A thread for boring computer questions.

Also...If Ed is still here- My girlfriend's burner won't re-write, erase or read a CD-RW once we have initially burned some files onto it. Help! What is wrong? It's an internal ibook cdrw drive.

Repeat the mantra and you will discover you only believe it to have been broken. Because Macs never break down.

< / schadenfreude >

I am trying to install my new iPOD but whenever I plug it in it just flashes 'Do not disconnect' forever and (presumably as a result), when I try to run the iPod software updater both the 'Update' and 'Restore' options are greyed out. The iPod appears in my iTunes panel, and it lets me move tracks onto it (I unchecked the 'automatically update iPod with new tracks' option), but still the display on the iPOD just flashes 'Do not disconnect'. Dragging iPod to the Trash tells me I can't as it's in use. So I have to disconnect it. Then it tells me off for not putting the device away properly.

But all the tracks I loaded onto it are then there on my iPod and play fine! But I don't want to be disobeying the 'Do not disconnect' message every time. WHAT'S GOING ON? Someone help me.

Also, I might be saying something you already know here or is less useful but if you set your importing configuration to ACC encoder then you can play .acc files on it which take up a lot less capacity. This is probably unuseful, mister importer.

Maybe I'll go the AAC way. I guess I like the idea of being able to share my tracks with PC owning friends though.

In other news, I found out that you shouldn't reboot Windows while your iPod is still connected, because then it'll scandisk the iPod very VERY SLOWLY for something like two hours before you can disconnect it again.

My CD drive still thinks everything disc I put in is a CD-RW and stutters a lot when I try to access it, but I think it's going to need to be repaired. Bleh.

I want to enter in names for each item in the table I'm working on. A lot of them start with articles, and I want them to be sorted by name, but I want them to be presented without putting the articles at the end of each name. How can I do this? Is there some sort of function that I can add to the varchar type to not count leading articles when sorting, but still present them when in a list?

Thanks!

can iChat do group chats on rendezvous?

Thanks!

Here's the deal: the company I work for often produces PowerPoint presentations for clients but we're now getting to the stage where our clients know their way around PowerPoint and we need to take it to the next level. I'm suggesting we go down the DVD route and take the movie clips, slides and soundtracks, and edit them in FCP and then burn a DVD which the presenter can navigate using the chapters.

What format does FCP/DVDSP use for editing the video? When we use video crews, normally we end up with a video tape that is turned into an MPEG and embedded into the .ppt - what format(s) can I get from the crew that I can then use in FCP/DVDSP? If the crew uses a purely analogue tape process, how can I get this into FCP in high enough quality for it to look like proper footage in the result?

Most of our clients use PowerPoint and some of the final product will need to include PowerPoint-like functionality. I've heard that Keynote can read PC .ppt files and export a movie file. I'm thinking that there must be ways of manipulating the DVD controls so that a series of DVD chapters can be navigated in the same click-run-click-run way. Can anyone verify this?

Keynote will do what you say but interactivity will be removed, but you can put that back in in DVDSP if you need it. The best thing to do would be to encode each slide's animations as a movie and then make each slide a 'chapter' on the DVD then people can jump around slides using the forward and back buttons on the DVD player, or access them through a menu or other controls you build into the DVD with DVDSP.

I guess what I'll do with Keynote is to import the client's .ppt, tidy it up (Keynote's transitions look way nicer than PowerPoint's) and then export as a straight movie. I can then edit in video segments with FCP and then put in chapter markers/scripts with DVDSP. In film DVD bonus features, you sometimes get galleries of images where you have to press a button to advance to the next image - I'm guessing that I can set up something similar in DVDSP to mimic the slideshow of PowerPoint.