

I established my enterprise OCS account, got logged in using Office Communicator Mac 2011 version 13.0.0 (100825) [Edit: no difference with version 13.1.0 (101123)]. I was able to successfully send and receive a call from my MacBook Pro using the built-in microphone and speakers. But at work, I want to get calls on my trusty (if aging) Mac Pro.

Plugging in the Polycom CX300 went fine, and OS X 10.6.6 recognized it.

But the display on the front of the Polycom said "Sign in to Office Communicator". Uh, I'm already signed in to Office Communicator.

I won't bore you with all the searching and hair-pulling I did. Here's the simple solution:

Open your Sound control panel from System Preferences. Select Polycom CX300 under the Input tab. After a few seconds, the display on the front of the Polycom will change to a phone icon and you will be able to receive calls on the phone.

Don't close the control panel! If you close the control panel, the phone will go back to "Sign in to Office Communicator". You normally leave a control panel open on your computer all the time anyway, don't you?

Note that you won't be able to use the keypad on the phone to call anyone. You can do it from the Communicator software but not from the phone. Why would anyone want to make a phone call from their phone, anyway?

Conclusion: Microsoft Communicator 2011 for Mac has no real support for USB phones. Having to open your Sound control panel and leave it open is not an acceptable workaround. You can tell how serious Microsoft is about the Mac client by the fact that Communicator doesn't even have its own community support forum, but is relegated to Other Microsoft Products for Mac.

References:

1. OC optimized devices for Communicator for Mac (MacOffice2011)

2. Microsoft Launches Communicator for Mac (comment #1)
   [ Submitted by John on Mon, 2011-02-14 12:13. |

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Solved: Mac Pro Losing Connection to USB Kinesis Keyboard

I've been having a frustrating problem lately. I use a Kinesis Advantage contoured keyboard and I love it. My current computer is a 2006 Mac Pro. The problem is that randomly the keyboard will cease to be recognized by the Mac. I wondered if the aging Mac was developing flaky USB controllers.

If I reboot the Mac (which I can do, since the mouse still works) everything is fine.

But a keyboard that randomly stops working is not a pleasant thing.

I plugged it into a USB hub instead of directly into the Mac. No dice. I brought in my Kinesis from home and swapped them. Same problem! Hmmm.

What would cause this to happen? For one thing, I noticed that whenever I burned a CD it would happen. Strange.

By careful observation, I then noticed that it usually happened when I got up from my desk. When I got back the keyboard would no longer work. Weird! So it wasn't really the CD burning, it was the getting up from my desk.

Finally it occurred to me that the problem was static electricity. When I sat back down at my desk, I discharged static electricity through the keyboard.

I took a grounding wrist strap and connected it from my desk to the radiator nearby.

Since then I have not had the dead keyboard problem at all. Yay!

Reference: Antistatic Desk Strip

Anonymizing Reviewer Identity in Microsoft Word 2011 with Ruby and Automator

Microsoft Word 2011 lets you turn on the Track Changes feature and distribute your files to friends and colleagues. You can then see their comments and corrections.

Now consider the case of an editor of a scientific journal. The workflow goes something like this:

1. Receive article from fresh-faced graduate student.

2. Pick three reviewers.
3. Receive article back from reviewers, bathed in blood-red ink. Figuratively speaking, of course.
4. Anonymize reviewer comments.
5. Return paper to graduate student, who reads it and weeps.

Notice step 4, in which the identity of the reviewers is cast into shadow. That way the graduate student only knows to hate "Reviewer number 2" instead of a specific person.

Microsoft's solution to this is to strip all personal identifying information (which they like to refer to by the acronymn PII) from the document in the following way:

Step 1: Open a saved copy of the document.

Step 2: Go to Word / Preferences / Security and check the box under "Privacy options" that says "Remove personal information from this file on save."

Step 3: Go to File / Save a Copy... and save a copy of the file, naming it something like MyFile-clean.docx.

This file now has no more metadata in it. The comments that have been made using the Track Changes feature have been anonymized into a single entity called "Author".

That's great. But there is a problem. In our scientific journal editor workflow example above, the graduate student doesn't know who to hate. Typically you'll get two good reviewers and then one who is just out in left field. This reviewer has just been turned down for promotion, missed a big grant, and got some bad gas station coffee. We want to isolate that reviewer, not mix in the grumpy comments with the good.

That got me thinking.

Doesn't Microsoft now use an open standard, Office Open XML (OOXML), for all of their documents? Can't we just go in there and tweak things a bit?

If we could sift through the contents of the XML and find the bits where the reviewers are identified, we could enumerate them and then anonymize them on an individual basis.

So that's what I did. I wrote a Ruby script that basically does the following:

• Make a copy of the original file.

• Extract the Open Packaging Conventions contents to a working directory.
• Reach in and find all attributes of authors and their initials (w:author and w:initials). They look like this in the wild:

<w:comment w:id="13" w:author="John Doe" w:date="2010-10-29T13:37:00Z" w:initials="JD">

• Transform the attributes into the following for each identified author:

<w:comment w:id="13" w:author="Reviewer 1" w:date="2010-10-29T13:37:00Z" w:initials="">

• Repackage the files using the Open Packaging Conventions.

• Present the user with filename-clean.docx.

The reviewers are now conveniently renamed Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2, etc., and their initials are empty strings.

Now I know what you're thinking. The correct way to do this is to use SAX or DOM and a proper XML parser to reach into portions of the tree and change attributes. You'll want use XSLT. You'll want to read the 5,220-page Office Open XML Part 4 - Markup Language Reference. You can do that if you want to. But that's not what I did (OK, I admit to downloading it and skimming sections). I took the quick and dirty way and used a gnarled old copy of sed.

The problem, though, is that my colleagues are unlikely to whip open a terminal and run a Ruby script. They want a nice, self-contained little droplet that they can drop a .docx file onto and magically a cleaned version will appear.

"Easy!" I thought. "I can do that with Automator!". Well, sort of. It turns out there is no good way to raise an informative error if you want to save your Ruby script as an Automator app that uses the Run Shell Script action. Rather, you get the unhelpful dialog box The action "Action Name" encountered an error. Check the action's properties and try running the workflow again. This is only going to confuse my colleagues who, I repeat, expect to just drop a file onto an icon and have it work. If they mistakenly drop a text file on there, or a .doc instead of a .docx, I want them to receive a nice error message like, This only works with .docx files. The file you dropped on me was not a .docx file.

Using Ruby's raise keyword only puts the error in the Automator log and raises the aforementioned dialog box instead. Enter...AppleScript. Sigh. It always comes back to AppleScript, doesn't it?

So I added a brief AppleScript to error-check the dropped file. If it encounters a suffix other than .docx it displays a helpful dialog box. If it doesn't, it passes through to the next action in the workflow (that is, the Ruby script) and all is well.

I give you now the pain of my labors, in both Workflow and Application form. I don't guarantee that it will work for you. I don't guarantee that it will expunge all mention of everyone in the document. I don't even guarantee that it will download to your browser without setting the internet on fire. Remember, nothing in life is guaranteed. Especially this software which you're downloading for free off of some guy's internet website.

APC UPS and Snow Leopard Server Not Communicating

I have used APC (American Power Conversion) power equipment for a long time. I have had both good and bad experiences with their products (a cherished memory is calling their technical support and asking about the "smell of burning plastic" emanating from one of their units).

I've recently upgraded an Intel Mac Pro to Snow Leopard Server (OS X Server 10.6.2) and noticed that the controls in Energy Saver for the UPS are different. Not in a good way.

Here's the relevant screen from OS X Server 10.5.8:

And the same screen from OS X Server 10.6.2:

After reading a thread on Apple's support site about APC UPS Charge Percentage Not Updating I changed the setting on the server to that shown in the second screenshot above; namely, since the computer can't seem to read the charge percentage, it's better to let the computer monitor how long it's been on the battery.

Another annoyance is that I keep getting the dialog Your computer is now running on UPS backup battery power. The UPS is supposed to self-test every 14 days but I'm seeing the dialog more often then this.

It makes me uneasy, and I don't like being uneasy about servers.

See also: http://www.macworld.com/article/140207/2009/05/apc_leopard.html

Blast2GO BLAST results not opening in Mac web browser

If you use Blast2GO on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (and haven't been derailed completely by Apple moving Java Web Start around), you might have run into the issue of not being able to view BLAST results in a web browser. Blast2GO even helpfully opens a window for you to choose which browser you want to use, but no matter what you select, nothing happens. Except the following gets written to the Application Messages pane:

Error with choosen Browser! /Applications/Firefox.app: cannot execute

The solution is to tell Blast2GO which browser you want to use. You do that by specifying a path in the blast2go.properties file. You can find the file at /Users/yourusername/blast2go/blast2go.properties.

When you open the file in your text editor* you'll see a property entry under User Pathes (sic) called BlastBrowser.Explorer. You may be tempted to put /Applications/Firefox.app here or even, if you're clever, /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox. But don't do that. Firefox will just complain at you about more than one instance running at a time. Rather, use /usr/bin/open and it will automatically launch the appropriate browser.


// User Pathes
MainGui.Workspace=/Volumes/Data/blast2go_datafile.dat
MainGui.Favorites=/Volumes/Data/blast2go_datafile.dat,
BlastBrowser.Explorer=/usr/bin/open


I ensured that Firefox was the default application to open .fcgi files by creating a text file called foo.fcgi and then selecting Get Info. Probably unnecessary because /usr/bin/open opens URLs in the default browser anyway.

*I used TextWrangler -- if you're still opening files in TextEdit do yourself a favor and download TextWrangler, then make it the default text editor.

Permissions fix for Podcast Producer

I'm setting up Podcast Producer, a proprietary podcast workflow system from Apple. After wading through the setup of OpenDirectory, Kerberos, NFS, etc., I attempted to submit my first podcast. On the client console, I got


pcast[5802]: Starting file upload for 63165854-E6A9-46F6-ADE7-BF84D67568A4
pcast[5802]: Total Upload Size: 259255
pcast[5802]: Destination directory: '/Volumes/SFS/Recordings/783AEE7D-C6EA-4F7D-8D1A-17AAFF7905AA' is not mounted on client machine. Skipping.
pcast[5802]: Trying HTTPS POST of '63165854-E6A9-46F6-ADE7-BF84D67568A4.plist' to 'https://podcastserver.example.com:8170/cgi-bin/pcastupload.cgi'
pcast[5802]: Uploaded: 355/259255 bytes (0 %)
pcast[5802]: Time elapsed: 0.064978 and remaining: Infinity (seconds)
pcast[5802]: 500 "Internal Server Error"
pcast[5802]: FTP upload not configured
pcast[5802]: Unable to upload file: /Users/john/Library/Application Support/pcastuploader/metadata/63165854-E6A9-46F6-ADE7-BF84D67568A4.plist
pcast[5802]: pcastuploader quit


On the server, I got

pcastupload.cgi[9708]: /var/pcast/server/cgi.conf does not exist

Digging in further on the server, /Library/Logs/pcastserverd/apache_error.log says

[error] [client x.x.x.x] /usr/share/podcastproducer/cgi-bin/pcastupload.cgi:36:in `read_config': CGI Configuration file does not exist (CGIException)
[error] [client x.x.x.x] \tfrom /usr/share/podcastproducer/cgi-bin/pcastupload.cgi:30:in `initialize'
[error] [client x.x.x.x] \tfrom /usr/share/podcastproducer/cgi-bin/pcastupload.cgi:275:in `new'
[error] [client x.x.x.x] \tfrom /usr/share/podcastproducer/cgi-bin/pcastupload.cgi:275
[error] [client x.x.x.x] Premature end of script headers: pcastupload.cgi


Well, all pcastupload.cgi is trying to do is read the config file at /var/pcast/server/cgi.conf. A quick check showed that /var/pcast and /var/pcast/server were not readable by anyone except the owner, root.

So to fix the problem:


sudo chmod o+rx /var/pcast/
sudo chmod o+rx /var/pcast/server/


Now the podcast is successfully uploaded to the server. Of course, it's dying there now, and I'm off to investigate.

Go ahead and ignore

Hmm, I think I will go ahead and click Ignore...

XServe RAID discontinued

Apple has discontinued their confusingly named XServe RAID storage system. That's a shame, and yet another red flag for trusting Apple in the enterprise market, in my opinion.

I currently administer two of these (one on OS X Server and one on RHEL5), and I can't say enough good things about them. They have been reliable and fast. When a disk goes out, the system sends out notification and starts a rebuild on the hot spare automatically, just like a good RAID should. And they're quieter than any other dedicated RAID solution I've looked at. RIP, XServe RAID.