Keeping my digital life in-sync (2)
Some months ago I wrote the post Keeping my digital life in-sync. At this moment I still haven’t found a good working solution to keep my bookmarks in-synch. This mainly concerns the bookmarks within (Mobile)Safari on my iPhone. FoxMarks does a pretty good job for anything bookmark related in Firefox, which is my preferred browser on all platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux).
When it comes to being able to access the same documents from different machines I started to use Apple’s MobileMe by using its iDisk functionality. But for whatever reason it didn’t really work well for me.
Since the time I started using Macs I have been listening to the The Mac Geek Gab Podcast by Dave Hamilton & John F. Braun. For some time now I heard them mention Dropbox. So after hearing about their good experience with Dropbox I decided to give it a try.
At the time of writing I have installed Dropbox on four machines (two Macs and two Windows machine) and I like it! It has a nice feel to it, just by looking at the Dropbox folder I can see what the status of my files are (All done or still folders/files to be synched).
One thing that I have found that does not work (not sure that it should) is when you use Dropbox for folders that also contain hidden files. I have some folders that also have files that start with a dot, making the files invisible on Unix based platforms (Mac, Linux, etc.). When these files got synched to the Windows machine the files and folders where created but where visible. When synching between two Windows machines these attributes are also lost. So it is my guess that file and folder attributes are just always lost.
For not a real big issue but I can imagine that for others it is a big deal, so let’s hope Dropbox will find a way of fixing this issue cross platform.
You can get Dropbox for free including free 2.0GB of storage, which if needed can be upgrade to 50GB for $9.99 per month or $99 yearly.
Just so you know…
Internet Explorer 6 on Windows ME…
Last weekend I tried to update Internet Explorer from version 5.5 to version 6 on my dads Windows ME machine.
I am always anxious when installing something new or updated on his machine. This time did not disappoint me, it failed. I would just like to upgrade the machine hardware and OS to something more recent, but with all the special hardware and software installed on it for his visual handicap, I am not that eager to take on that project. Most of the time I am out of the country for work, so if anything would need a bit more time it would take weeks to finish. My dad, due to his handicap, relies on his PC to read news, books and stay in touch with friends and family.
The installer gave the very unhelpful message ‘Set up was unable to install all the components’, the helpful message would have been something along the lines of ‘Set up was unable to install the following components X, Y, Z because we suck at creating proper installation routines and we Microsoft still don’t understand Windows good enough to make it work properly’. That would have made much more sense…
Today I did a bit of searching on this issue, because it always nags at me when these kind of things just don’t work the way they should. It appears we were not the only one hitting this issue.
From the posts I found some people suggest to download the full installation of Internet Explorer 6 including Service Pack 1 (ie60sp1.exe) instead of only the downloading-installer (ie6setup.exe). Sadly enough from the Microsoft download site only the downloading-installer can be downloaded. Using Google I was able to find a number of sites where it could be downloaded, but I don’t trust the kind of sites I was redirected to. Normally the site Oldversions.com is the solution, but I could only find Internet Explorer 6.0 without the Service Pack. So I might download a version from one of those sites anyway and then first try the installation within a Virtual Machine to see it is a proper install kit or something more devious.
Microsoft’s Knowledge base has some articles related to the message ‘Set up was unable to install all the components’;
1. Err Msg: Setup Was Unable to Install All the Components
2. Error Message: Setup Was Unable to Install All the Components
If all goes well I can install it on my dads machine in two weeks time, since coming weekend my girlfriend and I are going to Paris. Hopefully the weather changes for the better, the way it looks now we are in for 4 days of rain…
To be continued….
Social Networking
Wakoopa
