Word styles

Word StylesHow is it that otherwise competent people still don’t know how to use style sheets in Word? How long’s Word had styles? Well over a decade.

You load up some document to do some work on it, and some idiot has created a zillion different styles, by virtue of editing the entire document manually (and therefore inconsistently) and Word happily making every little variation a separate style.

Half the headings have numbering, half don’t, the default paragraph type after a heading has a bullet, the bullets are mis-aligned, some bright spark has decided a standard text paragraph isn’t “Normal” but has its own special name, and the whole thing’s a mess.

I remember a few years ago I painstakingly set up a document with about 15 styles, to cover any eventuality expected, then wrote tons of text for it, and passed it to someone else for review. It came back with all the styles removed. All the text was just formatted independently, and had been changed around to be inconsistent. To this day I don’t know how he did that. Grrr.

And even last week a document came my way that had a ludicrous number of styles in it. Possibly 200 or more. You had to scroll through the list for ages to find what you wanted.

Oh, some people can’t use the Language features, either. I know it’s common for Aussies to accidentally set their documents to US English and then wonder why it complains about “colour”, but the other day someone sent me a document which had half its text set to French (even though it was in English).

Byebye MSN t-shirt

MSN t-shirtToday one of my longest-lasting geek t-shirt goes to meet its maker. It was an MSN beta tester shirt, sent to me in 1995 just after the Windows 95 release. It now has too many holes in it to be of use anymore.

Back then, of course, MSN was not a web site. It was the anti-Internet, a closed proprietary network using a bunch of jumbled technologies (some, like MediaView, were really really ugly) that I somehow got involved in testing… In retrospect, it was always doomed to failure given the rise of the Web, though I admit, I didn’t really appreciate that at the time. I blogged about it here, some time back.

So, hasta la vista, MSN t-shirt.

Programming for beginners (The Next Generation)

Microsoft are doing more in the beginner programming area, with the Coding 4 Fun web site and the Beginner Developer Learning Centre, backing up their various Visual Studio Express free packages. No doubt to fight back against the onslaught from PHP and other open-source tools, but hopefully it also helps get some more people into programming, particularly kids whose brains pick up such concepts so fast and have the imagination to make use of this kind of thing.

But I wonder if we’ll ever again see the heyday of home computer programming that there was in the eighties. Call me a teary old nostalgic if you like, but it strikes me that the eighties was the sweet spot sparking interest in programming: you had millions of computers going into homes with a relatively easy to use programming language built-in (all those variants of BASIC), but crucially, you also had a shortage of the kind of productivity software that lets people express themselves nowadays on computers without having to program anything.

For instance, back in the day, I used a Commodore 64 and a BBC B to do video titles for friends’ productions. To do this, I had to program them. Initial attempts were pretty pathetic, but let me tell you, the Doctor Who starfield sequences I eventually got working were pretty damn good. Thanks to the miracle of colour palette manipulation, along with some year 10-level mathematics I got not only stars flying out of the screen, but galaxies spinning around and wormholes appearing. (Unfortunately for that particular production an earlier, decidedly less impressive and readable credits sequence made it into the final edit.)

These days something similar would be done on Powerpoint or in a video editing package, which would probably have its own built-in titles editor. It’s undoubtedly easier, but half the motivation to dabble in computer programming is gone. OK, so this is just an example, but it’s something you see in various areas of computer use, such as web page design (do beginners still learn HTML?) or games (why code up your own Donkey Kong like you love in the arcades when you can just get it on MAME?).

This is not to say the huge variety of software enabling high productivity on computers is bad, of course, but I do think it means people are much less likely to get into programming these days as a hobby.

Setting up SFTP/SSH on Windows

I’ve been wrestling with OpenSSH for Windows to set up an SFTP server. I’m still ironing out some of the fine detail, but the basic steps are below.

This article covers the initial setup:

  • Install the software
  • If the FTP user doesn’t already exist in Windows, create it.
  • Open a command prompt in the c:\program files\openssh directory (assuming that’s where it’s installed)
  • Set up the group file: mkgroup -l >> etc\group
  • Set up the passwd file: mkpasswd -l -u username >> etc\passwd
    The -l means local user. If it’s a domain user, use -d. Type just mkpasswd for help.
  • Create the home directory for your user. If following the IIS standard, that would be c:\inetpub\ftproot\username — but it can be anywhere
  • Edit the passwd file to put the home directory in. Load it in Notepad or another text editor. As with all the files to do with OpenSSH, passwd is in Unix format, so you may do better to use an editor that knows Unix end-of-line characters. Anyhow, change the second last field to match the home directory. Cygdrive notation needs to be used, eg for the above /cygdrive/c/inetpub/ftproot/username
  • For domain users, you’ll have to make sure the Domain Users group is added to the groups file. This can be done by doing a mkgroup > textfile.txt and then extracting the line for Domain Users from the file and adding it manually to the etc\groups file.
    Also double-check that the group ID (the third field in the groups file, which is delimited by colons) matches the ID your user(s) in the passwd file (the fourth field).
  • Start the OpenSSH service (note that when adding additional users, you do not need to restart the service

Continue reading →

Technology lets down playback

I can think of two examples where digital media has limitations which affect the fidelity of playback in a major way: with music it’s gapless playback, often noticeable on MP3 players and with CDs on some players. With DVDs it’s layer changes, again, worse on some players than others.

This shouldn’t be the case, of course. Digital media of course is meant to be better than analogue, in every respect. I don’t know if there are standards mandated in the relevant formats, but perhaps there should be… or at least some documented workarounds, such as recommending where DVD authors place layer-changes.

After all, these kinds of things can ruin the enjoyment of a movie or piece of music if handled badly.

Friday brief stuff

Google for the Enterprise: Google Apps Premier edition is here. $50 / user account / year, providing Gmail, GTalk, GCalendar, GDocs & Spreadsheets, GPage with guaranteed uptimes, phone support and more storage and options.

Favicons: Good article on making a good favicon.

One commenter left a useful link to the PNG2ICO command-line tool. This online tool also looks handy.

RIP: Robert Adler, the man who invented the TV remote control (despite not watching much TV himself, apparently).

RSS vs old-fashioned browsers

I got interested in checking out the number of subscribers to my feeds, since Google Reader is now revealing it in the user-agent.

Here are the figures from my personal blog.

bloglines.com /feed/ 26
bloglines.com /feed/atom/ 2
reader.google.com /feed/atom/ 8
reader.google.com /feed/ 21
reader.google.com /feed/rss2/ 1
feedshow.com /feed/ 1
netvibes.com /feed/ 2
newsAlloy.com /feed/atom/ 1
newsgator.com /feed/rss2/ 1
newsgator.com /feed/rdf 1
rojo.com /feed/ 1

Bloglines is reporting as two separate readers for /feed/ – perhaps different versions?

So 65 subscribers from those aggregator services that report on numbers.

Whereas the home page is getting around 240 hits per day, many from individuals, but also a lot from search engine bots. (No I haven’t got the energy to work it out precisely.)

So it would appear that despite the growing popularity of aggregators, many people continue to just hit the web pages manually.

These figures are much lower than for many, but it reflects a similar result to what Ed Bott found in his stats.

Australian PM spam

Someone’s spamming Australian email addresses with a fake news bulletin about PM John Howard having had a heart attack. It includes a link supposedly to The Australian newspaper, but which in fact goes to http://www.theau-news.org/ The spams come from a variety of addresses, with subject lines such as “John Howard, the current Prime Minister of Australia have survived a heart attack” and “Best surgeons are struggling for the life of the Prime Minister”.

The domain was registered only a few days ago, to a post-office box in Nova Scotia, Canada, and apparently the site tries to install malware.

SYDNEY, February 18, 2007 08:56pm (AEDT) – The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard have survived a heart attack. Mr Howard, 67 years old, was at Kirribilli House in Sydney, his prime residence, when he was suddenly stricken. Mr Howard was taken to the Royal North Shore Hospital where the best surgeons of Australia are struggling for his life.

Click on the link below to get the latest information on the health of the Prime Minister:

The Australian – keeping the nation informed
Continue reading →

Nostalgia++

Over on my personal blog I’ve posted about visiting the ACMI “Hits of the 80s” video game exhibit. Well worth a look for any nostalgic geeks in, or passing through, Melbourne.

It’s great to see ACMI’s Games Lab giving computer games some recognition for the important cultural impact they’ve had. While we may never again see something like Space Invaders causing a shortage of coins in Japan, or pop songs written about Pacman, games are a huge industry, and a big influence over popular culture.

The problem with syndicated news

SMH (NSW) story: A man has been shot dead on Valentine’s Day, in what locals are saying was a jealous argument over an ex-wife. A large search is now underway for the killer around the small town of Gulgong, near Mudgee in the state’s central west.

Age (Vic) story: A man has been shot dead on Valentine’s Day, in what locals are saying was a jealous argument over an ex-wife. A large search is now underway for the killer around the small town of Gulgong, near Mudgee in the state’s central west.

At the time I initially looked, neither story had any indication which state this happened in, except the SMH one linked to a Google map of Gulgong, NSW. I had guessed that, since I recalled Mudgee was in NSW.

When you’re feeding your local stories into the global (or at least national) media machine, a little more info on where it’s happening would help a lot.