Articles posted in November, 2008

Pro Applications Update 2008-04: Making things complicated for Logic Studio users

Thursday, November 27th, 2008 • 11:54 am

Today, my weekly Software Update check displayed the following: Now, you need to remember that my Internet connection is such that, whenever I have to download software updates, I always prefer to download them in a format that I can keep, so that I don’t have to download them again in case I have to […]

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Word 2008: Fails to show selection in background document window

Monday, November 24th, 2008 • 12:20 pm

In addition to its numerous bugs, Microsoft’s Word 2008 suffers from a myriad of flaws that consistently make it less useful than it could be and demonstrate an utter lack of attention to detail on the part of Microsoft’s engineers. As a professional translator, editor and writer, I often—nearly always—have more than one document window […]

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The hacker writes

Friday, November 21st, 2008 • 1:27 pm

And now, for Betalogue’s literary moment of the week: From: c88@hotmail.it Subject: sorry admin **bibi-info** Date: 21 novembre 2008 11:08:54 HNA To: [my email] hi admin -pierre- am bibi-info hacker algeria  your friend first , am very sorry for hacked your site or your blogs but am doing this from you for mor security . […]

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PowerPoint 2008: Incorrect word selection behaviour

Monday, November 17th, 2008 • 11:13 am

You can always count on Microsoft to screw up even the simplest, most basic things. In PowerPoint 2008, they have managed to break one of the most basic mechanism for extending text selection. Say you have a line of text and you select one of the words in the line by double-clicking on it, which […]

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Under attack (continued)

Saturday, November 15th, 2008 • 6:01 pm

I am afraid that I have to report that, after a 10-day reprieve, the successful attacks on my blog have resumed. Once again, yesterday morning, the same hacker (obviously) was able to hack into my blog’s database and change my WordPress admin user’s e-mail account to the address of his choosing (the same one as […]

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More on the Adobe CS4 Installer

Friday, November 14th, 2008 • 12:02 pm

Since my post yesterday on the lousy Adobe CS4 installer generated a fairly substantial amount of feedback (thanks in no small part to a link on Daring Fireball), including a post on Adobe product manager John Nack’s own blog, but also a fair amount of private e-mails, I would like to clarify a few things. […]

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Adobe CS4: Yet another lousy Adobe installer

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 • 12:01 pm

No matter how good or bad their software actually is, one thing is for sure: Adobe’s engineers appear to be utterly unable to design a proper Mac OS X software installer. I have already written about Adobe’s installers multiple times: “Adobe CS installation: Talk about user-hostile” “Adobe Acrobat 6.0.2 updater: Talk about confusing” “Adobe Reader […]

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PowerPoint 2008: Wrong behaviour when extending paragraph selection

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 • 3:07 pm

I am forced to spend a lot of time in PowerPoint these days, and I am having so much fun. (Can you tell?) Here’s further evidence (if needed) that Microsoft’s engineers could not design a proper text editor to save their own lives. When it comes to text editing, some things are supposed to be […]

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PowerPoint 2008: When left is right

Sunday, November 9th, 2008 • 1:30 pm

It is truly extraordinary. I sincerely believe that Microsoft are the only software company on the face of this earth that is capable of producing software that cannot tell the difference between left and right. No wonder they blamed PowerPoint for the last space shuttle disaster. Here’s the situation. I have a block of text […]

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PowerPoint 2008: Stupid bullet behaviour

Saturday, November 8th, 2008 • 6:55 pm

I hate PowerPoint. I only use it because I have no choice, when my clients ask me to translate PowerPoint presentations. I have tried using Keynote, in the same way that I use Pages for translating most of my clients’ Word documents. But unfortunately, the compatibility levels are not good enough. There are just too […]

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WordPress: Specifying charset when restoring database from backup

Friday, November 7th, 2008 • 11:42 am

The official documentation provided by the WordPress codex for the process of restoring your database from a backup suffers from a shocking omission. It fails to specify that, when your blog is encoded using “utf8” Unicode encoding—which has been the default option in WordPress for a while now—you need to specify this in the form […]

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Under attack

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 • 8:07 pm

If you visited this site on the web in the past week or so, you will have noticed that things have not been quite right at Betalogue lately. While the rest of the world was busy celebrating Barack Obama’s classy victory in the U.S. elections, I have actually been busy fighting repeated attacks from very […]

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