Articles posted in December, 2004

EPL 2005: Day 20 (Newcastle 0 – Arsenal 1)

Thursday, December 30th, 2004 • 5:41 am

Good grief. If this keeps up, I am going to have to find another football team to get enthusiastic about. This game must have been the most boring game that the Gunners have played all season. I know that, at this stage in the season, it’s all about the result and the points, but still… […]

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Cross-platform iPodding: Unnecessarily complicated

Wednesday, December 29th, 2004 • 9:30 am

Two things are happening in my wife’s technological world right now. She just got her own iPod mini for Christmas, and the university where she teaches has just got a new language lab that is entirely digital. (The old one still used cassettes.) One of the major benefits of a digital language lab is that […]

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The Graphing Calculator Story

Monday, December 27th, 2004 • 5:50 am

Ron Avitzur’s account of how he and a friend created the Graphing Calculator application that shipped with Mac OS on PowerPC machines starting in 1994 is a pretty amazing story, and well worth a read. Sometimes we users have very little idea of how much work — and personal initiative, and individual strength of will […]

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Word 2004: ‘Clear Formatting’ does not remove highlighting

Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 • 6:38 am

Word has this highlighting tool that lets you change the background colour of the selected text. It can be used like a yellow highlighter to highlight portions of text that need to be edited/changed/etc. This tool is available in the Formatting Palette, under “Font“. In other words, it is a character-level formatting tool. Then why […]

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Word 2004: Changing footnote/endnote options without inserting a new note

Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 • 4:56 am

This is one of the typical annoyances in Word that years of complaining and cursing have done nothing to improve. Say you have a Word document with existing footnotes or endnotes whose formatting options you want to change. For example, you have a series of endnotes numbered with Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, etc.) and […]

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EPL 2005: Day 18 (Portsmouth 0 – Arsenal 1)

Sunday, December 19th, 2004 • 6:22 am

Phew! They say that the truly great teams are those that are able to eke out a result even when they don’t play well. Today, Arsenal fans are definitely hoping that this is true. Because their team was positively awful — and yet still managed to win all three points. It was yet another expensive […]

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GarageBand: Needs ‘Group Notes’ and ‘Ungroup Notes’ commands

Friday, December 17th, 2004 • 5:50 am

In essence, GarageBand is a tool that lets you visually edit music. As such, GarageBand is, in several aspects, a drawing tool. It lets you select notes, move them around, adjust the distance between them, etc. Because of this, when editing a loop, I often find myself looking for a command that is not there […]

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GarageBand: Needs ‘Fix Duration’ and ‘Fix Velocity’ buttons

Friday, December 17th, 2004 • 5:43 am

As someone with limited experience in music making, using GarageBand to create music by trying to reproduce “musical ideas” that I might have in my head has already taught me quite a few things. One of the most important ones is probably how rhythm is so much more than just a matter of timing. We […]

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New rule for Betalogue: Readers cannot submit a comment without registering first

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004 • 2:57 am

Due to recent comment spam woes, I have decided to adopt more stringent rules for user contributions. From now on, if you want to submit a comment on a blog item, you’ll have to register with Betalogue first, and the registration process will include an activation step. I am sorry I have to impose such […]

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Adobe Reader update pain

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004 • 2:36 am

I have the Adobe CS Premium software package. The CDs include a copy of Adobe Reader 6.0. I want to update it to the latest version. So I try to run the combined Acrobat Pro / Adobe Reader 6.0.2 updater that I have. The updater tells me that it cannot update Adobe Reader 6.0, only […]

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Comment spam woes

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004 • 1:26 am

Please be advised that Betalogue is currently being subjected to large amounts of comment spam, which explains why you might see seemingly unrelated comments about gambling and what not in the “Recent Comments” box on the home page. I am unfortunately all too familiar with spam registrations coming from people with @mail.ru accounts. I am […]

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EPL 2005: Day 17 (Arsenal 2 – Chelsea 2)

Sunday, December 12th, 2004 • 6:14 am

Mmm, so close. So close to a victory. So close to a Thierry Henry hat trick. Still, the Gunners didn’t “deserve” to win, once again, simply because of the poor defending on set pieces. It is rather unbelievable that Arsenal keeps conceding goals on free kicks and corner kicks. Surely everyone must see that there’s […]

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Character encoding in e-mail: having to deal with GroupWise crap in 2004

Thursday, December 9th, 2004 • 8:41 am

We are in 2004 and, unbelievably, I am still experiencing problems with accented characters in e-mail messages. This is the kind of issue that should have been fixed long ago, but due to lousy software and poor compliance with universal standards, it’s still with us today. I work for our provincial government here and they […]

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Champions’ League: Arsenal 5 – Rosenborg 1

Thursday, December 9th, 2004 • 1:40 am

That’s much better :). Finally we get to see some of Arsenal’s flamboyance in a Champions’ League game. Granted, it was just a qualifying round game, and the opposition wasn’t exactly top-class. But still — it was the Gunners as we like them, creating chance after chance, and putting quite a few of them “in […]

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New policy for member registrations

Wednesday, December 8th, 2004 • 5:46 am

I am getting a bit tired of people who register with Betalogue for the sole purpose of getting the URL of their commercial web site to appear on my Members page, presumably as a way to increase their ranking with Google. So from now on, I am imposing a new requirement for people who register […]

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