The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Living not far from Oz Park in Chicago, when reviewing the lopsided percentage of our web traffic using the Apple OS or at least not Explorer, I’m reminded of the cinematic refrain, “O what a world, what a world? Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”

Microsoft is not the Wicked Witch. Apple is not a good little girl. And yet it might make you think for a second when you look at our statistics, that Microsoft just doesn’t matter that much, at least not to our visitors, with only about 30% of you on the Microsoft platform, and fewer than 1 out of 10 using Microsoft Explorer on a given day.

Located at the Apple Consultants Network: At-a-Glance website, the story is entitled: Consultant Opens the Door to Multi-platform Collaboration with Zimbra on the Mac.

The story is a brief overview of our Mac consulting at an advertising firm in downtown Chicago that provides comprehensive branding services for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, where we installed and support a Zimbra 4.0.4 server running OS X Server on an Xserve, among other select services.

More evidence Microsoft Exchange is not required for enterprise collaboration, nor blackberry/treo/windows mobile synchronization! You can see the full story on Apple Computer, Inc.’s Consultant Network website here.

On November 28th, I posted a blog about a customer’s equipment being destroyed by her local cable company, and the data recovery that ensued. The intended effect was to remind people people of the importance of backing up their data. Nearly all of the responses to the blog expressed disbelief that the event happened, and questioned the authenticity of the damage to the components. Evidence of the catastrophe follows.

I asked this customer permission to use her detailed account of what transpired along with photographs that she took at the scene.

We’ve had reports of some issues from a variety of customers regarding Apple OS X Mail. The issue seems to cause sent messages to occasionally end up in the Drafts folder, and appear as though they have not been sent, though they have. I have done some research to try and find a solution to this, but so far have been unsuccessful. I have noticed in my research, however, that people from all over the Apple community are experiencing the exact same issue with all kinds of different mail services, including Apple’s .Mac Mail. Evidence suggests that this is an existing bug with Mail.app.
Here are some examples:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-57000.html
http://forum.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=600

Forwarded to me by an old friend of mine and my parents who has worked for the IRS for many, many years, this is True, although it’s been floating around by e-mail, and I had doubted it, if you’re a US tax filer, it will make you at least $30 if you follow its straight-forward instructions. What’s more, if you’re a business, you can get quite a bit more. “Businesses get a bigger refund, based on the actual phone bills,” says Greg Mermel, CPA, whose column on the subject will be posted on 12/22/06.

At last I met the new Apple Xserve, at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference in Chicago last week, where Apple showed up with a team of knowledgeable specialists, 2×24″ iMacs, and a posse of MacPros running a variety of relevant software. Not only is there art and science in the new Macs, but also Apple is into Science, calling OS X “The Platform for Discovery.” Movies and pics of what was discovered follow. Come, visit the Apple booth at RSNA with me!

If you have attempted to partition an external drive to include an OS boot disk on a new Intel Mac, you may have noticed a few options. In Disk Utility, you have three options for partitioning.

GUID Partition Table - used to create a boot disk for an Intel-based Mac.

Apple Partition Map - used to create a boot disk for Power PC Macs, or non-startup disk for any Mac.

Master Boot Record - used to create a boot disk for DOS/Windows machines.