Because I work in an advertising agency, it is vitally important that our files go out to the printers 100% correct. We preflight all our work before we send it out. We use a tool called Flightcheck Pro from Markzware to do this.

This product has really struggled since the move to OS X. We have stuck with this product mainly as their are few, if not no other products to use. Markzware has beaten off all the competition. The last few releases of Flightcheck Pro have actually failed to collect the fonts correctly and their forums are full of this fault. We have waited and waited for this to be fixed.

On the 2nd June 2007, Quark released Quark 7. We obviously needed Flightcheck Pro to work with Quark 7. As of the writing of this article, Flightcheck Pro still doesn't work with Quark 7. Of course software like Flightcheck Pro can't be written overnight, but we were a private beta test for Quark long before it even became a public beta. Quark had two public beta releases. I would have thought the Markzware would have been ready shortly after the official launch of Quark 7 with a product that they know a lot of users of Quark will require.

Back in August on their forums a public beta was promised. I am sure a public beta for a product such as Flightcheck Pro would help the users and the Markzware get a better product to market quicker. There is no better way to test it than let users put proper jobs through the checking engine. More users, more jobs, more testing, more bugs found.

Hopefully now some good news. I spoke to David, the Managing Director, from Markzware at the London Mac Expo last week and he promised that I would have a beta this week. Not sure if this is going to be a public beta, but at least we now know there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it is switched on. To be fair to David, he was very apologetic as I expressed our concerns about the way this situation has been handled. He asked for just a little more patience.

I did point out that with some better communication from Markzware some of this could have been avoided. Public betas seem all the rage at the moment. Adobe has Photoshop Lightroom and Soundbooth. Parallels used a public beta very well to iron out issues in their first release of Desktop For Mac, and then later, with Mac Pro issues. Quark, the company who never used to communicate, had Quark 7 as a public beta.

I do hope Markzware has now turned the corner. We might know this week.

Last Thursday, I was at the opening day of the London Mac Expo at Olympia. I have never been a great fan of the London Expo, as it seemed so small and meaningless. Back in the days when it was held at the Business Design Centre in Islington, it was hardly worth the bother. Paris used to get all the attention as they normally had the advantage of Apple delivering a Keynote at that show. This didn't happen this year and it seems London has taken advantage.

Quark decided to use this event to launch their new Interactive Design plugin and held a keynote. A good example of the show gaining prestige was the presence of Google. HP, Apple, Adobe, Sony and other big names were also present. Only Microsoft was missing. They had nothing new to show so that makes some sense.

It was nice to see some smaller developers there. Realmac Software, the makers of Rapidweaver had a stand along with a company I hadn't heard of, Accountz. They make cross platform accounting packages. The owner, Quentin, showed me the Personal Accountz version. It looks really nice. This software sector has very little Mac software available and even less made for the UK. In fact, Accountz software doesn't show any currency, just numbers. So it can be used anywhere. I use Quicken at the moment, but I am paying a lot of money for a package, 80% of features, I can't use.

I also met up with the Your Mac Life team. Thanks to their sponsors, Griffin Technology and iStockphoto, they had come over from the States to cover the show. It was good to meet Shawn again. The amount of work he puts into the show should never be underestimated.

I was surprised by the number of stands that concentrated on photography. Sony were showing off their first ever digital SLR. Screen calibration was covered as was colour output, small and large.

Overall, I think this year's show was excellent. It had a good mix of large and small vendors as well as companies actually selling you the software and hardware that was on display. Some good deals were also available. I look forward to next year and the continuing growth of the London Mac Expo.

Last week, I was given the task of trying to write a batch file to upload and download a folder via SFTP. It wasn't as nearly as hard as I thought. Here is how I did it.

Firstly, I downloaded PuTTY for Windows. I made a folder on the c: drive call sftp.

I copied PuTTY to this folder. The batch files should go into the same folder as PuTTY.

Next I opened PuTTY and logged onto the SFTP server so that the local server knew about the keys. The batch file will fail if this isn't done first. Their are ways to add this part to a batch file, but this seemed easier.

I then made a batch file that was called scheduled_download.bat

In the file I put the following code:

psftp username@sftp server name -v -bc -batch -pw logon_password -b
download_files.bat

You don't seem to be able to put file commands like get and put into this batch file so I had to made a second one. This was called download_files.bat. You can see this in the second line of code. That batch file had the following lines:

lcd c:\patches
get -r test

lcd changes the local direct on the windows machine. This is the folder that the files will be downloaded to. The, get -r test, part will download all the files in the folder test on the sftp server.

If you want to copy files to the sftp server, you can use this code:

lcd c:/patches
cd /test
put -r v3

Again, lcd changes the directory you are using to upload from. cd changed the upload folder on the sftp server to test and put -r v3 uploaded all the files from the folder v3 that is in test.

I hope this helps.

Last Thursday night I had the honour of listening to Steve Wozniak at a Waterstones book signing session in London. He was there to publicise his new book, iWoz. The majority of the people there were mid to late thirties. Probably too young to have had an Apple ][, but obviously were Apple lovers. He walked into the room to tremendous applause. He quickly introduced himself, as if any were necessary and quickly started to speak about his childhood. He is a very quick speak, and to start with it sounded like he was just listing events, but soon you were taking in by his story.

It was not a list of facts and achievement to blow his own trumpet. It was enthusiasm for his craft. You could tell how proud he was of the products he has made over the years, from his science projects when he was 11, to the programs he wrote when he was at University. Woz is very engaging to listen to. You felt at anytime he would take a pen and draw for you his thoughts about circuit design and how one design was better than another.

After 50 minutes he had only just got to the Apple ][ years when the Waterstone staff told him to start taking questions or we would run out of time. It was disappointing. You could tell he wanted to go on and I am sure he would have. He got the obvious, what do you think of Windows question? He was very diplomatic. He said it had its place for certain jobs, but ended with, I suppose it works. This caused a lot of laughter. Some of the people who asked questions obviously had a good knowledge of Apple history. One person asked why Apple chose Microsoft BASIC rather than Woz continue to write his own. He explained it was a time issue. He needed to do other things and it was quicker to buy it.

After an hour it was over. Time was called. He signed everyones book who stayed behind. He was happy to have his picture taken with everyone. This is the first time I had met Woz. I hope to hear him sometime tell the whole story. This is the man who built the computer that changed the world. It meant the maths teacher I had when I was 11 could have a ZX80 and then a ZX81. They were the first computers I had every seen. I was taken in by them straight away.

That lead me to getting a ZX Spectrum, BBC Master, then an Amiga. My love of computers was born back in those days. Finally I got my first Mac, an LCIII, an iMac, then a g5 quad and now a Mac Pro. Woz spoke about 4k of ram. I have 5gb of ram. How the world has changed since those days when Woz, Steve Jobs and Ron Wayne started Apple. Woz got a ball rolling that would effect my life years later.

Thank you Woz.

After looking into this further I found out what was really happening.

If you go to the connect to server dialog box you will see a little cog in the lower left hand corner.



Click on options and you will see the following screen.



If you now untick, allow sending password in clear text, and try and logon to a Window Server you will get the -35 error. Deleting the preferences as I suggested before only resets the tick box back on. I am sure their is a setting on the server to allow non clear text passwords. When I find it, I will post it here.

I have only seen this error on Intel Macs. Sometimes you can successfully login, but other times you get a -35 error. Once you get this error it never seems to go away. Even a restart doesn't fix it. I have only seen this when I tried to login to a Windows 2003 server that was running Services for Macintosh (SFM). I could login to a server that was running Windows 2003, but was using Extremez-IP.

I can't take credit for this fix as I found it via the Apple Discussion boards, but it does work.

Open terminal and navigate to

~/Library/Preferences

then type rm .GlobalPreferences.plist

then navigate to

/Library/Preferences

then type rm .GlobalPreferences.plist

be very careful with rm it can remove a lot of files if you get it wrong. After doing this I was able to login into a server no problem. You can't do this from the finder as the files are invisible.

As it turns out this does fix it, but I had to redo it again after installing 10.4.8. I am as yet unsure if it was the update or the reboot that messed it up. Hopefully I will be able to update this later and let you know.

Following on from my post below, I can confirm that the latest Apple update to OS X, 10.4.8, fixes the issues I was having with my Mac Pro and the Cisco VPN client.

I wanted to make sure the machine would restart after I installed 10.4.8 so I removed the the CiscoVPN folder from system/library/startupitems folder. To delete this folder you will need your admin password. I then did a permissions check via Disk Utility. Installed 10.4.8 restarted and the re-installed the Cisco VPN client and now it works fine and I can restart and shutdown as normal.

When I update my OS I always use the combo updater.