Chris Erwin

Are you having problems with the Jostens toolbar not showing up in InDesign CS3?  Were you led here by Google?  Are you not interested in my uninteresting story on how I solved this technological mystery?  Then just issue these commands and move along.

sudo chmod -R a+w "/Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Plug-Ins/Jostens"
sudo find /Users -name "InDesign SavedData" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

If you’re here for the story, read on!

At work the yearbook team is using InDesign CS3 on OS X 10.4 to create the yearbooks this year.  We upgraded them to CS3 over the summer and I didn’t anticipate any problems.  Turns out we did have a problem, and it was a big one.

The printing is done by Jostens, who provided a CD with an InDesign plugin and some support files that are used for their specific layout.  I installed the plugin and opened InDesign to make sure the toolbar showed up.  It did, but unfortunately I tested it as a user with more file permission rights than the students.  I know better, but I’m also lazy, so what can I say?

A few days later the teacher reported the toolbar was not showing up when InDesign was opened.  I checked and sure enough the toolbar was not present when running InDesign as one of my student-level accounts.  To me, this pointed to file permissions issues.

I started by giving all users read, write, and execute permissions for /Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Plug-Ins/Jostens/.  I logged back in under my student account but the toolbar was still not there.  After trying all sorts of other crazy permission changes everywhere I tried another student-level account of mine.  To my surprise, the toolbar appeared when I ran InDesign.  Hmm.

I pondered this for a while, envisioning myself at the critical plot twist of an episode of House, ACSA.  I didn’t have a team to bounce ideas off of and insult, nor did I have a cane or a three-day beard.  I sure had a mystery on my hands though.  What was the difference between these two accounts?  I logged in and out of each one a few times, running InDesign and pondering the results.  When I logged in as cerwin, the toolbar did not appear.  When I logged in as chrise, it did.  Every time.

“…can’t be autoimmune…”

I thought about ordering a CT or treating for sarcoidosis, but then I realized I had four more patients (computers) in the room, all presenting the same symptoms.  I wrote off the first patient as dead (for now) and slid down a seat.  Starting over, I logged in as an administrator and made /Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Plug-Ins/Jostens 777.  Is it a good idea to give normal users write rights to an important folder?  No, but I was in a hurry and figured I could restore that folder any time a user mucked with it.

Logged in as chrise.  The expectation was that the toolbar would show up fine, which it did.  Logged out and in as cerwin.  The expectation this time was that it wouldn’t show up, for no good reason.  Much to my surprise, it did show up.  Hmm.  It’s not Lupus.  But it is a compound problem, combining the permissions on the plugin folder with something else.

I thought a bit more until I realized the problem.  InDesign is caching its toolbar layout in a file in my profile somewhere.  Since cerwin had logged in on computer 1 before the permissions were fixed, the toolbar failed to launch, and InDesign made its layout cache without including that toolbar.  chrise had logged in after the permissions were fixed and thus InDesign’s layout cache in that profile included the Jostens toolbar.

Simple enough.  A few quick rm -r commands and I was back on computer #1 with a clean slate.  I logged in as cerwin and lo and behold, there was the toolbar.  Ok, that’s simple enough, I can just go around and delete everyone’s profile out of /Users, right?  It’s not that easy, since the users might have saved some larger files locally to avoid taking up space on the server.

I poked around /Users a bit until I found the offending file.  I finally found it: “InDesign SavedData”  Nice extension, Adobe.  No matter, as it was time for some bash fu.

sudo find /Users -name “InDesign SavedData” -print0 | xargs -0 rm

This removed the InDesign SavedData file from everyone’s profile and restored their access to the Jostens toolbar.

My Creative Zen Touch had developed a problem with the headphone jack nearly a year ago. The left channel solder joint broke and I couldn’t find a small enough soldering iron to get in there and fix it. Not all is lost, as it has a nice 1.8″ 20GB hard drive which I will surely find useful.

I started researching mp3 players about a month ago to find a suitable replacement. Creative has the Vision M, but I’ve had enough of Creative after my Zen Touch’s headphone issue as well as the huge headache of switching to Vista with my Audigy 4 Pro. Creative hasn’t come up with a suitable driver that works well in Vista with low latency. Vista’s sound system has changed and Creative failed to adapt. EAX no longer works due to the changes to Vista’s sound stack, and Creative actually has the stones to charge for the wrapper they’ve developed to allow for EAX in Vista. Yeah, thanks.

There are some interesting options from companies such as iRiver and Sony, but one brand stood out – The Apple iPod. Now, I disagree with Apple’s reputation as a ‘good’ company whose interests lie in what’s good for the consumer. Just like Microsoft or Intel or any other corporation, their interest is in money and money alone. Steve Jobs has come to the realization that there is money to be had in pretending to have consumer interests in mind. For this reason, I try to avoid Apple products as they are for the most part overpriced for what they are. Sure they’re decent products, better in many respects than some consumer-level products from other companies, but they’re not the epitome of computing perfection carved from pure awesome and running software coded in awesome++ like the Apple fanboys would have you believe. They’re just decent with a less-than-decent price tag.

Anyway, as much as I dislike Apple, they had a pretty solid product. The 5.5g (fifth and a half generation, the September 2006 update to the fifth gen) plays mp3s, which covers my current music library, as well as AAC files. As I imagine many people do, I at first thought one of the A’s in AAC stood for Apple, and thought ‘why would I want to play an Apple proprietary format?’ Turns out AAC stands for ‘Advanced Audio Coding’ and is a standardized lossy compression format set to replace mp3. It just so happens that Apple is one of the few companies using it at the moment, and music from the iTunes Music Store happens to be in AAC format.

One of the reasons I didn’t want to used iTunes was the fact that ITMS purchased music uses Apple’s FairPlay DRM, and as everyone should know, DRM is inherently bad. I don’t support copyright infringement and understand that DRM was partly designed to curb illegal digital media sharing, but in reality it has done nothing to slow it down. Instead, the RIAA and many record labels are using DRM to make money by limiting when and where you can play the music that you have purchased. They are attempting to turn the purchase of music into the purchase of the rights to play a piece of music and limiting what those rights cover. By doing so, they would like to make it so that you have to purchase ‘My Humps’ rights for your mp3 player, your car, your computer, and your stereo, thus earning them 4 times the money for crappy music they don’t deserve any money for in the first place.

In the end however, my discontent with DRM and the RIAA and my strength of character in standing up for my principles took a back seat to my laziness. Am I playing DRM-encrypted music and videos on my iPod? Well, yes, but it’s not keeping me from playing anywhere I want; I only want to play them on my computer and on my iPod. Make no mistake, I will not hesitate to strip the DRM from the files should I want to play them elsewhere. iTunes isn’t keeping me very happy, especially with it’s horrible performance in Vista. For now though the DRM is in tact and the RIAA is happy.

I had already made some purchases off of iTunes. I had purchased a few episodes of The Office that I had missed, and I bought the ‘My Musical’ episode of Scrubs. I now have a working TV tuner card for my computer and don’t miss shows thanks to Vista’s Media Center (more DRM silliness). As soon as I get around to it, I will be converting some of my recorded shows to mpeg4 for use on my iPod. Does this make the media companies cry? Sure does, but I don’t care. I recorded it, so I’m going to watch it where and when I want. I won’t distribute it, because that’s wrong and I understand that. I don’t need Microsoft or Apple to hold my hand on that point.

So here I sit, listening to Carmina Burana on my evil corporate mind control device. Do I feel dirty paying for an Apple product? Well, perhaps I do on occasion, late at night, when I’m contemplating the state of open source software and net neutrality and everything that is free (as in speech) in this world, but normally my laziness is in charge and I don’t give a crap. I can’t take down corporate America and thus The Man by not buying one iPod. Hell, I’m not even a dirty hippie that wants to see corporate America fail. Steve Jobs can have a beer on me because I want just want to listen to some music.

Converted from the old blog.

In this article I describe how to disable Bluetooth functionality for all users in OS X.

A java programming teacher at work ran into an issue where his students were using the built-in Bluetooth hardware in their iMacs to share work. He was rightfully concerned that this would occur during tests.

All of the Bluetooth settings in OS X are per user, and Workgroup Manager was of no use. Students use Active Directory domain accounts, so config file tweaking wouldn’t help.

After a little Googling we found this solution. Short of removing the Bluetooth hardware from the computers themselves, this seems to be the most effective method of disabling Bluetooth functionality for all users.

Simply remove the following files from /System/Library/Extensions :
IOBluetoothFamily.kext
IOBluetoothHIDDriver.kext

Remove the following files from /System/Library :
Extensions.kextcache
Extensions.mkext

If you removed them using the command line, reboot the machine. If you drug them to the trash, select “Secure Empty Trash” from the Finder menu and reboot the system.

To restore functionality, the files could probably be restored, but it’s just easier to re-image or rebuild the system altogether.