Computers suck

mikea

mikea

Touchdown! Greaser!
Gone West
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Feb 12, 2005
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iWin
Disregard the previous.

Computers suck. Macs suck, too.

I'm helping my buddy setting up his new iMac. The biggest disaster, amazingly, is getting EUDORA on the Mac to grok his 15 years worth of EUDORA on Windows mailboxes.

In theory it's just a matter of converting the text file format from DOS to Unix (Yes. I know how to do that. No combo of tr options makes Eudora/Mac happy. Textwrangler does. We'd just have to manually convert the 1000 files. Thus the Applescript misadventure anon.) The most amazing part is that Eudora's help to do this is ancient, non-existent and almost hostile.

Along the way in trying to accomplish this I wanted to move the tiny CRLF app that Eudora suggests from the Macbook to the iMac. More than that. It was compressed as a .sit file. New Macs don't come with Unstuffit. Mine has it. To download it required an email address and I wasn't in the mood. to be spammed (I know. I cause my own problems.)

So I unStuff the thing in my Macbook and try to move it to the iMac.

My Macbook Pro WILL NOT share files over the network no matter what combination I use.

  • Not to the new Time Capsule.
  • Not to my buddy's new iMac with OS X 10.5
  • It will to the Windows XP tower....except my my buddy's new iMac couldn't see the files no matter how many times I tried to authenticate.
  • The iMac could not see the file on the Macbook.

For all of the above tries the Macs had no problem seeing the computers, on the network they just couldn't get permission to write or see the f*'in content.

I even tried to FTP the file out. It ended up being 0 length, even though I used binary mode.

In the end I emailed it to myself. Even there I ended up with two files thanks to MIME nonsense.

So after after a long wasted time of trying, I surrendered and download the stuffed file, download and install unstuffit....and....in the end I finally got the message that the utility is for System 7 and there is no compatibility mode. So the only help Eudora has is prolly 10 years outdated.

I've spent like 9 hours of hacking various ways around the problem, mostly trying to get Applescript to do "exotic" things like find all of the files in the folder to work on them. It throws errors because evidently Apple never told it the kinds of stuff it'll find in an OS X folder. From what I find by googling it takes like 20 lines of barely comprehensible code to work around this.

I was trying to learn Applescript anyway to automate some routine tasks so I trust the time isn't entirely wasted. BTW, the decent script debugger costs $199. At this point I'm figuring that's just $10 an hour.

I did what I wanted with find from the Unix shell in about 2 minutes. (Like: Since I did make the list of full path to the files in find and redirect that into a file, maybe I could get Applescript to take that file as input. Not any easier. More hours of hacking. :mad::mad:)

I WILL accomplish this. I just can see that I have to invest maybe another 5 hours of hacking.

I HATE COMPUTERS. I am too old to enjoy this crap any more.
 
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mikea said:
I HATE COMPUTERS. I am too old to enjoy this crap any more.
Click to expand...

There is a special place in hell reserved for software engineers of incompatible products. It's right there next to the TSA cauldron.
 
Move it all onto a Palm device (Lord knows their OS is old enough) and move it onto the Mac from there.
 
gibbons said:
Nope. No matter how much the Mac & PC proponents poke at each other, the fact is they all suck. I guess the question "why keep 15 years worth of email?" is not in play?
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How long??? Heck, I don't think I even sent an email until around 1996 or 1997.
 
The free Mozilla "Thunderbird" email software (the email counterpart to the Firefox web browser) can read old Eudora mailbox files. Just take your old *.mbx files from Eudora and copy them into whatever folder you've designated to be the "Local Folders" folder of Thunderbird. Get rid of the .mbx filename extension and give these files a meaningful plain filename without an extension, and when you open up Thunderbird, the mailbox files will magically appear as folders under your "Local Folders". That's all I had to do to get my old Eudora mail archives imported into Thunderbird.
 
Neal Howard said:
The free Mozilla "Thunderbird" email software (the email counterpart to the Firefox web browser) can read old Eudora mailbox files. Just take your old *.mbx files from Eudora and copy them into whatever folder you've designated to be the "Local Folders" folder of Thunderbird. Get rid of the .mbx filename extension and give these files a meaningful plain filename without an extension, and when you open up Thunderbird, the mailbox files will magically appear as folders under your "Local Folders". That's all I had to do to get my old Eudora mail archives imported into Thunderbird.
Click to expand...

In theory. There also a free utility to convert the mailboxes to Thunderbird.

The problem is he doesn't want to convert from Eudora to anything, he wants to convert from Eudora to Eudora...from Windows/DOS to Mac.

ARRGHH. Right now for some reason the Macbook didn't like listening to the mouse button, even after a reboot. So I moved to this Windows PC. It hangs even on the keyboard.

I need a vacation.
 
mikea said:
In theory. There also a free utility to convert the mailboxes to Thunderbird.

The problem is he doesn't want to convert from Eudora to anything, he wants to convert from Eudora to Eudora...from Windows/DOS to Mac.

ARRGHH. Right now for some reason the Macbook didn't like listening to the mouse button, even after a reboot. So I moved to this Windows PC. It hangs even on the keyboard.

I need a vacation.
Click to expand...
The bluetooth mouse on the Macbook needed new batteries. What was happening was it didn't respond to mouse clicks. All better now.

Firefox on Windows does this hanging when scrolling and later, when typing thing, I think, when certain web sites are open in a tab, maybe another memory leak or java deal. I've fixed it my closing tabs one at a time.

I rebooted.

I need to look in performance manager next time to see what it's doing with the CPU and memory.
 
I have a partner that we purchased a small Sony Vaio. About 2 months ago. He now wants us to buy him a Mac Air. :confused: To properly set the stage, we have to maintain a desktop machine for him that runs pre-windows WordPerfect. :(
 
wsuffa said:
I have a partner that we purchased a small Sony Vaio. About 2 months ago. He now wants us to buy him a Mac Air. :confused: To properly set the stage, we have to maintain a desktop machine for him that runs pre-windows WordPerfect. :(
Click to expand...

He can run MS-DOS or FreeDOS in a Parallels or VMWare virtual machine on the Mac Air.

I was demoing to this buddy as I worked, how I was running a Remote control session viewing and controlling my Windows XP company desktop over a Windows-only VPN, watching a Live Meeting from another computer at work all in Windows XP VM in Parallels Desktop on my Macbook Pro. B) In other words, I was using 3 desktop OS instances to watch a 4th.

Sometimes. They work.
 
gibbons said:
Nope. No matter how much the Mac & PC proponents poke at each other, the fact is they all suck. I guess the question "why keep 15 years worth of email?" is not in play?
Click to expand...

Amen, brother Chip!

Mike, I didn't realize Eudora even existed any more! I was a long-time user, but I gave up on it when I had to either pay for it or watch ads. Oh, and there was the fact that there was a FREE (as in, free to use AND free of ads) mail client that Apple put on my computer, free.

So, I started using Mail. Unless he REALLY needs to actually do something other than read the messages, I'd highly recommend that he use Mail as well. When I actually need to read one of the old Eudora messages, well, Spotlight has them indexed and still finds them just fine.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Amen, brother Chip!

Mike, I didn't realize Eudora even existed any more! I was a long-time user, but I gave up on it when I had to either pay for it or watch ads. Oh, and there was the fact that there was a FREE (as in, free to use AND free of ads) mail client that Apple put on my computer, free.

So, I started using Mail. Unless he REALLY needs to actually do something other than read the messages, I'd highly recommend that he use Mail as well. When I actually need to read one of the old Eudora messages, well, Spotlight has them indexed and still finds them just fine.
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He has rules for about every sender that sorts them into folders.

It's a miracle enough that I convinced him to buy the iMac. Having him change mail clients will too much.

There is a free Eudora-->Mail converter which I'll try to see if it gets me anywhere. I expect as things have been going, it won't like having the Eudora mail in DOS format.
 
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mikea said:
He has rules for about every sender that sorts them into folders.
Click to expand...

Is there some way for the rules to survive the conversion? I can't remember how Eudora stores its rules and prefs, but if he's gotta re-do 'em anyway, might as well switch clients in the process. Heck, the auto-junk mail filtering alone is worth it.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Is there some way for the rules to survive the conversion? I can't remember how Eudora stores its rules and prefs, but if he's gotta re-do 'em anyway, might as well switch clients in the process. Heck, the auto-junk mail filtering alone is worth it.
Click to expand...

The rules files are also text, so I'm guessing they can be converted.
 
Forward all the e-mails to a yahoo/snotmail/gmail account, then forward them all to the new computer?
 
EdFred said:
Forward all the e-mails to a yahoo/snotmail/gmail account, then forward them all to the new computer?
Click to expand...

That might actually work, provided he recreated all the mail rules on the Mac version, but I gotta do the macho approach. After all, at this point I've had his iMac for over a week and still haven't gone back to the problem. I have however, filled it with cigar smoke for which he may kill me. :redface:
 
mikea said:
That might actually work, provided he recreated all the mail rules on the Mac version, but I gotta do the macho approach. After all, at this point I've had his iMac for over a week and still haven't gone back to the problem. I have however, filled it with cigar smoke for which he may kill me. :redface:
Click to expand...

Let him recreate all his rules, and just run them on messages already received.
 
mikea said:
He has rules for about every sender that sorts them into folders.

It's a miracle enough that I convinced him to buy the iMac. Having him change mail clients will too much.

There is a free Eudora-->Mail converter which I'll try to see if it gets me anywhere. I expect as things have been going, it won't like having the Eudora mail in DOS format.
Click to expand...
So basically you're telling us YOU CAUSED ALL YOUR PROBLEMS. Serves you right for convincing him to buy a MAC.
After 35 years in computers, I couldn't agree more. They take the best we have and give us crap in return.
Insidious little devices.
 
On your Macbook Pro, place whatever files you want to move into USERS > SHARED folder.
With both machines turned off, connect the iMac and the Macbook Pro with a Firewire cable.
Startup the Macbook Pro.
Startup the iMac.
The Macbook Pro should see the iMac as an external hard drive.
Copy from the Macbook Pro SHARED folder to the iMac SHARED folder.
Eject the iMac HDD image from the Macbook Pro, disconnect the Firewire cable, restart the iMac.
Why do people have to make simple things so complicated? :)
 
john smith said:
On your Macbook Pro, place whatever files you want to move into USERS > SHARED folder.
With both machines turned off, connect the iMac and the Macbook Pro with a Firewire cable.
Startup the Macbook Pro.
Startup the iMac.
The Macbook Pro should see the iMac as an external hard drive.
Copy from the Macbook Pro SHARED folder to the iMac SHARED folder.
Eject the iMac HDD image from the Macbook Pro, disconnect the Firewire cable, restart the iMac.
Why do people have to make simple things so complicated? :)
Click to expand...

We didn't do that, because I keep thinking, naively, that Mac-Mac and Mac-Windows network sharing should work. On that Macs are as good as Windows because we know that Windows-Windows networking is a black art.
 
With Windows file sharing turned on, the Mac will usually see the Window machine.
The Windows machine will not always see the Mac.
 
john smith said:
With Windows file sharing turned on, the Mac will usually see the Window machine.
The Windows machine will not always see the Mac.
Click to expand...

As above, the problem isn't seeing the machines, it's getting authenticated for access to the contents.
 
john smith said:
On your Macbook Pro, place whatever files you want to move into USERS > SHARED folder.
With both machines turned off, connect the iMac and the Macbook Pro with a Firewire cable.
Startup the Macbook Pro while holding the T key.
Startup the iMac.
The Macbook Pro should see the iMac as an external hard drive.
Copy from the Macbook Pro SHARED folder to the iMac SHARED folder.
Eject the iMac HDD image from the Macbook Pro, disconnect the Firewire cable, restart the iMac.
Why do people have to make simple things so complicated? :)
Click to expand...

You forgot one simple thing, which I added in bold above, to do FireWire Disk Mode.

Handy little trick to have in the book, though... :yes:

(Edit: T key, not F key. They changed it from "Firewire Disk Mode" to "Target Disk Mode" a while back.)
 
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john smith said:
By authentication, do you mean "permissions"?
Click to expand...

Yes, both.

On the new iMac with OS X 10.5: (From memory) Go->Network. You see the Windows PC, Choose share. User/login as...Enter user-password, ...and see the same empty folder. Repeat 15 times.

Same to shares on the Macbook.

Same to the Time Capsule

Same for any permutations of the above.

Much of this can be the usual crap with Windows networking not liking anything named with more than 15 adjacent characters. They have, eeek, a space in the name as in, Time<space>Capsule. :mad:
 
10.5 caused a permissions problem for many computers. There is an Apple tech note on how to go in and reset all the permissions to correct the problem. I do not recall offhand the specific note, but I found it when I had the proble.
 
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