Betalogue

I have already discussed the many problems with Word’s Customize dialog box, which essentially hasn’t changed in the past 6 years or so. The most blatant problem is that there is no “Cancel” button in that dialog box. If you make any changes in the dialog box, they cannot be undone. Given how destructive some […]

This one has been bugging me for a long time, and I have finally discovered how to do it. In the pre-CSS days, in order to align a table in a web page so that it was centered in the page, all you had to do was to enclose the table with <center> … </center> tags. […]

I guess this defeat now makes it official: Arsenal is in a bit of a crisis. In the space of one month, they have dropped five points behind Chelsea in the Premiership. They seem to have lost their confidence and fluidity, or the ability to maintain a lead and grind out results when needed. And […]

Last Friday, I wrote about a problem I was having when trying to use anti-spam scripts generated by the Hivewave Enkoder service in PHP pages for one of my web sites. A reader was kind enough to offer to have a look at the scripts, and came back with the conclusion that there was indeed […]

Like many other web designers, I have to deal with spam issues and do whatever I can do to minimize the problem. One of the fundamental strategies to avoid spam in the first place is to never post e-mail addresses in clear text on web pages. It’s too easy for spammers to scan web pages […]

This is an interesting article by writer Paul Graham (author of Hackers & Painters) on America and man-made stuff — from cars to cities to computer software. It uses Apple as an example of a company that has managed to strike a balance between the “quick and dirty” approach that prevails in American manufacturing and […]

Maybe it’s just me, but I found that this week-end’s action was rather boring. We got to see Manchester comfortably beat Charlton 2-0, then Middlesborough beat Liverpool 2-0 without being particularly impressive, then Manchester City finally get an away win at Portsmouth 3-1. But none of these games were particularly interesting. The Sunday feature between […]

You know how, in most Mac OS applications (including pre-Mac OS X applications!), you can command-click on the title of a document window and a pop-up menu appears with the path to the document you are currently viewing/editing, so that you can open the document’s containing folder with a single click, instead of having to […]

I personally have always avoided Microsoft’s e-mail software like the plague. (It’s hard enough to rely on Word for word processing. I simply cannot imagine depending on Microsoft for e-mail communication.) Which explains why I so rarely report on Entourage in this blog. Betalogue reader Nate, however, was kind enough to send me this link […]

I frequently take stuff from an Excel spreadsheet and insert it into a Word document. I don’t use Office’s specialized tools for this, simply because I don’t trust Microsoft software. I just select a range of cells in Excel, copy it to the Clipboard (command-C), switch to my Word document, and paste the contents of […]

This is a typical example of how atrocious PowerPoint’s interface is, and the very real impact that the poor interface has on office workers in their daily work. I am referring here to the tools provided by the PowerPoint interface to create space between paragraphs of text and, more specifically, between list items in a […]

Another way in which the recent power outages in our region has affected me is that the Xserve server that I am administering and that is hosting my employer’s mail and web servers is no longer working as it used to. The Xserve is on a APC Smart 1000U UPS unit, which keeps it on […]

We have a major power outage happening here in Nova Scotia and it is not pretty. The storm didn’t seem to be particularly nasty, although it was quite early. (Typically Nova Scotia gets 6 cm of snow in November on average. This storm alone dumped up to 45 cm of snow in some places.) Yes, […]

I cannot believe this. First, it was the mini USB port on the camera, which somehow “fell” inside the camera and became unusable. And now this… In order to eject the Compact Flash card inside the camera, you open a small door on the side, and press the Eject button once to make it pop […]

Well, that was quite the game, wasn’t it? We missed the first half here because of a snow storm, but it looks like most of the action was in the second half anyway… After a 1-1 draw in the first half, the Gunners went ahead by 2 goals, not once, not twice, but three times, […]