Frederick's Timelog

Generosity (?)

Prologue

To give you some background before I go into the content here, I had just concluded a successful interview (the first of two) and was stopping by the library on my way home. The trip from there was bizarre – random acts of generosity sprung up, seriously making me wonder whether the world was conspiring to be generous, or whether it was some kind of karma day.

Act I: A mother with a stroller

I held the door open. Seems ordinary enough, right? It all started here.

A mother with three kids, one of which was in a stroller, was trying to get out the front door. Maybe that entrance wasn’t accessible, because the door wasn’t opening for them.

So before I entered, I held the door open for them, allowing her to get her stroller out.

I entered the library no wiser that this was the first act of many.

Act II: Library

I only had to check in two books, and the library has self-serve check-in machines, to which I wandered when I entered.

It’s really an easy process, but the lady overseeing check-in still had to help the patron in front of me, for whom it was probably a first-time experience.

“Yeah, that’s it. You just push here on the screen and put your books on the table.”

My usual experiences with librarians are far worse.

Act III: Viva

I ran across the street to catch the bus that was about to leave.

For those of you unfamiliar with this transit system, an individual with a ticket ‘validates’ the ticket on a machine before boarding the bus. That’s what I attempted to do.

I became frustrated because the machine wouldn’t take in the ticket – even after 4 or 5 tries, and even more frustrated because I was making the bus wait. I gave up, and boarded anyways through the door beside the driver. I genuinely intended to validate the ticket.

A minute or two into the ride, I asked the driver whether it was okay if I validated the ticket at my destination. His response surprised me.

“Sure… if you want.”

What the heck? Now, Viva is nicknamed “Free-va” because of the honour system on which fares work. Offenders keep their tickets without validating them – avoiding the fare – and are occasionally caught by enforcement officers.

Was this generosity, entrapment, or plain dereliction?

I fully intended to validate my ticket at the destination.

More »

More is coming

I sincerely apologize for the lack of Office 2010 posts, which started with Part 1 and Part 2.

I’ve gotten to use it a lot more in the course of daily business, which has opened my eyes to some astounding features.

In any case, I’ve been very busy and will continue to be busy until next week, which is when I plan on publishing Part 3.

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What a scam: Domain Registry of Canada

I’ve been receiving these letters every single year a few months before any one of my domains is set to expire.

This company is clearly harvesting WHOIS data in violation of their ICANN agreement to send official-looking “expiration notices” to domain owners, many of whom unwittingly send in payment, unaware that the “Domain Registry of Canada” is merely a company attempting the entirely unethical practice of domain slamming.

Since 2001, this company has been soliciting domain transfers under the guise of renewing the registration with the existing registrar. Of course, their prices are ridiculously expensive — $40 per year for a domain name — and that’s part of why I didn’t fall for it, since I operate my own domain registrar and I know the value of domain registration services aren’t that high.

An early example of the domain letters from 2002 is published online.

In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission settled with the sister company “Domain Registry of America” to stop their misleading business practices. The way they decided to comply was by adding a little blurb that blended into the text, one that few people seeing an official-looking letter would read.

They’ve changed it a bit now, to uppercase and bold text, but the premise of their operations is still the same.

The envelope is misleading. Indeed, the colour and layout of the envelope nearly exactly matches that of an official Canadian government letter, except for the return address in the top-left. And there they’ve neatly placed a maple leaf, knowing that it is associated with the country, and by extension, the government.

Even the NAME is misleading.

The letter has been changed in recent years, but still carries the same layout that I recognize from as early as 2005. The prices are ridiculous; a .net domain isn’t worth $40/year. (I know; I was selling them for $7.99 last month.)

That letter just irritates me. Sentences like “take advantage of our best savings” when you actually pay $30 more, misleading phrases like “You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights”, and worst of all:

“Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.”

It’s rare for me to say something this angry. Screw you, Domain Registry of Canada.

Office 2010 Technical Preview: Part 2

See Part 1 if you haven’t read it for some background. In this post:

• Interface improvements
  • Aero Glass
  • Ribbon
  • Backstage
  • Animations tab

I’ve had about 4 days now to play with the Office 2010 Technical Preview, which, according to Ars Technica, is actually a slightly older build than the most current one, and for which testers were “hand-picked”.

I did end up installing both the 32-bit and the 64-bit editions of the software, realizing that I wanted to see whether 64-bit was stable (and it seems to be). When I discovered that Office 2010’s PDF export functionality is terribly inferior to Adobe Acrobat (more on that later), I went back to 32-bit so that the Acrobat add-in would work, but discovered to my horror that it crashes Word (but more on that later).

Let’s get started with some fresh content about interface improvements. LOW-BANDWIDTH WARNING: there are a LOT of screenshots.

Interface improvements

Indeed, Office 2010 is even prettier than Office 2007, at least in my opinion. The splash screens are now animated, as demonstrated below.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

On Windows 7, the titlebar blends seamlessly into the application, taking the Office 2007 look a bit further by merging it with Aero Glass. It’s a nice change.

Tip: on my blog, you can click on any image that links to the picture to see a larger version.

Some people don’t like how the colour is now white, but I don’t mind it at all. I just wish the colour schemes were actually available. In Office 2007 there was a choice between Blue, Black and Silver.

Ribbon, Ribbon Everywhere

The ribbon (also known as the Fluent UI) is now extended to Outlook and Publisher as well. (In Outlook 2007, messages and composing would take place in a window with the ribbon, but the application itself was ribbonless.)

Unfortunately, the ribbon seems to complicate Publisher, allocating valuable screen space (of which people have tons these days) to tools that will be used once or twice in the life of the workflow.

More follows the jump. More »

A David Suzuki article

It’s pretty rare for me to read any offline news nowadays, but I did that today, noting to my chagrin the ongoing strike in Toronto that has made it a foul smelling dump, and an article about gossiping from which I have much to learn. But there was another article worth sharing by David Suzuki. Fortunately, this newspaper has an electronic edition, making it possible for me to share these articles.

In this article, entitled “Harming environment is bad for business“, he pointedly attacks the companies exploiting the tar sands who launch massive campaigns to cast doubt on environmental science, and the politicians who pretend that scientists worldwide are scheming to deceive the public. You should read it.

Go on, read it. Not that I’m an environmentalist. (Well… I make decisions considering the climate change, but I’m not an activist.)

Office 2010 Technical Preview: Part 1

This is the first part of my posts about Office 2010. Last night, I received an invitation to the Office 2010 Technical Preview, and today, I am attempting to install it on my Windows 7 RC machine.

Legal notice: since this isn’t a private beta, I am allowed to discuss the preview and my experiences with it. However, I am not allowed to share product keys, installer files, and documents to which I have access by virtue of the invitation. The contract that binds me with reference to the technical documentation quotes as follows:

You […] agree: (a) to refrain from disclosing or distributing the Confidential Information to any third party for five (5) years from the date of disclosure of the Confidential Information by Microsoft to Company/You; (b) to refrain from reproducing or summarizing the Confidential Information…

Thankfully, there’s a public pressroom for Office 2010 information, from which I was able to get equivalents of the stuff in the confidential documents. Here’s some information for you.

System Requirements

Office 2010 is designed to work on computers with very limited resources; after all, many businesses were concerned that they would once again need to upgrade their hardware. Office hasn’t really necessitated hardware upgrades in the past; Office 2003 ran very well on old Dell OptiPlex machines on Windows 2000, and Office 2007 ran quite well on older XP laptops.

The specific details are in the FAQs document.

The installers are rather compact; the Technical Preview 32-bit/64-bit installers for Office 2010 Professional are no more than 600 MB each.

64-bit editions

I’m currently on Windows 7 RC 64-bit edition, but I resolved ultimately to install the 32-bit edition of Office 2010. This is due to the following reasons:

• The 64-bit edition of Office 2010 does not support most add-ins.
  Users of software with add-ins in Office programs will find that most of them do not work with the 64-bit edition of Office 2010. Software vendors are expected to release newer 64-bit add-ins, but users must use the 32-bit edition for compatibility with older add-ins.
• One cannot upgrade Office 2007 to Office 2010 64-bit.
  According to the technical documentation, “2007 Office system cannot be upgraded to native Office 2010 64-bit.“
• I don’t work with spreadsheets greater than 2 GB in size.
  The documentation listed a number of benefits of using the 64-bit edition. The central point was being able to open large Excel spreadsheets. Since I don’t do this, the benefits of the 64-bit architecture are insignificant when it comes to Office 2010.

Screenshots of my installation will come in the next installment of these posts. That is, after I manage to install it. At the moment I’m getting the following error with the 32-bit installer, after customizing the install and even going through a few minutes of the installation progress bar.

If this persists with the 32-bit installer, I may have no choice but to try the 64-bit installation.

Update: the installer has now succeeded. More will be coming!

Update: Part 2 is here, with screenshots and commentary on interface improvements!

VIPRE – Another Antivirus Product?

I’m usually sceptical of new antivirus products advertised to be both ‘fast’ and ‘effective’. But after receiving an offer from Sunbelt Software to inform readers about their new product — VIPRE® Antivirus + Antispyware — I had to investigate.

VIPRE claims to be “high-performance security software” that performs better than traditional suites like Norton Antivirus. That much is very believable; after all, we all know how clunky and laggy the established ‘leaders’ in antivirus are. But my personal antivirus favourite is ESET NOD32 — and I’ve always gotten the impression that it’s fast — so I was really surprised that internal testing showed VIPRE to be even faster and more resource-efficient than NOD32.

At this point I wanted to see what some credible sources had to say. CNET UK had essentially the same reaction that I had when first presented with this product: “never heard of it.” But after their own use, they had this to say: “we’re pretty impressed and will continue to use it — particularly on netbooks, which don’t have much power to spare.”

Credible sources that give software positive reviews always influence me. That’s why I think (and this personal opinion isn’t influenced by the sponsorship of this post) you should try Sunbelt’s new Antivirus Software, especially if you don’t have antivirus software already. Install the 15-day trial and decide for yourself whether it’s worth using. (I would have done the same myself if I had another PC to use for testing.)

Sponsored by Sunbelt Software

Subversion for Beginners

I mentioned previously that I wanted to post how Subversion works (on the surface, for beginners) and how I use it for my development needs.

To create my WordPress plugins, Simpler iPaper and Simpler CSS, using SVN has been a must; after all, the only way to release new versions of the plugins is through SVN. I also keep this site’s WordPress installation up-to-date on the development version using Subversion. Additionally, in my current efforts to develop a working solution for HDTV’s in business and organizational settings, Display UI is being developed using Subversion for version control.

You get the idea. I use it on a daily basis, and for practical purposes. I don’t claim to understand the fine details, but hopefully this post gives you an idea of how I use it and how you can, too.

So what is version control? Simply put, it’s a way of keeping track of the changes made to files. It’s often impractical to make manual backups of a file before every set of changes to it, so version control systems like CVS and SVN emerged to help people — especially developers and programmers — keep track of their files, share changes with team members, and prevent stupid mistakes.

Accidentally deleted your code? Revert your changes. Came up with an ingenious way (that works) to do something? Commit your changes. Need to get the latest revision of all the files? Update the working copy.

Perhaps the most practical application of systems like Subversion is in team development. When three or more people are working on the same set of files, it’s useful to be able to merge the changes seamlessly, see the changes others have made, or even work separately on branches (kind of like forks) and tags (usually released versions that are being maintained).

I did write that I don’t claim to understand the fine details. If you really want to understand Subversion, I highly recommend this book by members of the development team: Version Control with Subversion, or the book online.

Let’s talk about how to use it. Hard-core programmers often choose to use the command line tools, where they type commands like svn up to update the files. Beginners will be glad to know that there are implementations with GUI’s, like RapidSVN and TortoiseSVN. Eclipse users may use Subversive or Subclipse, “team providers” that let coders easily perform version control tasks inside the IDE.

Assuming that you’re using the command line binaries — which you can get from the Subversion site, and I recommend official CollabNet builds where possible — most of the basic tasks are rather easy.

Instead of right-clicking and picking options from a menu, tasks are done by typing commands.

First of all, a ‘repository’ is a hosted location containing all of the code, revisions and metadata. Often, one can access a repository via HTTP, as in the case of WordPress, which is found at http://core.svn.wordpress.org/ .

To ‘checkout’ a repository means to make a local copy (known as a ‘working copy’) of the contents. That’s what we have to do first when working with an established project: get the code from the repository.

To do so, type the following at an open shell (on Linux/Mac OS X) or command prompt: (don’t type the ‘$’ — that’s just what you should see at the start of every command line in Bash)

$ svn checkout http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ wordpress/

Windows users would do the same, but at a command prompt — again, without the dollar sign.

That command invokes the svn executable and tells it to checkout the WordPress trunk directory to the local folder wordpress.

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