Office 2007 - omigod

I've been using Office 2007. Ugh. I have a headache. Heartburn too.

Maybe the new menu structure/ribbon thing will be worthwhile someday, but it'll take years for me to recoup the productivity loss from this transition.

It varies by application. Word was such a miserable product that the ribbon is a minimal hit. They appear to have made some stab at fixing Word's completely broken stye sheets, but the "themes" tool requires use of .docx (surprise!) and that's not practical. Maybe in 3-4 years.

Access appears to have been severely wounded by the ribbon. Does Microsoft really think there's a way to make Access pretty? It's a data hacking tool for heck's sake! The new Access has some nice Sharepoint integration, but I don't see anything else I like so far. They don't appear to have fixed the big problems with Access (inline functions don't return values, rather the cell contains a pointer to the function, and the links to tables are still absolute paths and break all the time). Excel, as usual, escaped the worst of it. Nobody dares touch Excel.

Then there's Outlook. Ye gads. It may be the worst of the lot. Damn ribbons - I need a 32" display now! There's only one good thing in the Outlook update (excepting Sharepoint integration) -- the category view no longer breaks whenever you sort on a field. That bug has been in Outlook for eons.

Only a monopoly could get away with something like this ...

Update 6/26/07: Some things look bad, but get better over time. The ribbon isn't doing this. Ctrl-F1 toggles ribbon display of course, but that only mitigates the mess. There's something called a "Quick Access Toolbar", it feels like it was added in a last minute panic. You can partly restore some basic usability by painfully configuring the QAT, including tediously ordering the list by clicking, incessantly, an up and down arrow. That's right, no drag and drop, clicking an arrow. Vintage 1989. If the OpenOffice team tries to emulate any of this stuff they're insane.

FTP connections via Finder: use ftp://username@foo.org

Another good TUAW tip:

TUAW Tip: Using FTP in Finder - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

This week, Apple posted a tip about using FTP directly from Finder. What Apple fails to mention in its tip is that whenever you connect via the Finder's Go -> Connect to Server option, make sure to include the user name in the ftp address. Don't connect to ftp://foo.org, instead, connect to ftp://erica.sadun@foo.org. Adding the user name fixes nearly all the connection problems that people write to me about. Instead of getting "The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in (address) could not be read or written. (Error code -36)." an authentication window appears.

The model of username@ also works for smb:// and afp://

Messing with OS X icons

Preview has surprising abilities ...

Import your icons into Photoshop - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Basically, the trick is to open the application's icon in Preview (as was pointed out in the comments, you can most easily do this just by copying it in the Finder and selecting "New from Clipboard" in Preview's file menu), then save it in Photoshop (PSD) format. Now you can open it in Photoshop and get access to the image for editing, including the alpha channel.

I've usually done a get info to see icon, clicked on it, then cmd-c then open in preview.

Use of the SUBST command to reduce breakage of Microsoft Access 2003 links - an esoteric hack for escaping DOS 2.1's "path trap".

Where to pass on these kinds of tips and techniques for working around Microsoft's kludgy applications? It's a bit of a puzzle since Microsoft's products have an unlimited number of oddities requiring an unlimited number of hacks. This is but one of the myriad ...

I posted this one to Microsoft's high quality Access queries newsgroup, and since I use this blog to keep track of things like myself I'll post it here too. It's probably too esoteric for anyone else though ...

Use of the SUBST command to reduce breakage of Access links

One of the great failings of the past 20 years of Microsoft's dominance has been the failure to implement good file system redirection. XP today is almost as dependent on absolute paths as it DOS 2.1. [1]

In the world of Access this manifests as broken links to external data sources. I use links very extensively in my data management work, a typical project may contains dozens of query files with links to dozens of data tables distributed over one or more drives. Any change to any path, including renaming a folder or file or moving a file, will break the links.

Access 2003 responds to a broken link by irreversibly breaking a query on first use. It doesn't matter if you don't save the query when you see it's broken, the query is now broken. (This may be fixed in 2007.) If you're careful you can use Linked Table Manager to repair the link before first use of the query, but if you foget you're in trouble.

Today I reinvented a workaround. I say reinvented because I found a single mention of it in this newsgroup from 1999 [2]. It worked then so I presume it works now. Seven years is long enough that I'll repost the technique.

The trick is that DOS 3.x's SUBST command still works in XP. Indeed, in XP you can apply a SUBST operation to path containing a drive letter mapped to a network share.

The result is a de facto partial indirection layer.

Assume I have a database file john.mdb in c:\work\fark\dbase\cpt.

I run this command: SUBST P: c:\work\fark\dbase\cpt.

Now I create a link from a query database to a file in john.mdb

The link will have the path P:\john.mdb

Now I move john.mdb to e:\dbase\cpt

I now clear the P: substitution and run: SUBST P: e:\dbase\cpt
my links will not break.

For more information on SUBST simply type SUBST /? on the command line.

Of course if Microsoft were to implement file system indirection, or even relative paths in Access links, this kludge would not be useful.

meta: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, Microsoft Access 2003, indirection, redirection, link, linked table manager, 070620

[1] Mac Classic's greatest innovation was an absolute file identifier that provided indirection, one could move files around without breaking relationships. OS X, sadly, broke much of this, but OS X today still has quite a bit of indirection.

Indirection is a member of the interesting class of things that are as unappreciated as they are valuable. Nobody ever mentions file system indirection as the most important innovation of the early Macintosh, but I think it really was. Twenty years later XP is almost as much a "prisoner of the path" as DOS 2.1. Sadly, OS X has regressed, though it's still well ahead of XP.

Despite the nastiness of using a fully specified path name to implement data table links in Microsoft Access, I do have to say the "link to table" technique is very useful and has very impressive performance and reliability.

The future of SVG is ?

I was an old SVG fan way about 3 DCB1 (before the Dot Com Bust 1). I'd lost track of it over the past few years as it was eclipsed by Flash and by Ajax based non-standard solutions. Work questions made me look it over again recently. Somewhat to my surprise, the technology may not be quite dead. So if Apple and Google decide to be nicer to each other than, say, Netscape and Sun @ 1997, we might see SVG play some role on small low bandwidth computing devices. Like, say, the iPhone.

But what about, you know, the IE web? On the one hand Microsoft's Silverlight is going to crush Adobe's Flash, so Apollo and Flash are irrelevant. Similarly SVG can't play on the larger web without Microsoft, so SVG seems irrelevant on the IE web too. On the other hand Google can't cede this battleground to Silverlight. (Apple of course can't either, but in this struggle they root from the sidelines).

So will Google buy Apollo/Flash (and/or Adobe)? Or will Google embed SVG support in the Google toolbar and thus bring it to IE / Vista? Or bet on both horses, since either is safer than Silverlight? (Adobe's SVG plug-in was never relevant, so let's not even mention it.)

This will be interesting to watch ...

If anyone sees evidence that Google is going to put an SVG reader into their toolbar code please send a note to jfaughnan@spamcop.net. I'm curious!

Gordon's Tech - migration to new domain

I've now migrated my three primary public blogs to the domain kateva.org. False alarm, I had some imaginary glitches and switched back to the old url for now. I'll probably switch again in a few weeks because it does actually work including automatic feed updating through the '301 redirect'. Below are some notes I'll leave in for reference ...

Update: Well, that didn't go so well after all. The feeds don't seem to follow the migration, so if you move a blog the old feeds don't seem to work. I'll see if I can get some Google tech support help, but in the past they've been hard to work with.

Update 6/20/07: I was too impatient. A post to Google Groups (I didn't try Google tech support) received a very kind response from "wasted":

I don't use bloglines myself, but Blogger will use a 301 redirect on the blogspot address to go to the new custom domain, for everything including feeds. So any feedreader should follow the redirect...

And so it does. It just takes a bit longer to update than usual, and it follows the common bloglines behavior of showing an unread count of "10". Bloglines updates the URL as well. I did two roundtrips on my test blog and it works. I've switched back to the old urls (hey, I was justifiably nervous) but I'll switch them one at a time over the next few days. It's noteworthy that bloglines managed two roundtrips, a "301 redirect" is "permanent". (see also)

Clearing the Finder "Open With" contextual menu

Delete com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. For more, see - Mac OS X: Clearing the Finder "Open With" contextual menu

How to create a google apps custom domain and move your blogger blogs to your new domain

Okay, I'm impressed.

This was a bit hard for me to figure out from Google's generic documentation [1], but with the way I've described the process below anyone can do it. Cost is $10/year. It took me about 30 minutes to:

1. create and register a custom domain (kateva.org) and set it up with free google apps.
2. create a CNAME entry corresponding to the name I want my blog to have.
   (Example: instead of http://googlefaughnan.blogspot.org this blog will eventually move to http://tech.kateva.org)
3. change my blog publish settings to the new url and demonstrate the new url works and the old one redirects.

I've done this for a test blog I created for this kind of experiment, but in the description below I'll use this blog as an example (though as of this posting I've not yet moved it).

Get your Google Apps domain and configure your subdomain CNAME settings.

1. Go to Google Apps and register a domain for $10/year configured with the free Google Apps services. (Same thing we do for our family email, I have a few businesses setup this way too.) In this case, I used kateva.org. (Kateva is our dog's name, I rather like it.)
2. From Google Apps follow the link on the advanced tab to eNom's configuration screens. (The advanced tab will give you a high security password and username information). Note there are host records associated already with ghs.google.com.
   
3. Click the edit button and add a new row. For "host name" enter the name of the blog, such as "tech" (for Gordon's Tech, which would then have the url http://tech.kateva.org). For Address use ghs.google.com. For Record Type use CNAME.
   

Now go to Blogger and select the blog you want to move.

1. Note the current blog URL, because when you're done it will be gone (but it will redirect).
   
2. Click on Publishing tab.
3. Enter the url corresponding to the CNAME you created (example: notes.kateva.org).
4. Don't use the missing files host. (This is mostly for persons who had FTP blogs and are switching to a hosted blog.)

Now test

1. Does old URL redirect?
2. Does new URL work?

I'm going to do some more testing with feeds and the like, then move my blogs. As to why I'm doing this, that will be a post on Gordon's Notes shortly ...

Two Blogger help files to use for reference:

• Using a custom domain
• Create a CNAME record for my custom domain?

[1] They're clearly trying to be "open" and "generic", but this works very easily if you do everything with Google. They just don't document it that way.

Update 6/18/07: I'm concerned that after one makes this switch, feeds that point to the old URL no longer update. I hope I'm wrong about this! I'll update as I learn more. Not good if true! (See also)

Update 7/19/07: It turns out that the 301 redirect works, but only at the domain level. Since Google changed the syntax for RSS feeds between their blospot and custom domain implementations RSS feeds don't "update" by redirect. Atom feed syntax is identical, so they do update. Google has not acknowledged nor documented this.

Also, it's interesting how this works. A CNAME is imply a redirect. So all requests for blog.kateva.org are redirected to ghs.google.com. I assume when one switches in Blogger to a "custom domain" Google creates a relationship in ghs.google.com so that all requests for the custom domain sent to ghs.google.com are resolved internally. So this solution implements two layers or indirection, one at the CNAME level and one at ghs.google.com.

Update 4/15/2008: Google never did fix the old-rss redirect bug.

The graveyard of minimized windows ...

When you use VR goggles with 30 foot wide virtual displays, you'll see where minimized Windows go ...

The Land of Wind, Ghosts and Minimised Windows

... So what modern Windows versions actually do when you minimise a window is move the window.

WinNT and its descendants - possibly even Vista, though I'm not sure - move minimised windows to the undisplayable location -32000, -32000. Way up there, eight to ten metres above and to the left of your monitor(s), all of your 'minimised' windows are hanging in the air.

Windows 95 and its descendants, though, couldn't go that far. They should have been able to, but too many programs - serious expensive commercial programs from companies that should have known better - went crazy when presented with large and/or negative window locations. Windows 95 had to work with as much existing software as possible, so (read all about it on Raymond's blog here) it ended up moving 'minimised' windows to only 3000, 3000.

The 3000, 3000 position stayed the same for the rest of the 95-derived Windows variants - Windows 95, 98, 98SE and ME. And it gives rise to an amusing artefact.

If you install one of those versions of Windows on a computer with two really humungous monitors (or three normal screens), and then tell Windows that the screens are positioned diagonally with the primary at the top left, you can see the Land of the Minimised Windows...

BTW, this is one of the things Apple's developers messed up when they semi-ported Safari to Windows.

The $20 noise reducing "headphone" solution that beats the $350 Bose QC 2 ...

Or so Pogue's readers claim: 

Blocking Out Background Noise - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog

...As another reader put it: “I have a Bose QuietComfort 2 headset which transforms my daily commute into almost a recreational activity. But I’ve found a better solution: Get a pair of lightweight, industrial hearing protection ear muffs for no more than $20 by Bilsom. (I love these: http://tinyurl.com/2r4a6y).”

He then suggests that, for music, you can slip a pair of regular old iPod-style earbuds *inside* the earphones. “The sound reduction is superior, there are no batteries required, it is a much cheaper solution, and the sound can be stunning, depending on what brand of earphones you buy.”

(This reader offers a video that demonstrates a similar hack: http://www.marvgolden.com/hearing/index.htm.)

This is an over-the-ear effect similar to the in-ear high end occlusive earphones. It probably won't be as good at reducing continuous noise, but it will blunt outside conversation, music, etc. Depending on what you want, this could be an advantage or not.

Aperture's bizarre lift and stamp UI

I'm still using Aperture in trial mode. I refuse to buy until Apple adds the ability to edit image date information (like every other image management software ever produced). In the meantime I'm slowly slogging through one of the most cryptic and sluggish pieces of software I've every seen. The Aperture Quick Reference is worth printing btw.

The worst part of a generally disappointing product is Aperture's bizarre "lift and stamp" UI. My guess is that some Apple engineer tried to hack an awful interface and made it both worse and out of sync with the documentation. I suspect there are some bugs in there as well.

In Aperture 1.5.3 both 'o' and 'shift-o' seem to do exactly the same thing. Some web sites claim the option key will change the lift/stamp button, but that doesn't work for me. Regardless of what I do, it always says 'stamp'.

After much labor I finally found a sequence of actions that allowed by to take image settings from one image and apply them to multiple images. Nothing else I tried worked for "stamping" multiple images. Here's what I posted to Apple's Discussion group.

Apple - Support - Discussions - Re: Lift and Stamp - one image only ...

1. Adjust settings on the reference image.
2. Select image.
3. Type 'o' to bring up the L&S HUD (or use either the lift or stamp toolbar buttons, they seem to do the same thing). If you leave the lower left select box set to 'add' a "stamp" operation will add to existing edit metadata, if you choose 'replace' it replaces existing edit metadata
4. Look at the settings, confirm that the HUD is showing the right settings to apply. Unselect any you don't want to apply.
5. HOLD the command key to change the cursor to a select cursor. Select all images desired. Click stamp.

Aperture is disappointing. iPhoto hasn't been updated for eons and is falling behind the (free) Picasa app -- and it can't handle multiple image Libraries. (Doesn't anyone travel any more? Get married? Divorced? Anything?). OS X 10.5 is late (I don't believe it will be ready for the fall).

There are no OS X blogging applications even remotely comparable to Microsoft's free Vista/XP Writer.

Apple is not doing very well right now. I'm ready for the iPhone to be a pretty impressive flop.

Update: Primary Only. If you type the letter S when using Aperture, Aperture will, without warning, change its operating mode to "primary only". There's no warning, Aperture just changes mode. In this mode it doesn't matter what you do when you select, the operations will apply only to the image with the thick white "select border" (the "primary"). Lift and Stamp away, Aperture won't give you a warning, but only one image will be stamped. I was in Primary mode and didn't know it.

I realized something was truly bizarre when I couldn't apply ratings to multiple selected images simultaneously. I poked around the menus until I saw the "Primary" option. Selected.

Who the heck wants this? Why does it have a quick key? Why doesn't Aperture display "Primary mode" in the chrome to warn users what mode they're in?

Anyway, when you're in standard mode, Lift & Stamp works this way:

1. Select images you want to Stamp.
2. Type o to bring up the Lift & Stamp HUD.
3. Click on an image you like (this does the lift). Note settings
4. Clicks stamp, this applies changes to the images you selected in step 1.

That's so weird.

Aperture Lift and stamp tool - winner of the unusability award?

I've been trying to use the "lift and stamp" tool in Aperture 1.5.3. It will only "stamp" one image, no matter how many I select before application. When I search on this tool, I mostly find comments on how hard it is to use it.

Aperture is such a frustrating product ....

Encyclopaedia Britannica - Google integration

We subscribe to the encyclopedia britannica - mostly for sentimental reasons. It's not terribly useful; Wikipedia has better coverage for the topics I need to know about. Still, it's handy when the kids have questions, though even then it can be flaky. Tonight most of the links were dysfunctional when I used Camino, a switch to Safari fixed that problem. (I suspect I was hitting a bad server and switching browsers randomly assigned me to a working server.)

Really the EB seems to have been on its last legs for ages. The web site has been remarkably uninventive; for example, they've never really tried to build a community of users. I figure they've been waiting for Google to bail them out.

Maybe that's starting. Just by chance I came across this Google co-op integration feature:
Co-op Encyclopaedia Britannica integration. I've used Google co-op to create my own custom searches, but I'd not heard of this option.

I clicked the button, and now, as long as I'm logged in to my Gmail account, my Google searches include results from EB at the top. I'll give it a try for a while. Maybe I'll even use my EB account more than once every six months - if they can get their site working! (Wikipedia, by contrast, never fails me.)

The Co-op site, btw, provides other search integration options, but I didn't see any others I wanted.

The mystery of Safari, and how to file a bug report

The "surprise" of Steve Jobs unremarkable Apple developer keynote address was a Windows version of Safari. It's not been an auspicious launch. Even by the unexacting standards of Apple's product releases it's probably a month away from being ready, but Jobs dumped it out anyway.

There's a new version for Windows out already, but I'm more interested in how we're supposed to file bug reports (not that I'm going to bother with it!):

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Safari Beta 3.0.1 for Windows

• For security issues: email product-security@apple.com.
• For engine-level issues, like site compatibility or crashes on specific pages: file a bug report in WebKit bugzilla.
• For any bugs, including the above categories, you can file a Radar bug.

In other words, don't bother with the little bug icon on the toolbar. That offical Apple stuff goes nowhere.

In related news, Cringely tries to figure out why the heck Apple bothered. He figures the premature timing was driven by a lack of anything to announce at the WWDC, but the primary motivation is to provide a platform for AT&T web services. Seems unlikely, but, like all things Cringely, it's interesting.

The explanation I like best (so far) for "why Safari/Windows" came from Daring Fireball. DF thinks it's all about referral revenue from using the Google search box in Safari/Windows. Apple wants a Windows platform for iPhone web development, and this way they get that and a few million in cash flow.

Ultimately though, I'm still puzzled.

By the way, I wrote a while back that the push of OS X from April to September, and the reasons given for that delay, suggested that OS X may not be ready until 2008. The lack of WWDC news has reinforced my suspicions.

It's rare for a project as big as 10.5 now appears to be to slip by only a few months. If they do ship in September, I'll bet it will be about as cooked as Safari/Windows.

Why doesn't Apple do basic security testing?

 Glenn Fleishman, writing for Tidbits, asks a simple question ...

TidBITS: Apple Updates Windows Safari Beta with Security Fixes

... It's disturbing that Apple isn't stress testing its public beta software with the same kind of readily available tools for fuzzing that both researchers and the nefarious have. Many of the Month of Apple Bugs flaws (see "MoAB Is My Washpot," 2007-02-19), as well as many recent AirPort and AirPort Extreme problems, were discovered through fuzzing.

We all know Apple treats early adopters as alpha testers, but Fleishman is making a more important point. Apple is releasing products that evidently haven't passed even basic attacks using off-the-shelf hacking tools -- including OS X 10.4.

In a reasonable world, that would be product negligence, and there would be rabid lawyers ringing Cupertino. It's the 21st century Apple. You need to do much, much better.