All Unix commands have a manual. For example, typing man top in the Terminal will display the manual for the top command. This is really handy, but I hate reading manuals off the screen. I have found this useful application that will open man pages in a GUI. It is called ManOpen and can be found here.

It makes reading and printing these helpful man pages much easier.

I have a problem at work regarding Final Cut Pro opening very slowly. I know that it is caused by the Sophos anti virus software, but their is no way of seeing which files it is scanning. I was researching this and found this Unix command.

lsof (List Open Files)

Typing this into the Terminal It will list all your open files and I mean all of them! It will be a long list. You can filter by using the -c command. For example lsof -c Final will list all the open files that are running under Command column that begins Final. It is case sensitive so final will return nothing.

COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
Final\x20 9088 xxxxxx cwd DIR 14,9 1088 2 /
Final\x20 9088 xxxxxx txt REG 14,9 17093696 1978666 /Applications/Final Cut Pro.app/Contents/MacOS/Final Cut Pro
Final\x20 9088 xxxxxx txt REG 14,9 111908 1978660 /Applications/Final Cut Pro.app/Contents/Frameworks/ProTimecode.framework/Versions/A/ProTimecode

You can also list open files by their pid. For example, lsof -p 9088,9110,9912 will list all the open files for these PIDs 9088,9110 and 9912. You can find the pid your application is running under via Activity Monitor which can be found in the Applications/Utilities folder.

Exchange 2007 looks like a really nice product. We only moved to Exchange 2003 back in June after 7 years on Exchange 5.5. I didn't think we would even think about 2007 for quite awhile, but after seeing the demos, I think we may well implement it this year.

Some of the features I liked we could have used in Exchange 2003, but they have been made much better in 2007 so it is worth the upgrade. Here are the ones that took my eye.

With Outlook 2007, users can set themselves up to an Exchange server. It will look for their login details and will find them on the server. Three clicks and they are setup.

Mobile Devices are handled much better in 2007.

We may move our voicemail system to Exchange. Users will be able to listen to their voicemail messages from within an email. They can even dial in and have the Exchange server read them their mail.

Remote users are able to click on links to documents even if they are inside the network without a VPN.

One application has been taken away and that is Exmerge. I love Exmerge. We use it for brick level backups. With only 300 users it is quick and simple. I will have to see if their is another way of doing this.

We will be installing a test server over Christmas. Hopefully, I will have some comments on how that goes early in 2007. One thing to note. The only version of Exchange 2007 that is supported by Microsoft is the 64 bit version. You can use the 32 bit version for testing, but it is not supported. To run the 64 bit version, you must also run Windows Server 64 bit. If you are in the Software Assurance program, you will be able to get this version free.

Last week, I went to Microsoft's UK head office in Reading for the launch of Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and Vista. I was impressed with what I saw. When I went in I felt that we would eventually roll Vista out to our users, but not any time soon.

After the launch, I had changed my mind. It not only looks good, but it had some features that look like they will be worth moving ahead with faster than I thought. I haven't installed it yet on my machine, that is a Christmas project.

The aspects I liked were:

The new Group Policy options, especially USB device control.

The GUI looked good. In fact, some of the demos were done via XP and it looked so old.

The imaging technology also looked good. It looks like making images to roll out to machines will be much easier and we won't need third party tools anymore.

The help feature looked brilliant and you can even record your own to help your users.

As I say, I haven't tried any of this as yet, but it looked good in the demos. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I will be blogging more as I try all this out.

If you can't get your Rosetta applications to open and they only bounce in the dock, then try this.

Quit all open applications.

Open Activity Monitor. This is found in /Applications/Utilities

Pick Administrator Processes from the pull down.

You should see a process called translated. You may also see a process called translate.

Highlight them and click the red quit process button at the top of the screen.

Choose Quit. The process should now end and be gone from the list.

You should now be able to open your Rosetta applications.