Author Archive
Thursday, July 14th, 2005 • 12:26 am
I am afraid my plans to move this blog to www.betalogue.com and start using a new blogging system have hit a snag. The basic problem is that there is no easy way to migrate all my existing data (blog entries, membership information, user comments) from pMachine to WordPress. Based on what I am reading on […]
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Posted in Blogging | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 • 12:07 am
Most Betalogue readers visit the site at its regular address, i.e. www.latext.com/pm/betalogue. However, a couple of years ago, I posted a note about the fact that I had registered and parked the betalogue.com domain name and that it could be used as an alternative to access my main web site. Well, the time has come […]
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Posted in Blogging | No Comments »
Friday, July 8th, 2005 • 7:42 am
Nothing like a sympathetic message from a software company to alleviate one’s no-broadband blues… Today, when I launched InDesign, Adobe’s updater automatically launched, and found a couple of available updates for me. When I checked them to see how big they would be and how long it would take to download them, I saw the […]
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Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 6th, 2005 • 7:05 am
In my personal experience, there is a major problem with using e-mail as a communication tool in a professional environment. The problem is simple: people don’t acknowledge receipt. E-mail communication is not 100% reliable and there are many situations where one really needs to know very quickly whether someone has received one’s e-mail message or […]
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Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, July 6th, 2005 • 5:39 am
I know it’s a minor cosmetic detail, but… This kind of visual glitch simply shouldn’t happen. We are talking about a fairly mature operating system and application here. I was simply browsing the web and scrolling down a page (a frame in a page, to be precise). Of course, I cannot reproduce it, so there’s […]
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Posted in Macintosh | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 • 12:53 am
Mac OS X’s Preview application, which is the default reader for PDF and picture files, has consistently improved over the years. Yet even version 3.0 (included in Tiger) still suffers from annoying quirks and flaws that limit its appeal as the default PDF reader application. For example, say you are in any Mac OS X […]
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Posted in Macintosh | No Comments »
Thursday, June 30th, 2005 • 5:00 am
Even though I’ve never owned one of these iMac G5 machines myself, I am starting to get trouble-shooting work to do for people who own one. Today I went to give a training session on Adobe Creative Suite for someone who is using one. She had also bought a small D-Link router so that she […]
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Posted in Macintosh | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 • 4:19 am
In the June 25, 2005 issue of The Globe And Mail, science journalist Dan Falk writes: … speed is equal to distance multiplied by time… Yikes. I am guessing that Dan Falk is having a rather difficult time defending himself by arguing that “multiplied” was a typo for “divided“. Just guessing. Then again, today is […]
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Posted in Society | No Comments »
Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 • 4:50 am
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the fact that one of my internal Seagate hard drives had failed. I requested a RMA number through the Seagate support site (which only works with Microsoft’s Explorer or Netscape 7.0 and is really slow, especially over a modem connection). The defective hard drive was shipped back […]
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Posted in Macintosh | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005 • 6:20 am
If you use Photoshop CS or Photoshop CS2 in Tiger and try to change the number of copies that you want to print of your document in the regular “Print” dialog, you might notice that you cannot. The contents of the “Copies” field are selected by default, and the focus (blue halo) is on the […]
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Posted in Macintosh | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 • 12:33 am
I regularly visit the 3hive web site. It covers music web sites for record labels or artists who share some of their own music tracks for free as MP3 files. When I see a page with tracks that I might be interested in, I add the tracks to my Speed Download download queue. When I […]
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Posted in Macintosh | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 • 12:27 am
It seems to me that it’s a pretty obvious question: Since in most cases the “drawer” with the thumbnails or the table of contents for a PDF file opens on the right-hand side of the window by default, why on earth is the “Drawer” button on the left-hand side by default? It’s neither intuitive nor […]
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Posted in Macintosh | No Comments »
Monday, June 20th, 2005 • 7:09 am
Adobe is really trying to break all records when it comes to lousy software installers these days. The lowest point was probably reached with the Illustrator CS 11.0.2 update, but it’s not an isolated case. Take the Adobe Reader 7 installer, for example. Download the thing and double-click on it and what do you get? […]
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Posted in Macintosh | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 20th, 2005 • 5:43 am
A number of Mac OS X machines in my employer’s offices use a custom-made Java application that communicates with a library management system on a central Solaris server. Mac OS X support has always been a bit dicey — the provider of the library management system is, predictably, more familiar with client computers running Windows. […]
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Posted in Macintosh | No Comments »
Sunday, June 19th, 2005 • 8:50 am
I don’t know why, today is the day for uncovering Finder bugs and flaws… Here’s another one that’s outrageously easy to reproduce. Open a Finder window in View as List view mode. Select an item in the window. Click on the name a second time to make it editable. While the name is editable, click […]
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Posted in Macintosh | No Comments »