Articles posted in April, 2003

A Chilling Wind

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2003 • 5:44 pm

Even though this has probably already been linked to to death, I still feel I should include it here: “A Chill Wind is Blowing in This Nation…” by Tim Robbins, CommonDreams.org It’s a transcript of the speech given by actor Tim Robbins to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2003. I […]

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DataViz’s MacLinkPlus: a disappointing lack of updates

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2003 • 4:19 pm

MacLinkPlus Deluxe is a pretty much indispensable tool for any Mac user who has to exchange files with PC users. PC users, being the overwhelming majority, tend to forget that their computing platform is not the only one, and to send attachments in formats that many Mac users cannot read. MacLinkPlus Deluxe comes to rescue […]

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Mac OS X: French Canada vs. France

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2003 • 12:39 am

There is a simple, yet very annoying problem with Apple’s default settings for French-language installations of Mac OS X (Jaguar, any version). When you install Mac OS X, one of the first things that the system asks you is what kind of keyboard layout you want to use. If you’ve selected “French” as your main […]

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Word X: Keep with next / Keep lines together settings not honoured in table cells

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003 • 1:12 am

If you use tables in Word for page layout and allow table rows to break across pages — which is pretty much required if your table cells contain large amounts of text — then Word will not take into account the Keep with next and Keep lines together settings (in Format>Paragraph…). Instead you can only […]

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Word X: Cutting and pasting search strings

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003 • 12:53 am

There are several issues with Word X’s Find/Replace dialog. I just encountered one that is pretty representative of the overall carelessness in the design of the application. I have a document with several numbered lists of items. The people who wrote the document used Word’s automatic numbering features, which I carefully avoid myself. (I have […]

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Mac OS X: Workaround for the New Folder dialog bug

Monday, April 21st, 2003 • 11:50 pm

As noted in an earlier item, Mac OS X still suffers (as of 10.2.5) of an annoying bug in the “New Folder” dialog box that pops up on top of the “Save As…” dialog when you click on the “New Folder” button to create a new folder before saving a file inside it. In a […]

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Word X: Getting lost in documents with large tables

Monday, April 21st, 2003 • 8:35 pm

Further to my previous item on Word’s annoyances when tables are used for page-layout purposes, the problem appears to be even worse when using the Find/Replace dialog in such documents. Today, I am editing a document that contains 2-column tables spanning several pages. I need to do a large amount of cross-referencing because many items […]

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Best of the Web indeed

Monday, April 21st, 2003 • 6:42 pm

I have been painfully trying to follow the Wall Street Journal‘s Best of the Web service since earlier this year. The best thing I can say is that I usually find the articles that it points to in ORDER to denigrate them rather interesting. But I cannot help reprinting this gem from last Friday’s issue: […]

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Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Monday, April 21st, 2003 • 5:29 am

Woody Allen’s movie making can be downright infuriating at times, and this movie is no exception. But in the end you’ve got to admire the… construction of the movie itself. There is no denying the cleverness of it — and the fact that most annoyances are probably quite deliberate. Too clever? I don’t know if […]

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Mac OS X 10.2.5 USB hub bug: Griffin USBAudioHub not affected

Sunday, April 20th, 2003 • 6:57 pm

Since a number of people appear to be affected by a USB hub bug in Mac OS X 10.2.5 that causes a kernel panic, I just thought I would mention that my Griffin USBAudioHub does not seem to cause the problem. I upgraded to 10.2.5 on Friday, and haven’t experienced any kernel panics. [P.S. Not […]

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EPL: Middlesborough 0 – Arsenal 2

Sunday, April 20th, 2003 • 5:25 am

Missed the whole first half because of the idiots at Sportsnet (Canada) who decided that baseball in overtime was more important than the EPL… They switched to the “broadcast” of the Arsenal game right before half-time, and promptly fed us a quarter of an hour of commercials. Never mind that the broadcast in question was […]

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Spring Cleaning

Saturday, April 19th, 2003 • 9:28 pm

After several weeks of workload-induced procrastination, I finally took the time yesterday to do a complete reinstall of Mac OS X on my startup volume, including the erasing of the existing contents of the partition. This is the type of situation where HAVING partitioned your hard drive is important, in my opinion. While it is […]

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Apple Peel: Mac Blogging with Radio UserLand

Saturday, April 19th, 2003 • 1:06 am

My latest “Apple Peel” column is up at Applelust.com: “Apple Peel: Mac Blogging with Radio UserLand – Interim Report” After a couple of months of using Radio UserLand on a daily basis, Pierre takes stock and reports on various issues with the blogging software tool.

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Blood vs. Art vs. History vs. Oil

Friday, April 18th, 2003 • 6:07 pm

It’s a bit hard to express concern or sadness about the looting of Iraq’s museums when there are still people bleeding and dying because of the direct human impact of this US-led war against Iraq. When you are dying or your mother or father or brother or sister has just died, a few thousand years […]

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Aladdin Software Updates: sheer idiocy

Friday, April 18th, 2003 • 2:26 am

Today when I decompressed a file StuffIt Expander stuck a dialog box in my face announcing that a new version of the software was available. Since I am a StuffIt Deluxe user (not for much longer, I can tell you), I went to the Aladdin web site to download the full StuffIt Deluxe 7.0.3 update. […]

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