Day: January 3, 2006

Lately, I seem to be running into a major technology problem each day. Today, all my Microsoft applications refused to open unless I paid money. It took me a little while to identify the problem. Evidently near the end of 2004, someone (this typically means I am blaming my wife) loaded “Office 2004 Test Drive” on my Mac. Evidently, today was the first time I opened a file created with a Microsoft product on this particular machine in the new year.

I do not use the Office 2004 Test Drive applications but the installation of this product must have somehow modified my Office v.X applications (or supporting files). I removed the Office 2004 Test Drive file and this turned out to be a mistake. I should have run an uninstall program in the “Test Drive” folder to remove Test Drive and the altered Office v.X and then reinstalled my Office v.X files (luckily I could find the installation disk or I would have been forced to pay a ransom to Redmond).

In case, you encounter a similar problem you can download a copy of “Test Drive” (DO NOT INSTALL) and run the uninstall program. I have no suggestions if you cannot locate your original install disk.

If you make frequent visits to this blog, you probably noticed that several weeks worth of posts disappeared. This was my fault. I operate several servers and took a short cut when setting up a new machine. I copied a version of my database administration tool from one machine to another. For some reason when I returned from vacation it looked like I had also copied the databases. So – I deleted the databases on the new machine. It turns out that the config files sets a virtual host path and I was actually deleting the databases from the original machine. This meant that I eliminated all of my blog entries.

I do back up my material (evidently on Dec. 7). The problem with my backup technique is that the tool I use assumes the database structure still exists and all the tool needs to do is reload the data. There is probably a lesson here. My favorite technology commentator (Leo Laporte) recently discussed the down side of specialized backup software in comparison to simply copying key parts of the hard drive to an external disk. The file created by the specialized software may not be readable by any other application. This was similar to my situation. Luckily, I had saved my database information (mysql) out as an sql file (a text file containing the data and file structure information) several months ago. I was able to use this old information to recreate the database and then use my specialized software to reload everything to the point of my last backup.

Anyway, I will attempt to recreate some of the missing posts within the next week or so.

New Year’s resolution – backup!