Daniel, if you are interested in my G3 Powerbook w/ dead hard drive shoot me an e.

Question: What's more fun than re-installing an operating system?

Answer: Not much!...Oh wait, no. Going home. Going home is a lot more fun than re-installing an OS.

I'm having a weird problem with one of my Macs at work -- the DVD Player software is refusing to recognize or play DVDs. No matter what we put in the drive (DVD data discs, playable DVDs created on this same Mac, playable DVDs created elsewhere), it loads in the finder as "Untitled CD" and refuses to acknowledge the presence of any media.

We've run all the updates we can find, and are currently running DVD Player 4.6.5, which as far as I can tell is the newest version available.

Anyone have a clue what might be causing this or how to fix it? Since we can still create DVDs on this Mac (that will play everywhere else), I'm pretty confident that it's a software issue and not the drive itself.

Jess, that's a common problem -- I saw it mentioned the other day. [link]

The Mac I got from eBay on Sunday still hasn't shown up. I'm nervous.

I have a MSWord puzzler. Why would a document refuse to print? I have a letter that I've printed many times before. One day, I selected the print command, pressed OK and...nothing. I can print other things, just this document, when commanded to print, will not print. I saved it to the document storage system...nothing. Tried other printers...nothing. It just doesn't tell the printer to print, the printer icon doesn't come up or anything. I've tried looking at all the various settings to see if there's something I accidentally checked that says "don't print"-- haven't found it. I've been able to c/p the doc and print that, but has anyone else seen this problem?

About the only thing I can think of is that in the Print dialog box, instead of an active printer, it's being told to print to a file, and dumping copies of itself on the hard drive somewhere. But this:

I saved it to the document storage system...nothing. Tried other printers...nothing.

....makes it sound like you've tried all that.

Other than that, I've got nothing. Sorry, bon.

That sounded like a very good answer, actually. As far as I know, the only way to print to file is checking a box on the print dialog, and that box isn't checked when it fails to print. If there's another setting, though, that might be it.

The only place I know for sure to do that is the check box in the print dialog. If there's someplace else to do it, maybe somebody else will know.

Oh, what OS are you using?

XP, this is my work computer.

In situations where c&p works, I breathe a sigh and pretend it never happened. Word is weird, but I've never had that particular problem.

Hokay. I solved my PostgreSQL "what's the row_id of the last insert?" question two ways--first by issuing a "SELECT currval()" query right afterwards, but have now replaced that with the PostgreSQL extension to INSERT that means you can say:

INSERT INTO table (row_id, row_field1) VALUES (DEFAULT, "This is how we roll") RETURNING row_id

and the insert query returns a row I can grab stuff from. Neat, and I've yet to consider the full ramifications.

Because I can never get enough, I'm now missing a MySQL extension, REPLACE. The difference between

INSERT INTO table (primary_key, rowvalue) VALUES (17, "For Nilly);

REPLACE INTO table (primary_key, rowvalue) VALUES (17, "For Nilly);

is that the latter will overwrite a preceding row with the same unique key. Saves me writing a sequence of commands.

Anyone know a 'standard' PostgreSQL way to do that?