Category Archives: Applications

RSS

XML feeds are the fashionable thing these days. Something like it almost showed up with Active Channels in IE4, but it’s taken RSS (and to a lesser extent, Atom) to grab a foothold for it to really take off. Anything half-decent has it, and the number of hits that most blogs get from RSS readers is ever-increasing.

One of the questions to ponder when setting up a feed for people is this: Do you provide your full content (at least of recent items), kit and kaboodle in the RSS feed, or just summaries? Pushing everything out uses more traffic (not a problem unless your site is very well-read) but gives people the convenience of reading everything in their RSS reader. Conversely, if you’re trying to get people onto your site (for whatever reason; to get people to see your adverts is important for commercial sites) you’d probably lean towards summaries.

My blog provides everything, because it was set-up this way when I was playing with it, and when I inadvertantly switched it to summaries during a WordPress upgrade, people used to reading it all quite rightly complained, so I switched it back.

This site uses summaries. (WordPress provides the first X words of an entry, or a specific Summary field if it’s filled in.) While we’re not commercial exactly, it would be nice to get enough Google ad revenue to at least cover the hosting fees. For this, you need people visiting.

We’ve had some comments about this, expressing the view that this is a Bad Thing as it discourages readers who like to read everything from their RSS readers. That’s probably true for some people — unless the summary (human or computer-provided) is compelling enough, they won’t visit. But do they bother to visit if they can read everything from the RSS reader? Maybe if there’s pictures or they feel compelled to leave a comment. A visit is only a click away, after all.

For now, we’ve decided, like an aging 80s rocker clearing out his CD collection, to keep the Status Quo, but do a little tweaking of the feed to provide more text in the auto-summaries. Hopefully there’s enough interesting content appearing here to keep people coming back.

Do you really really want to open the file?

I know the spread of macro viruses via consumer products is a dangerous thing, and obviously Microsoft in particular have had to take action to help slow them down. But I’m not convinced the plethora of dialog boxes that now adorns every application is really the way to go.

For instance, if you open an MDB in Access 2003 that was created in Access 2000, you are likely to get no less than three separate security dialogs asking if you’re sure, if you’re really sure you want to open the file.

I’ve been using Access for some years, but I don’t know what an “unsafe expression” is. I created the MDB I’m opening, and it’s just got tables in it. No macros, no VBA modules, not even a report or query. There’s nothing unsafe in it. So I said No, don’t block the unsafe stuff you imagine is in this file. Give it all to me.

Having said no, I don’t want them blocked, it then complains that it can’t block them. Obviously it doesn’t trust me to answer sensibly, it really wants to block those imaginery unsafe items. But it can’t without sending me off to Windows Update to install Jet 4 SP 8 or later.

I had to really concentrate to work out what the Yes/No options at the bottom of the dialog are for. They’re nothing to do with blocking the alleged unsafe expressions, or installing the service pack. Nope. What it’s asking is if I still want to open the file.

Having ascertained that I don’t care about the unsafe expressions that don’t exist, and I still want to open the file… it asks me just one more time, by suggesting the bleeding obvious: “This file may not be safe if it contains code that was intended to harm your computer.” Well duh, no kidding.

The cunningly placed Cancel button on the left could easily lead one to click that by default. But finding and clicking the Open button finally really opens the file.

Now, why did I want to look at this file again?

Excel to HTML

I can’t believe how stupid Excel (2002/XP) was with the table of browsers the other day.

The plan was to get the numbers into Excel, copy/paste into a Frontpage table to strip back the formatting, then paste into WordPress.

Nup, bloody monstrous Excel tags right the way through it, which Frontpage couldn’t override, and evidently no easy way to strip. No combination of Paste Special would work. So for example, instead of <td></td> we got:

<td align="right" x:num="1.15E-2" style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10.0pt; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Arial; text-align: general; vertical-align: bottom; white-space: nowrap; border: medium none; padding-left: 1px; padding-right: 1px; padding-top: 1px"></td>

I kid you not. Now, I know about round-trip HTML, though I have my doubts that anybody uses it — firstly because it looks like crap in a web browser, and secondly because if you’ll want to edit it later, you’ll just keep an XLS copy. Besides, it’s badly implemented. The cell above was using the “Normal” style. It shouldn’t have had all the formatting crap embedded in it.

Word XP actually has a Save As Filtered HTML option to strip out all this crap. Excel XP doesn’t. (I haven’t checked Excel 2003 yet).

Plan 2 was to save it as HTML, load it into FrontPage and crop the HTML to paste into WordPress. Nup, trying to re-open it in FrontPage just threw it back to Excel. WTF?! Opening in UltraEdit (my preferred text editor) just revealed the same tags as above.

How can two Microsoft products that are part of the same suite, same version, operate so disastrously badly with one another, for something as simple as copying a table?

Plan 3? Oh bugger it, it’s only a few lines, just write it by hand.

If it were more I’d go install and run that clear The Useless Crap Out Of The HTML filter thing (oh look, they could do with clearing the crap out of their URLs too), but it refuses to install unless you have Office 2000. Wonderful.

Next time (after swearing a bit) I’ll probably save to CSV and then do a global replace from commas to table tags.

Surely there must be an easier way?

Office Clipboard

I’m used to the Windows Clipboard, which has one spot to put things in. Copy/paste. It’s simple, it’s easy to use, it’s quick.

Office ClipboardDamn this expanded Office Clipboard that comes with Office 2000, with its extraneous toolbar turning itself on and plonking itself right at the top, screwing up all your menus. Damn its 12 spots which fill up and then interrupt you to tell you they’re full. I don’t care if they’re full. Yes of course I want to copy this and bump some old long-forgotten thing from an hour ago off the list.

I don’t want it. I didn’t ask for it. Is there some way of turning this bloody thing off?

Yes, thankfully there is.

(Thankfully in Office XP, it can be done from the Options screen.)

Lookout is so frelling useful

I can’t believe it hasn’t been part of Outlook since the beginning.

I’ve had it for like a month. I stopped noticing how hard it was to search through Outlook’s folders a few years back because I stopped *trying* to search through Outlook’s folders. It was too pointless an exercise. I just found other ways to do things. I treated Outlook’s search feature as damage and routed around it.

Now, I want to know the IP address of the XYZ Server, I search my mail for “XYZ Server.” I want to know when we’re supposed to be at the restaurant, I search on the name of the restaurant.

In hindsight, I can’t believe how much Outlook sucks at some things.

—Jekke

(oh, yeah. Lookout is available for free at http://sandbox.msn.com)

Okay, we’re running

Obviously in a geek blog, you should blog about how the blog got setup.

Domain name. Geekrant.com and .net were already taken, but .org was free. I registered it with Gandi. They’re a French company, have been around for a while. I think I first encountered them some years ago in a list of domain registrars. At the time they were up near the top of the recommended registrars not only for being reasonably cheap and reliable, but also for having a domain registration policy that precluded all sorts of the kind of legal mumbo jumbo that some other registrars had at the time, which theoretically gave you rather less than complete control over your domain. Whatever the reason I originally went with them, they’ve been good over the years, and provide useful stuff like free domain and e-mail forwarding. At 12 Euros a year, perhaps not the cheapest around, but reliable and quick. Quicker than I thought, actually. I assume Those In Charge have improved the speed of new domain propagation over the last few years, because everything seemed to be done after a couple of hours.

Hosting. The hosting is at Aussie Hosts, a mob in Brisbane who specialise in shared hosting on Linux, and using the Plesk7 web site control software, which is frikkin’ marvellous. I’ve never come across a web control panel quite so useful and user-friendly. It does everything, and is light-years ahead of most of the other very clunky web control panels I’ve seen.

Software. Installing WordPress is dead easy. Upload the files into the http directory, create the MySql directory and its user in Plesk, then run WordPress’s install script. That’s it. It creates all the tables, creates the initial user, and away you go. Then I logged-on to WordPress and created the users, set the various options like comment spam parameters, and structure of permalinks. For the latter it tells you what your .htaccess needs to look like. You just paste it into the file and you’re done. (Admittedly it shat itself the first time I tried it. I wiped it out, and tried it again a bit later. Not sure what was different the second time, but it worked.)

Template. For WordPress’s templates, you basically need to edit: index.php (the main page), wp-layout.css (the stylesheet), and wp-comments.php (the comments section, which for some reason WP’s default installation has quirks like the caption for the comment fields appearing after the fields themselves. Wacky). I’m not entirely a master of CSS yet, so I just fiddled with the fonts and colours, and fiddled a bit with the links and so on. I’ve messed the template up slightly — right now the XHTML validation gets a thumbs-down. Will fix that when I get the chance to look at it.

We started creating a (perhaps over-ambitious) hierarchy of categories for articles to fall into. Hmm. Probably should have just copied out of DMOZ or Yahoo or something. (Just the hierarchy that is. If you look around, it’s incredible the number of directory sites that have swiped content completely from Yahoo.)

Also created a basic logo in my trusty old copy of Corel Photopaint, added in a Google advert to try and recoup some of the hosting and domain name costs, and that’s about it for now. Further fiddling can (and no doubt will) come later.

Missing the bloat

A colleague was pasting a picture into his Powerpoint presentation. Some kind of diagram, and unfortunately he didn’t have the original document it came from, so no matter which Paste Special option he tried, it came through as a bitmap. Saved it to disk, e-mailed it to someone else, and wondered why it took so long.

Then he saw the size. It had blown out from a couple of hundred K to over 4Mb.

So he tried zipping it. WinZip took it down to, believe it or not, 80Kb.

No wonder people complain about Microsoft bloatware… sometimes it’s not just the apps, it’s the way they store stuff as well.

Pointless dialog

Digging out an old Word97 document at work, I loaded it up into Word 2K. It displayed fine, but I noticed an embedded Draw98 diagram in it that needed updating. Double-clicked, it produced an error to the effect that it wasn’t going to happen ‘cos Draw98 wasn’t on the machine. Okay. Right-click… ah… it can convert it to something else… choose that, and what do I see but this:

Convert Draw98 to Draw98?

Very handy, eh? And if you’re wondering, clicking OK got the error again. Pretty sloppy from a coding point of view.

I did a bit of digging and found an MSKB article which said no problem, just install Draw98 again… and even a handily placed link to it.

Click, download, run. Nup. It wants an Office 97 application on the machine to install! Triffic. And all this recommended in a KB article purporting to apply to Word 2K.

The article also suggests digging into your archive for Word 2, for a copy of Draw (that’d be 16 bit, surely? Eugh!)

If you don’t have 10 year old floppies hanging about, you can also get at the picture and edit it in Word’s Picture Editor. Not as good for this particular drawing, but it might have to do if I can’t do it any other way.

Or else re-do it from scratch in Visio…

Excuse the dust

Welcome to Geekrant.org. Still getting things setup. The idea came yesterday when mucking about with MamboServer. Mambo is a fine product, with a lot of cool features, and was in contention for a web site of mine. But yesterday it finally dawned on me that Mambo doesn’t allow a post to sit in multiple categories. That just plain sucks. Along with the URLs it spits out, some of which are what they call “SEF” — Search Engine Friendly — but are in no way human-friendly, that was the nail in the coffin. That site’s going WordPress instead.

Like this one. And several sites I’ve setup, in fact.

So I e-mailed a couple of mates to ask if anybody wanted to join in. Josh reads his mail every few days when he’s not at work… no doubt he’ll get back to me sooner or later. But Tony’s in. That was good enough. A few hours later, the domain is registered, WP’s setup, and it’s all systems go. Idea to web site in less than 24 hours. Not bad.

Well, apart from little things like the site design/CSS/template. Yeah. Well. All in good time.

So what is this? A place for people to rant or talk about geeky stuff. Issues they’ve come across, clever things they’ve done, wondrous things they’ve discovered.

More later.