A bug in Vista’s UAC

By tim, on April 19th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) elevation prompt sometimes appears when it shouldn’t. Here is an example which works every time for me. I have a folder in Documents (within my home directory) called recordings, containing MP3 files. I double-click one of these files and it opens in Windows Media Player. Now let’s say I

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Google apps in the real world

By tim, on April 18th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Or at least the semi-real world: Wired’s Michael Calore spent a month working (mostly) with Google apps rather than his usual desktop software (on a Mac). I’ve thought of trying this same experiment myself but haven’t yet felt that it is worth the risk.

A few points interested me. First, that he could live with

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Tech people like Bob Dylan

By tim, on April 18th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

My review of Dylan in concert last night.

PS How can I justify this on a tech blog? I can’t; but I note that many tech people like Dylan, from Apple’s Steve Jobs to IBM’s Bob Sutor and more. And I will never forget Microsoft’s Don Box and his band performing Like an IUnknown at PDC

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Using WordPress pages

By tim, on April 17th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Yesterday I posted an article on Office Open XML which is too long for a blog entry. Rather than creating a separate HTML file I used a WordPress page entry. WordPress pages are authored in the same way as blog posts, but are not part of the blog itself; they “live outside of the normal

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Mono’s new GUI library: how is this hype justified?

By tim, on April 16th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Mono’s Miguel de Icaza reports on a new GUI library for Mono:

We have been working on a technology that we believe will revolutionize user interfaces. Today we are announcing the response to Microsoft’s WPF/XAML, a response to Flash and WPF/E. A cross-platform GUI toolkit (supports Windows, MacOS and Linux and is easily ported

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WPF/E is now Silverlight

By tim, on April 16th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s Flash alternative has a new name: Silverlight. Undoubtedly a radical shift in naming conventions. Back in 2005, Microsoft renamed Avalon to Windows Presentation Foundation, and I noted that:

These new names seem to be deliberately chosen to be forgettable.

Now we have memorable back. Interesting.

The name may be there, but

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Microsoft’s Jean Paoli on Office Open XML

By tim, on April 16th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

I spoke to Jean Paoli about Office Open XML and its standardisation. I respect Paoli, one of the originators of the XML specification. His major point, apart from complaining about what he calls IBM’s orchestrated campaign against the ISO standardisation of OOXML, is that only Microsoft’s XML format can maintain fidelity with legacy Office

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Will CDs become worthless?

By tim, on April 15th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

I often see classified ads for CDs with a stated reason for sale like this one, plucked from eBay today (emphasis mine):

CD & INLAY EXCELLENT. CASE SCRATCHED BUT NO CRACKS Having a clearout as gone digital. All CDs genuine and in very good condition unless stated.

Now, one can only speculate about the meaning

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Official performance patch for Outlook 2007

By tim, on April 15th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Computerworld has drawn my attention to a new performance patch for Outlook 2007, issued on Friday. Here’s what Microsoft says:

This update fixes a problem in which a calendar item that is marked as private is opened if it is found by using the Search Desktop feature. The update also fixes performance issues that occur

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HTML5 vs XHTML2 vs DoNothing

By tim, on April 12th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Simon Willison points to David “liorean” Andersson’s article on HTML5 vs XHTML2. This debate about the evolution of HTML has gotten confusing. In a nutshell, the W3C wanted to fix HTML by making it proper grown-up XML, hence XHTML which was meant to succede HTML 4.0. Unfortunately XHTML never really caught on. One of its

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