Articles posted in June, 2003

Security features and user annoyances

Monday, June 30th, 2003 • 10:15 pm

I am a regular customer of the Chapters Indigo on-line store here in Canada (although I am starting to use Amazon.ca more and more) and have always been annoyed by several aspects of the design of their web site. Yesterday, I decided to go one step further and file a complaint: From: Pierre Igot Received: […]

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Good grief!

Monday, June 30th, 2003 • 9:25 pm

I’ve just found out about the recent “controversy” surrounding the Echo project, RSS, Dave Winer stopping his blog one day and restarting it the next day, and what not. I must admit that I am, once again, confounded by the level of puerility both in what is being said and in what is being done. […]

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Friedman on where we are going

Monday, June 30th, 2003 • 8:46 pm

Interesting column by Thomas Friedman on the evolution of the wired (and increasingly wireless) world and its impact on world-wide relations and, more specifically, on relations between the US and everyone else: “Is Google God?” by Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times [free registration required] None of this means we, America, just have to […]

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Word X: Styles dialog not smart

Sunday, June 29th, 2003 • 5:35 pm

You are typing a text in Word. You want to create a new style for a particular series of paragraphs. You go to the “Style” dialog by choosing “Styles…” in the “Format” menu, you click on the “New…” button, you name and define your style, you click on “OK” to validate the creation of the […]

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MacUser.co.uk: Why bother?

Saturday, June 28th, 2003 • 5:53 pm

I occasionally follow links to UK Mac sites, because they can offer a different perspective, and because the UK version of MacWorld magazine that can be found on the newsstand here in Canada is often better than its US counterpart (but also much more expensive). One site that I’ve been carefully staying away from, however, […]

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Republican preachers and pirated software

Friday, June 27th, 2003 • 4:29 pm

A telling story on the Wired web site on Orrin Hatch, a Republican senator from Utah who suggested that people who download copyright materials without paying for them should have their computers automatically destroyed, and who was revealed to be using unregistered software on his own web site: “Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?” by Leander Kahney, […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Using the “To:” field

Friday, June 27th, 2003 • 4:08 pm

In spite of Mail’s attempts to catch my junk mail and move it out of sight, I still get a fair amount of junk that Mail’s filters are not able to identify as such. (It seems to me that Mail’s junk filter stops learning once you put it in Automatic mode. It’s a shame. It […]

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Mac OS X: The problem with brushed metal

Friday, June 27th, 2003 • 5:59 am

The preview screen shots of Panther provided by Apple confirm the rumor that Mac OS X’s Finder itself is going to be using the “brushed metal” look currently in favor at Apple and already used in iChat, iTunes, Safari, and other applications. This is in apparent contradiction with Apple’s own guidelines, which recommend that the […]

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The New Republic on the selling of the Iraq war

Friday, June 27th, 2003 • 5:43 am

This article in The New Republic on the way the US administration has lied and misled the American public and insulted everyone’s intelligence is, unfortunately, required reading: “The First Casualty” by John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman, The New Republic

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Repairing Eudora’s damage: painful

Thursday, June 26th, 2003 • 8:53 pm

Two days ago I wrote

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Panther write-up by Irate Scotsman

Wednesday, June 25th, 2003 • 11:34 pm

Matt Gemmell does what we Mac bloggers are all tempted to do, i.e. he comments extensively on the forthcoming “Panther” version of Mac OS X and its mixed-bag of apparent UI “improvements” and new features, based on the screen shots made available by Apple. A fun read after HAVING had to endure the official propaganda […]

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No iTunes Music Store for Europe any time soon

Wednesday, June 25th, 2003 • 10:30 pm

According to this article in The Independent (UK), Apple’s iTunes Music Store will not be available in Europe until 2004 because of disputes between record companies and their artists over licensing. I suppose such “artists” include Internet-hostile acts who also favor pseudo “CD protection“. It really is mind-boggling to think that supposedly artistically-minded people can […]

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Mailsmith Filters: Big disappointment

Wednesday, June 25th, 2003 • 10:00 pm

I can hardly believe it, but I have just found out that Mailsmith’s “integration” of Mac OS X’s Address Book is only skin-deep and that it is impossible to use groups created in Address Book in the definition of filter criteria in Mailsmith. For example, I have a GROUP called “Friends” in my Address Book […]

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Mailsmith Crash and Application Enhancers

Tuesday, June 24th, 2003 • 7:19 pm

I’ve already experienced my first Mailsmith application crash when trying to open a Mailbox Information window. The next time I restarted Mailsmith, I was greeted with a warning telling me that Mailsmith had crashed or been force-quit, and indicating that the possible culprits are the “Application Enhancers” that Mailsmith has detected I have installed. I […]

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Mailsmith Glitches and Bugs

Tuesday, June 24th, 2003 • 7:10 pm

Now on to the less than satisfactory stuff… When mailboxes created in Mail have a file name that’s longer than 31 characters, the resulting mailbox created by Mailsmith during the importing process has a truncated file name with a string such as “#7312F” attached to it. Mailsmith supports long names for mailboxes, but obviously not […]

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