Betalogue

I am pleased to report that replacing my G4’s original IBM 120 GB hard drive with a new Seagate 120 GB hard drive seems to have eliminated the annoying system freezes that I had been getting in Panther. After installing Panther and my applications on the Seagate hard drive and moving the essential stuff from […]

The inconsistency in the behaviour of controls (buttons, etc.) in background windows in Mac OS X when clicked upon — also known as click-through — has been discussed several times in this blog. Leave it to Microsoft, however, to screw up things even more than any other Mac OS X application. Take a look at […]

Newsweek technology writer Steven Levy makes a number of excellent points in his recent column entitled “iTunes and Lawsuits.” The recording industry is still desperately out of touch with the realities of today’s music buying experience, and it doesn’t sound like things will be improving any time soon. I am glad to hear that Steve […]

I guess there is some justice after all… The Chelsea millionaires were thoroughly outclassed 3-1 by 10-men Monaco in the first leg after Makalele’s shameful play-acting had caused the sending off of one of the Monaco players. But of course there was still lots left to do for Monaco, because the away goal rule meant […]

The application switcher feature in Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) is a significant improvement over the previous behaviour (which used the Dock), to the point that I find myself using it constantly now. In particular, I like the fact that it rearranges the order of the application icons depending on which application you visited last. […]

Apologies to Betalogue readers for the disruption in the past 24 hours or so. My host had hardware problems (’tis the week of defective hard drives!), and the server hosting the latext.com domain had to be taken off-line for a while. I didn’t know exactly when (there’s a 14-hour time difference between me and my […]

As regular readers of this blog, my G4 (MDD) has been acting up lately, with random freezes (either momentary or permanent and requiring a hard reset). Because of some of the symptoms (namely weird hard drive noises), I have been suspecting my internal hard drive. By coincidence, I had just ordered a new Seagate hard […]

Web design expert and Designing with Web Standards author Jeffrey Zeldman has redesigned his web site yet again. I guess I wasn’t the only one who was rather unimpressed by the previous redesign. The new design is significantly better. There’s less wasted space (although the use of a fixed width layout is questionable). The bits […]

In his fourth post on Word’s development process, MS program manager Chris Pratley says the following: A couple of people have asked about the permanence of electronic information and access to it in the future if it is in Word format. Microsoft takes this very seriously. That’s one of the reasons we make the format […]

Here’s a perfect example of what’s really wrong with Microsoft Word X (and probably other flavours of the product as well). This morning, I received a document to translate. It arrived in my In mailbox as a “.doc” attachment, i.e. as a Word document. I saved it locally on my hard drive and attempted to […]

I didn’t realize that this was a problem… This morning, I want to start configuring my second internal hard drive (recently installed) by installing Panther on it. In the good old days of the classic Mac OS, you could insert a system CD, and launch the system installer on the CD without having to boot […]

This is a pretty strange bug, no doubt related to the flaky nature of Microsoft’s code and its non-standard behaviours. The situation is the following. I have a document open in Word, and select “Print” from the “File” menu, and then click on the “Preview” button in order to view a PDF preview of the […]

You know you’ve hit a rare strange bug in Mac OS X when a search in Google for the key phrase in the symptoms of your problem returns… no results. Right now, I have one of my two processors constantly peaking at 100% usage, while the other one is around 50%… And I am not […]