Articles posted in March, 2004

Panther’s Mail: Strange bug in Message window toolbar

Wednesday, March 31st, 2004 • 12:42 am

In Panther’s Mail application, if you double-click on a message to open it in a separate window, and then click on any of the following toolbar buttons: “Reply”, “Reply All”, “Redirect”, or “Forward” while holding the Option key down, instead of ignoring the Option key and doing the expected action, Mail closes all windows, including […]

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Panther’s Address Book: Can the autocompletion feature be turned off?

Wednesday, March 31st, 2004 • 12:31 am

Address Book’s autocomplete feature turns out to be a major pain in several situations. I’ve already mentioned the problem with it interfering with Canadian postal codes in a very annoying fashion. There is also a major problem when a proper name already exists in the Address Book database and happens to have been typed in […]

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Louis Saha on Ruud van Nistelrooy: Uh-oh

Wednesday, March 31st, 2004 • 12:19 am

Mmmm, Louis, can you feel the hair-blower treatment coming? You’ve just been a Manchester United player for a couple of months, and already you are bad-mouthing your peers? Ouch. Of course, everything that Louis Saha says is true (that Ruud has little big-match experience, that he never scores from outside the box, that he never […]

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Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and where they are all going

Wednesday, March 31st, 2004 • 12:14 am

I attended a day-long “Executive Briefing” organized by Apple Canada yesterday in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The event was an invitation-only type of thing intended for people working in the education field (both K-12 and Higher Ed) in the province. My colleague and I were invited as the main computer technology people at our provincial resource […]

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Sick in a strange way

Tuesday, March 30th, 2004 • 11:23 pm

Not really a “mental” case — at least not according to most reasonably well-informed people (including the several mental health professionals who have all been unsuccessful in their attempts to treat me as one) — but not really a “physical” case either. We are, quite obviously, in that “grey area” in between, where things seem […]

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Running Panther Server: Automatic login not working

Sunday, March 28th, 2004 • 3:48 am

This is a typical example of some basic functionality that’s not working right in an OS that is supposed to provide industrial-strength services. My Xserve is located in a locked basement room at the university and I work at home, a 10-minute drive from there. The Xserve is also “locked” with the security key provided […]

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EPL, Day 30: Arsenal 1 – Manchester United 1

Sunday, March 28th, 2004 • 3:29 am

It was destined to be one of the highlights of the season, and didn’t quite live up to that billing, in part due to a lackluster first-half that was very short on flamboyance. Refereeing issues took centre-stage yet again, with several valid claims for penalties being denied on both sides. Fortunately, however, things never really […]

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Panther: Java 1.4.2 vs. Mac OS X 10.3.3

Saturday, March 27th, 2004 • 3:54 am

I’ve been very busy lately with lots of work, including the process of upgrading about a dozen flat-panel iMacs from Jaguar to Panther. Eventually I will probably have to take the time to explore the possibility of installing the same system on several machines from a disk image on our Xserve — but this is […]

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Champions’ League quarter-finals: Chelsea 1 – Arsenal 1

Saturday, March 27th, 2004 • 2:04 am

As expected, it was a pretty intense affair, with two highly focused teams of top-class players. They managed to neutralize each other during the first half. Then a rather unfortunate defensive mistake on Arsenal’s part and a bit of luck for Chelsea led to the first goal for the home side. The goal was followed […]

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Panther freezes

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004 • 3:27 am

Looks like good old system-wide freezes on the Mac are enjoying a bit of a resurgence, unfortunately… I experienced one the other day in Panther (10.3.3), and, based on MacInTouch reports, I am not the only one… The symptoms are very simple: Everything is frozen, except for the mouse pointer. You can still move the […]

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Word X: Wrong colour for selected text

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004 • 12:44 am

Mac OS X users are supposed to be able to define their preferred colour for highlighted/selected text as a system-wide setting, in System Preferences, under “Appearance”. This colour is supposed to be used everywhere, by all applications, for highlighting text. Leave to Word X to only comply with this requirement some of the time: What’s […]

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Apple’s daily Knowledge Base changes digest

Monday, March 22nd, 2004 • 11:18 pm

I recently subscribed to Apple’s free daily Knowledge Base changes e-mail digest. On the whole, the service is useful. It sends you a daily digest of all the changes in the Support area on Apple’s web site, including links to software updates, new or updated Knowledge Base articles, etc. There are a few problems with […]

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Fonts in Rick Schaut’s blog

Monday, March 22nd, 2004 • 11:04 pm

I don’t know what MacBU developer Rick Schaut uses to create his blog pages, but if it’s a Microsoft product (and there is some reason to suspect that it is), it doesn’t reflect well either on the company or on him as a software user personally. If you go to this page, for example, you’ll […]

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More on FileMaker 7 at MacInTouch.com

Monday, March 22nd, 2004 • 4:29 am

The debate over the new version of FileMaker continues at MacInTouch.com in the reader report on the product. The last item posted (as of March 19) offers an interesting view that should be more encouraging to FM developers who are considering an upgrade. Based on what reader Robert Cassidy says, the structural changes introduced in […]

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Mac OS X 10.3.3: Trouble-free update

Sunday, March 21st, 2004 • 5:37 am

After waiting a couple of days, the only issue I saw on Mac troubleshooting about the recently released Mac OS X 10.3.3 update was that it was causing some USB flash card readers to fail. So just to be sure, I first installed the update on my PowerBook G4 and tested my USB card reader […]

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