Of all the useless error messages, this one would have to take the cake. I found it in a Word document tonight.

It appears to be caused by the author using Mac Word, and having pasted a picture into the document in some weird and wonderful way.

The error is useless, because I already have Quicktime installed on this machine. (I didn’t particularly want it; it came with iTunes.) And if it wants a particular decompressor, it would be very helpful if it gave me a hint as to which one, and where I should get it from.

I couldn’t even see a way of extracting the picture so I could try and throw it at another viewer program.

In this age of standards, when the vast majority of pictures flying about the place are either GIF, JPEG or PNG, and even proprietary standards like MS Word are almost universal, why on earth should I be getting an error message like this?

Evidently the only fix is to go back to the source (on the Mac) and change the picture to something more universal. Thankfully the document’s author was around, so I could do that. But who knows why Mac Word lets people insert pictures in this way in the first place. (Powerpoint is susceptible too.)

Conclusion? Blame Microsoft!

Ever wonder how they fitted an entire computer language into just a few kilobytes, back in the 80s? Documented disassembly of BBC Basic 4.

How to highlight author comments in Wordpress … but it relies on the author being user ID 1, so it won’t work here, where we have several people posting. Could easily be customised to look for other user IDs though.

Some developers are throwing in the towel and running Vista as Admin.

The excellent Secret Life of Machines not only has a web site, but is available freely (and legally) via BitTorrent. And the theme tune is available on iTunes.

I use Outlook at work, and sometimes people send big attachments without zipping them up. Often they’re documents which are in the document management system anyway. Sigh.

Anyway, it’s easy enough to compress them within Outlook.

1. Open mail item.

2. Save attachment(s) to a temporary directory.

3. Zip (or whatever) the file. (See? 2Mb XLS down to 300Kb. Why didn’t the sender do that?)

4. In the email, click Edit / Edit Message on the menu. (This feature is a boon for fraudulent modification of emails, but also for compressing attachments.)

5. Right click on the attachment and Remove.

6. Drag the zip file into the email. (For some reason you can’t use the menu to insert an attachment like you can when composing. And the drag-drop has to land in the body section of the email.)

7. Save and Close the email.

Voila, a bunch of space saved.

I haven’t explored to see if the same method can be used in other mail clients.

Some Unicode symbols have surprising effects but… u?op ?p?sdn ?u????? s? un? s? ?l???u ?ou s,???? -, or, if WordPress doesn’t support Unicode properly, you miss out.

I’ve written before about Lotus Notes… to my surprise, there’s a whole web site dedicated to documenting how much it sucks.

Wow. I thought dealing with correspondents using Notes email was bad. Looks like it’s absolutely hideous if you’re trying to actually use the interface.

(via Coding Horror)

I had to do this recently. It’s not excessively difficult.

You can use this thing, but it’s really for dev environments.

WampServer installs Apache, MySQL and PHP. Easy.

Once it’s running, go into PhpMyAdmin and change the root password from the default (blank). You’ll need to update the PhpMyAdmin config too: this is in C:\wamp\apps\phpmyadmin2.10.1\config.inc.php — remember that this, like most of the files, is in Unix format, so you need to use a Unix-aware file editor. (Wordpad seems to be okay for this if you have nothing else installed, at least on Windows Server 2003.)

Download Joomla and chuck it into the root directory (default is c:\wamp\www)

Browse to http://localhost/

If Joomla tells you to change anything in the PHP setup, you’ll find it in C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.5\php.ini — though it seemed to take no notice when I changed magic_quotes_gpc as requested. Odd. I eventually found you can reset it using the WAMP5 tray icon: Left-click, PHP, PHP Settings. It then automatically restarts Apache to make it take effect. Neato.

The rest is easy… go through the Joomla install pages and it does it all for you. Then start figuring out your template and structure.

Still to figure out:

• Contact page/email doesn’t work. Probably some hiccup with Apache not figuring out how to send emails from Windows… maybe I need to make sure the Windows IIS SMTP server is running or something.
• Issues with .htaccess, needed to switch on friendly URLs (well, friendlier than those default Joomla/Mambo monstrousities)

I don’t think it’s that my eyesight’s going. I think it’s an ever-growing trend to use more subtle text highlighting and cursors. Sometimes when I search for a word, particularly a short word, within a web page or other document, I just can’t see what it’s found.

Sometimes it’s because the idiots programming it haven’t thought about what happens when the text found is underneath the search box. I’ve seen that happen when searching within an email’s text in Outlook 2003, for instance. Easily fixed the way most applications do it: by moving the search box if necessary, or by scrolling the document so the text isn’t underneath.

But sometimes it’s just that the screen is so busy with words that the highlighted term just doesn’t stick out. It happens to me when, for instance, in Word I’m searching for plain apostrophes and quotes that I want converted to their “smart” versions (because they look better on the printed page). In Word, particularly in Word 2007, the highlighting is tiny, and on a busy page, almost invisible.

Seriously, just try and find it in the text below.

This is made worse in Word 2007 because of the severely limited customisable colour schemes. But other applications have similar problems.

Either the highlighting needs some more emphasis, or (and I think this would work better, especially if your search term is short) a big arrow should appear pointing to it, or a circle or some other kind of highlighting should appear if, within X seconds, the user doesn’t do anything which indicates they can see where the text is.

Otherwise you have to find the found term. It’s not my idea of fun.

SnagIt 7, notable for being able to capture long web pages, is being offered for free download.

So is Camtasia Studio 3.

(via Greg)

What idiot designed the email component of Lotus Notes? How is it possible that something so broken can be so popular?

Who decided that replying to an email with an attachment inside it should send the attachment back to the original sender? It’s in my Sent Mail; I don’t need to see it again. Waste of space and bandwidth!

And who decided that when replying it should ignore the From address and use the Sender address instead? Yeah sure I sent it from my Gmail, but it was on behalf of xyz; replies should go to xyz!

And why does it sometimes screw up email names and addresses? I’ve just seen something CCd (unsuccessfully, I assume) to John.Smith@company.comJohn.Smith — WTF?!

(And elsewhere in Lotus Notes… have you seen the state of the permalinks it produces in web sites?! I mean really, does anybody think something like http://www.doi.vic.gov.au/DOI/Internet/transport.nsf/AllDocs/CF55EBCAB40CEB3DCA2571F80004823E?OpenDocument is a sensible URL to present to human beings?)

Pondering switching from expen$ive Photoshop to free Paint.Net, but want to be able to read all your Photoshop files?

Just download this plugin, unzip and copy the DLL into the Paint.Net Filetypes folder. Easy.

Caveat: it doesn’t support absolutely everything in PSD files flawlessly. Discussion here. But the files I’ve been dabbling with (actually converted from CPT to PSD using an ancient copy of Corel Photopaint) work fine.

Why do I keep getting these? They rarely happened in Outlook 2003.

I promise you, I did close Outlook properly. Just like I do every time. It’s good that this version can do the integrity check in the background, but I don’t see why it’s needed at all.

IMAP performance in this version is appalling. It rarely seems to stay connected to the IMAP server for more than a few seconds at a time. Just about all the time I need to keep reconnecting and/or do the Mark For Download / Process Marked Headers thing, which gets old really fast.

I like a lot of the other stuff in the new Outlook, but these are very irritating.