Before I forget, my current understanding of the problem and repair procedure for Odysseus is:

Problem definition: when the underlying copy tool used by CCC to create images, “ditto,” does its’ thing, in certain circumstances, file ownership records are changed to 99 from the appropriate ownership status. CCC fora indicate this problem is associated with files created under OS9 and therefore outside of the permissins and ownership management protocols of OS X. In my case, this clearly affects files that have nothing to do with OS9.

User ID 99 is a special ID which causes the files to report, falsely, that they are owned by whatever process it is that is attempting to determine ownership. Determining the proper ownership of these files and resetting them to the correct User ID is the resolution. The problem that arises is isolating and identifying the appropriate and accurate ownership setting. It may actually be impossible to do so, if the UID 99 has been assigned to files which should belong to more than a single user ID or process.

1. Restore from backup via imaging.

2. Hand restore any User directories and preferences. I beleive I may attempt to hand restore Applicaions as well, but if that fails, I can figure out any apps that were updated in the day or two we’re looking to restore to.

3. Check for the UID problem.

4. If found (it will be), dig out the initiall installation disks that came with the unit. Perform an install using the archive and restore user prefs option.

This should resolve all system-level UID and perms errors, leaving only any issues associated with user-installed applications and files in the User directory hierarchy. THe files in the User directory, in theory, can then be recursively set to belong to the user associated with that directory.

Any remaining UID errors can be isolated on an application by application basis, presumably via reinstalls.

Well, Odysseus is back home after the shortest venture into uncharted territory of all time. The machine is fully operable, but I apparently neglected some homework.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a duplicate of the drive before taking it in, and afterward duplicated the Users folder daily until I took it in.

What I didn’t realize was that Disk Utility has a less cumbersome disk imaging feature intended for use as a backup and restore tool. The upshot is that somehow I scrambled the write permissions on the volume, and while it boots properly, prefs and stuff like install records, licensing keys, and the like are not being read or recognized.

So I have a longish round of repeated restores ahead of me to find the correct materials. Hopefully someone’s solved this problem previously, and I’ll beable to find out more from them.

Speaking of email, I am ready to kill Outlook.

First, (didn’t I note this previously?), in Outlook Office 2003 under XP SP2, the email program does not make a clearly documented, essential feature – redirection – available to users unless they are running the application in an Exchange server environment, and the help documents make no mention of this whatsoever. At least I have the small comfort of knowing I burned a solid four hours of support time on that ludicrous question.

Second, another crucial feature is disabled for users in non-Exchange environments. There is no way to define and use a range of correspondence templates such that the boilerplate can be easily and directly inserted at the cursor or such that the user can generate replies to inbound email directly from the template. The ideal use-case in this instance should be that a control-click on the “Reply” button would generate a contextual menu that included nested menus for the email templates.

You can define email templates, and even work with them to integrate them into user-facing widgets such as toolbars. But since the majority of boilerplate correspondence in any business environment is responses to the same seven to ten queries, the current necessary workflow – open, select, copy, close, paste – is absurd in the extreme.

I was further embatsinated by the apparent impossibility of duplicating user-created toolbars other than via manual click and point. Since a toolbar is contextually specific, only toolbars bound to a given view are accessible in that view. You can’t make your toolbar of templates and then simply drop it into every window that might spawn; you have to recreate it manually each time, as far as I was able to discover.

The upshot of this is that a one-hour setup turned into an endless four hours of miserable help-file spelunking and googlations.

Last week, as I realized I needed to drop Outlook in order to gain access to redirection, I installed Eudora 6.2 on my primary machine at work. I was appalled to see my old friend in such a state; although I was able to do the specific things that Outlook will not permit, the sad truth of the matter is that Outlook now offers a vastly superior user experience, from the comprehensive use of single-click access to the user-interaction elements (including organizational tools such as folders and flags) to the carefully designed three-column default display. By comparison, Eudora now feels irrationally organized and shaky, even recalcitrant.

Perhaps the superior naive-user experience led me to expect a similar polish behind the scenes. I don’t know. I can say that my wrists and back hurt needlessly from the stress of wrestling with the odious, abject failure of the deep UI and featureset. It’s the worst email client you can use, except for all the rest.

The Apple Store called me today to let me know that Odysseus is ready to be picked up. Given that he is a tricksy one, I half mistrust the word. I do not intend to wear my eyepatch.