I had an unusual query this week. A member of staff wanted to create a line graph that showed the chart position of a song over a number of weeks.¬¨‚Ć It’s an easy thing to do – two columns in the spreadsheet, one for “Week” and one for “Position”. Problem is, in a chart, the low numbers are at the top and the high numbers are at the bottom, so the graph comes out upside-down. You can’t just make the …
Over the summer at work, we changed the way staff profiles are stored on the network. Having finally got around the “redirected Application Data breaks Internet Explorer” problem (see here for my fix) in Windows XP, we rolled it out to all users. And all was well. Until they brought their laptops back from the break, and we found they then can’t run various programs or access certain things when not connected to the network. This is because the laptop …
Well, I did in the end as I didn’t have a choice. I read it carefully. Very carefully.
After what seems like a year of aborted attempts, this week I’ve made a concerted effort to deploy Adobe CS3 Design Premium on our XP network. This morning, I was successful! There were several problems to overcome, including lack of MSIs, inability to “roll your own” MSI due to the Adobe Licencing Service throwing a wobbly if you do, inserting the serial number, forcing it to install on machines with under a gig of RAM, coping with the sheer size …
Someone pointed me at this article today. It’s a “get the facts” piece from Microsoft, pointing out how much better Internet Explorer 8 is than rival browsers. Of course, being from Microsoft, it’s not going to be completely unbiased – is it? No. I won’t even begin to point out most of the glaring issues with the article, but one does stand out for me: Does it? Does it really? And, even if it does, what about CSS3? And what …
Over the last few weeks I’ve been becoming more and more frustrated with Google’s search. It’s only really one complaint, but it’s a pain. In the olden days, when you searched for words that Google thought you may have misspelt, Google would provide all the matches for what you typed in with, additionally, a link to a search for Google’s spelling correction. That is to say, if I searched for the word ‘stuipd’, it would show me all the matches …
Today, the new search engine come encyclopaedia come scientific calculator Wolfram Alpha became available to the public. Sadly, virtually everything I’ve asked it so far has come up with “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”. In one case, though, it managed a nice diagram: The question I asked was “Who is the richest?”. I don’t know what to make of the answer. You can try it for yourself here.
Isn’t is amazing how, having posted on a forum just a week ago asking if it was possible to stream music from my Mac to my phone over the internet, that I stumble across Subsonic? OK, so it isn’t click-and-work simple to get up and running. And, I can’t actually get it to stream to my phone (yet) – but I can stream to computers, browse my library, create playlists and so on! Other issues so far include being unable …
This was useful to me recently. I thought I’d post it here in case I forget how to do it in the future! It’s a way of letting you run sshd on a port other than 22, or in addition to 22. Be sure to read the comments on how to do the latter easily. Note that although the instructions are for Tiger, it works fine on Leopard too. macosxhints.com – 10.4: Change the default sshd port
To my iMac! Yay! On the 10th of March last year, I took delivery of my shiny new 24″ iMac. It marked the ditching of my last remaining Windows PC. Have I regretted it? Not in the slightest. It’s still just as nippy as it was a year ago. I can do everything I want to do on it, and everything just seems so much better, easier, and even quieter. It also draws less power than my old PC, takes …
I finally figured out how to fix Pine on my Leopard box! For, well, ever, it hasn’t let me post any news messages to my local leafnode server. Every time I tried, I’d get an error stating my post was rejected due to error 441, which is an invalid error. I eventually tracked down that the actual invalid header was the message-id header, which was being generated as something like: Message-ID: Pine.OSX.4.64.098263998623986.75543@myimac Which is wrong. The bit after the @ …
I’ve recently started using Acrobat (yeah, about 14 years late) to annotate PDF files, and it has been irritating me that whenever I highlight something, Acrobat decides to add my Windows logon name as the “author” of the highlight. Since this logon name has no resemblance to my actual name, it’s effectively useless. Helpfully, Adobe don’t make it easy for you to change it to read something else. After much playing about, however, I figured it out: Firstly, you need …