Articles posted in April, 2004

Chris Pratley’s blog entries on Word

Friday, April 30th, 2004 • 7:11 am

Chris Pratley is the manager of the Word program management team at Microsoft, and he’s started publishing a blog in which he’s sharing quite a bit of information about the product and the way it has been and is being developed, etc. It is quite an interesting read. While the focus of the blog entries […]

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Scheduled backups with Backup 2.0.1: Still launching multiple copies

Friday, April 30th, 2004 • 5:10 am

I’ve discussed the problems that I have been experiencing with Apple’s Backup 2.0.x application before. Version 2.0 was simply unable to perform scheduled backups reliably. At the scheduled time, the application would launch and then quit immediately. That was not exactly what I would call a reliable backup application. Things improved somewhat with the release […]

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Text anti-aliasing: Windows’ ClearType vs. Mac OS X’s Quartz Text Smoothing

Wednesday, April 28th, 2004 • 4:33 am

This is one of these issues that I have been wondering about for a long time… See, I have Virtual PC installed on my G4, and it’s running Windows XP Home Edition. I don’t use it very often, and certainly haven’t spent any time trying to customize Windows XP’s configuration. Now a new debate between […]

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Amazon.ca: Very nice customer service

Tuesday, April 27th, 2004 • 3:44 am

A few weeks ago, I placed an order at Amazon.ca for a CD that was going to be released on April 20th. Since Amazon.ca offers free shipping for orders above $39, I thought I’d add a couple of other things I was interested in in order to exceed that limit. I added a paperback and […]

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Microsoft Office X and Adobe Acrobat 6: Getting rid of these pesky Acrobat toolbars

Tuesday, April 27th, 2004 • 3:07 am

If you own and use both Microsoft Office X and Adobe Acrobat 6, you’ve probably noticed that installing Acrobat 6 results in the appearance of a new toolbar in Word X, Excel X, and PowerPoint X: There are several irritating aspects in this. First of all, Adobe did that without asking for your permission. Second, […]

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Panther freezes: Getting worse

Monday, April 26th, 2004 • 11:49 pm

This has been an on-going problem but today, it seems to be getting worse. This morning, I was adding a few CDs to my iTunes Music Library by importing their tracks in AAC (MP4) format, as I often do. One of the CDs had one of those so-called “hidden tracks”, so I imported the last […]

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AirPort Software 3.4: Not getting any better

Monday, April 26th, 2004 • 11:35 pm

Apple’s latest software update for AirPort networking has been out for a week or so, but so far, in spite of my numerous on-going problems with AirPort connectivity, I have refrained from installing the update either on my desktop G4 or on my PowerBook G4. Based on what I have been reading about the update […]

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Arsenal Champions

Monday, April 26th, 2004 • 5:31 am

Football is such that the win of a league title is almost always rather anticlimactic, especially for casual fans of the game such as myself. This was definitely the case for Arsenal on Sunday — although the anticlimactic effect was compounded by the unnecessary and unexpected controversy in stoppage time. But that doesn’t take anything […]

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EPL, Day 35: Newcastle 2 – Chelsea 1 and Tottenham 2 – Arsenal 2

Sunday, April 25th, 2004 • 3:31 am

The Newcastle game was terrific entertainment. After letting Chelsea go ahead within 5 minutes, Newcastle patiently fought back, and were rewarded when Ameobi scored a great goal just before half time. And then there was Shearer. You just have to admire the way that he gains and retains possession and then — what a finish. […]

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Filling out forms in Safari: no Undo when editing text

Saturday, April 24th, 2004 • 3:21 am

As far as I know, many text editing features, such as drag-and-drop editing, are built into Mac OS X and available to all applications with a minimum amount of work. And indeed, when you are filling out a form in Safari, for example, drag-and-drop text editing works just fine, as long as you hold the […]

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EPL: Day 35 (Manchester United 0 – Liverpool 1)

Saturday, April 24th, 2004 • 3:11 am

More trouble today for the champions at Old Trafford… To be true, it was a terribly boring game, until the penalty awarded to Liverpool was put in the net by Danny Murphy. Then Liverpool seemed to gain some confidence and threatened to score a second (without any real chances, however), and then Manchester United finally […]

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New Hard Drive, Part 1

Thursday, April 22nd, 2004 • 7:45 am

A few days ago, I mentioned my current problems with my G4 (MDD)’s internal hard drive (IBM 120 GB drive that came with the computer), and the fact that I had ordered a new Seagate drive anyway and was going to install it and complete the transition to this new hard drive. Well, I got […]

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Excel X Tip: Drag-and-drop table editing

Thursday, April 22nd, 2004 • 3:06 am

It’s taking me a long time to find out about this, but that might have to do with the fact that Microsoft’s Help feature in Office is so poorly designed. Search for “drag and drop” in it and you’ll find an item about how to enable or disable drag-and-drop editing, but nothing about how drag-and-drop […]

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Safari: Bug with URLs ending with /#xxxx fixed

Thursday, April 22nd, 2004 • 12:50 am

This one is another long-standing bug that I (and probably a number of other people) reported to Apple a long time ago and that has silently been fixed by Apple. The search-engine friendly URLs that my blogging system generates often end with a slash, which makes them look like they are referring to a directory […]

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Champions’ League semi-final: FC Porto 0 – Deportivo 0

Wednesday, April 21st, 2004 • 10:50 am

More shameful stuff in the Champions’ League, but this time from two teams from whom it was pretty much expected… I’ve written about Porto before. This is not football, it’s pure comedy — only it isn’t funny, and it isn’t at all entertaining. With everybody falling to the ground at the slightest touch, and faking […]

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