Rob Cannon

Office 2007 Beta 2 Supports Blog Posts, Maybe...

The new Office 2007 Beta 2 supports publishing to a blog from Microsoft Word. But even though dotnotjunkies is running Community Server, Word will not publish to it.

You can find more info about what blog engines are supported and how to configure an acouunt by going to http://kristab.officeisp.net/picture%20library/blog help.mht I configured the blogging account by using http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/metablog.ashx as the Blog post URL, but Word doesn’t like that. It complains when you try to publish.

Do you want to try it out? Head over to http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ and click on the “Try It” button, fill out a few forms and install the downloader.

Microsoft Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX Beta 1 has shipped

I mentioned earlier this week that the new WinFX SDK did not contain Visual Studio Integation. Well now the Microsoft Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX Beta 1 has shipped. The Avalon Intellisense works pretty well and I now longer get the warnings about the missing schemas for avalon and xaml. Check it out:

But it's by no means perfect. For instance, it doesn't like the idea of a XAML file with a ContentControl tag as the root and the Intellisense stops working.

WinFX SDK available last week, but Visual Studio Integration comes this week

Last week, the new Beta 1 of WinFX SDK was released, pulled, and released again. You can find it here. To save you from the time that I spent, you will find that there is no Visual Studio Integration in that package (unlike the Beta 1 RC release). In the old release, there were new project and item types that I could not find after completing this install.

So, according to the MS WinFx SDK newsgroup, an new package called the "Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WinFX Beta 1" will be available for download sometime this week. My supposition is that it will contain more than just the templates for creating new projects, otherwise why move it to it's own package...

MSN Tabs for IE, but no middle mouse click!

Well, the MSN team has added tabs to IE (get it at http://desktop.msn.com/). But it's not a perfect match. For one thing, the tabs bar seems to disappear and then reappear when you hit the new tab button. That's a minor inconvinience.

But the big problem is that it doesn't support the middle mouse button. Clicking the middle button is ingrained in my usage patterns now, and I am shocked that the MSN tabs doesn't support it. And a middle click on the tab should close the tab.

So, get middle mouse button support for tabs, load Trixie, http://www.bhelpuri.net/Trixie/Trixie.htm, (as a replacement for Greasemonkey) and then I am happy to use IE again. Oh yeah, image zoom would be nice.

Addendum: And get rid of MSN Search. Google still has it beat. I was trying to find the URL for Trixie. The search results from MSN were not very helpful. The search result for Google returns the URL I wanted as the top result.

Google Map Hacking

I’ve used the MapPoint web service for one client and it works pretty well, but I think the pricing is out of line for small businesses.

I just came across this article in Engadget about using the new Google mapping service for your own maps and it’s free (unless Google tries to shut it down).

You can also check out a wiki devoted to the subject here.

Bloggers bring down mainstream media again

Eason Jordan, CNN New Chief, has accused U.S. military of intentionally killing journalists. Apparently without evidence. And this story went unnoticed (or ignored) by the mainstream media. That is until bloggers talked about it enough.

While, I don’t think bloggers will ever take the place of the mainstream media, it’s nice that there is finally a mechanism to introduce accountability into an institution that has had no check for a long time. It’s the start of another revolutionary change in society introduced by the internet.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/240ovtmu.asp

ActiveSync 3.8 ate my InBox

Shortly after installing ActiveSync 3.8, all of the InBox folders that I synch lost their file attachments and their rich text. The file attachments still showed up but were really 0 length files.

I uninstalled and installed the earlier version and I have not had a problem for a week. Just a warning to anyone else before they install the latest version. I guess that’s what I get for installing a program that doesn’t bother to list what has changed.

P.S.
So is there a website like LadyBug to report this kind of stuff?

UPDATE: Just to clarify for a comment on this entry, it corrupted the email on the Exchange server InBox, not just the email on my Smartphone. And yes, that is a nasty bug.

Cortlen Cannon, Corbin Cannon

While playing with Google, my wife discovered that my son's name does not appear anywhere on the internet.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Cortlen+Cannon%22 comes up with no matches.

This is an attempt to fix that. Sorry to anyone looking for anything computer related.

UPDATE

After about a day and a half, he his now the only hit in google!

Adobe Reader 7.0 is out

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

One of the new feature is:

Experience better overall performance for faster launch times and real-time zooming and panning

Does that mean we no longer need the Adobe Reader Speedup program? It really does seem to load up fast.

BTW, they now try to load the Yahoo toolbar on install. You can opt-out, but it's annoying to have to deselect all of the extra software.

Catan is available to play

MSN has unleashed Settlers of Catan, one of my favorite boardgames, as an online computer adaption.

But, it costs $29.95 and there are lots a free alternatives out there.

And did I mention that it is buggy? I tried the free trial version and it crashed twice before I could finish a game (I guess the didn't use .NET!).

Now the trial period (one hour) has expired and I can't use the game.

But the MSN version does look nice... Maybe after some bug patches.

Visual Studio Team System Beta2 date? 2/14/05

A schedule of blog entries about Visual Studio Team system has been posted by the Program Manager of that product.

One item that jumped out at me was:

14-Feb Getting Started with Beta 2

So, can we infer that Beta 2 is coming out on or around Feb 14?

BTW, there are no entries about the final release....

Audible to be included in new Smartphone from Sprint

http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=ADBL&script=412&layout=-6&item_id=617618

If you are a commuter, you need to check out Audible. It is a great way to get downloadable audio books that you can play through most MP3 players. It’s a great way to pass the driving hours. The best deal is the premium plan where you get two books a month for a fixed price. The link above is a new bundling deal with Sprint where you will be able to play these books through your SmartPhone. I would love to combine my book reader (right now the old Audible Otis) with my SmartPhone, but I can’t imagine how short the battery life would be!

One great feature of Audible is that once you purchase a book, you can download it again whenever you want. They keep track of the books that you own. It’s the missing feature that keeps me from checking out the various music download services. Those downloaded songs just don’t seem permanent to me. Either your hard drive crashes and you loose all of your purchased music or you can never find what you want on all of those backup CD’s shoved in a drawer somewhere (plus you have to manage those backups).

It would be a great value-added feature for a download service to promise eternal ownership of the song that you purchase from them and you don’t have to worry about the backup. Plus, it would pretty much kill any possibility of customer churn as a customer would have a big incentive to stay with one download service.

Sept. 9, The day the blogsphere took down CBS

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vppin143966771sep14,0,5921308.column?coll=ny-news-columnists

“Sept. 9, 2004, will be remembered as a paradigm-shifting day in media history. That was the day the "blogosphere" took down CBS News.”

I guess other people are picking up the significance of what I posted a few days ago. For the longest time, Freedom of the Press was meant as a safeguard against a government that has gone haywire. The press is there to challenge the government when it is trying to abuse its power. But what happens when the press tries to abuse its power?

Over my lifetime, there has been a shift in the broadcast news from a institution that delivered facts and checked them (do you remember when the editorializing was confined to an editorial segment at the end of the news?) to one that tries to deliver sensationalized stories or tries to tailor the news it reports to a specific agenda. But until very recently, there has not been any widespread power to keep the press in check. Sure there have been a few watchdog organizations such as the Media Research Center and Times Watch, but their exposure has been fairly limited.

You would think that competitive pressure between news outlets would serve as correcting mechanism, but it seems that the Press has a herd mentality when it comes to new stories. If one outlet reports on something, they all flock to it. How else do you explain why the Ramsey and Peterson murders are huge headline stories when hundreds of other murders (some even more sensational) just get ignored. Any time a big story breaks, it doesn’t take long for the collective press to come to a consensus on how to report the story.

But now, there is the blogshere. Millions of people are reading various blogs that deal with all kinds of topics and this has developed into a new channel to deliver news and ideas. When something fishy appears in the Press, that can get challenged and the idea (if it is worthy) will spread like wildfire through the blogsphere. Suddenly there is a practical means to keep the Press in check. And it seems to be working.

Now I don’t expect the blogsphere to replace the Press as a means of delivering news, but it will server as a reminder to the Press that its job is to report FACTS and not push sensation or political agenda.

Now back to more technical discussions….

CBS Documents are faked using Microsoft Word

CBS has been trumpeting new documents (from 1972 and 1973) that purport to show that President Bush was given preferential treatment during his days in the National Guard. The problem is that the documents where created with Microsoft Word!

Typography experts were suspicious when they noted that the letters and memos used proportional fonts and superscripts, features that were very uncommon in the early 70’s. In all likelihood, these documents would have been produced on a typewriter and not a word processor. So some bloggers started their own investigating and found that when they retyped the documents into Microsoft Word, the spacing and line breaks EXACTLY matched these “30 year old” documents.

What I find interesting here is that bloggers are able to get on this news much faster than the professional news organizations. CBS, with all of their experience and experts, were not able to notice that these documents were faked. I wonder how long it will take for CBS to fess up?

UPDATE 1:
I did not make this post as a political comment. You will note that I did not comment anything one way or another about Bush or his service. My interest in posting this was for two reasons (both technically related as this is a technical blog). The first reason was that Microsoft Word was (allegedly) used to fake these documents and I find it interesting that whoever produced these documents did not notice that there was anything about them that would not pass for a document created in the early 70's. The second reason was the involvement of blogging in uncovering this foregery. It took one blogger to notice the use of new type setting techniques and another blogger took it even further by comparing the output of MS Word to the documents posted by CBS. I find the speed at which a key portion of a major news outlet's big story was shown to be false by the blogsphere to be a telling sign of the changes that are coming in how we get news.

Short answer, please don't make comments about Bush and Iraq and Kerry, etc... That is not what this is about.

UPDATE 2: Debunking of the debunking being debunked...
I followed the link about the debunking and I saw this update “you might have noted that the White House did not release those records, they merely passed along without comment copies that had been sent to them by CBS“. So, it looks like Boing Boing was just plain wrong.

Catan Online is online

I've already mentioned that my favorite board game is coming online. Now there is an official website from MSN Games.

http://www.catanonline.com

Not much beyond a web site, yet. Not even a screenshot.

If anyone associated with the website is reading this, your links page is missing the most useful link of all. A link to Board Game Geek (the most complete information on any board game)!

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/13