Office 2007 - Service Pack 2 released

Office 2007 - Service Pack 2 released

Here's all the info:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953195

Along with a couple of my less-favorite features:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968773/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968918/

Update: ack forgot to credit Paul Thurrott!

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/28/now-available-microsoft-office-2007-service-pack-2.aspx

Windows Mobile Facebook apps

Skybook:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=35590940472&b&ref=pd

http://www.magnifoca.com/

http://www.magnifoca.com/download_snap2face.html

Friendmobilizer

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=16698519604&b&ref=pd

http://faceofmobile.com/

Microsoft Vine

Mary Jo Foley reports (breaks?) that Microsoft is putting out a strange Twitter-like service meant to be used primarily during distasters:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2604

http://www.vine.net/

Cloudkick

https://www.cloudkick.com/

This is a new free service that helps you manage elastic virtual machines in the cloud - even so far as moving between Ec2 (Amazon) and Slicehost (Rackspace?).

Ubuntu 904 release

Ubuntu 904 release is out - http://www.ubuntu.com/ . Thanks Jeff for posting to Facebook or I might have been even more behind on this! 

Here's a free PDF that can help you get the most out of Ubuntu Linux: http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/

We follow

http://wefollow.com

http://wefollow.com/tag/tech

This is great. In response to Twitter's widely-ragged suggested list of people to follow http://twitter.com/invitations/suggestions , Kevin Rose created an app that just lists people by categories and followers, so you can see who really is a popular twitter-er on a certain subject. Politics one-upped by democracy. I heard about this on Twit (http://twit.tv).

Receipt archiving mistake

I made a mistake that I'm writing up here in hopes of helping you avoid it. I like to keep a copy of receipts that I received electronically, in electronic form. At first I would just take screenshots of the confirmation page on Amazon for example, and then paste into Paint and save as a jpeg. Then I found Microsoft had created electronic printer driver formats, MDI in office and XPS in IE. So I could "print" the receipt to a file. What I really wanted was to save to PDF, because I was concerned that my information might outlive the program that it was stuck in. But Microsoft PDF support is still lacking, though they have made some progress in Ms Office.

So I have all these pages in MDI format. It turns out that even Microsoft Word can't read MDI. Nothing can besides the Windows scanner viewer. Due to other circumstances I have finally realized I need the broad support of PDF. It helps to know it's an open standard, not owned by Adobe. I had used a "print-to-pdf" program years ago that had "ghost" in the name, that had not been very dependable. But I steeled myself and began a search for a PDF printer driver. It turns out there are actually quite a few free ones available now, that get very good reviews. In the end I went with a recommendation ( http://lifehacker.com/software/pdf/download-of-the-day-pdfcreator-windows-251080.php ) from LifeHacker, because I always worry about spyware in shareware. PDF Creator is actually open source, so that is even better. 

The part I like is that turn-about is fair play.. I can open my MDI docs in the Windows scanner viewer, and choose print to pdf from there, and convert all those MDI's to PDFs.

Windows 7 beta and VMWare player - network gotcha

http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives/1818-How-to-get-VMWare-Workstation-6.5-Guest-VM-NAT-working-with-a-Windows-7-Build-7000-host.html

http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives/1781-Semi-functional-workaround-for-networking-issues-with-VMWare-Workstation-6.5-and-Windows-7.html#comments

I dealt with this issue (WMWare Player networking doesn't work on Windows 7 beta) when the beta first came out. Turns out things haven't gotten any better yet, which frankly I find surprising. The author of these posts does a good job of laying out the alternatives and workarounds. I'm not a fan of ICS. At the moment I do have bridging working, as I am mostly working on a lan. However the gotcha is when you are working remotely using an aircard. You need NAT because you can't bridge to the cell provider. So this is a real problem.

Internet Explorer 8 driving me to Firefox and Chrome

I have remained a staunch supporter and user of Internet Explorer right along until now, even though I use Firefox on Ubuntu, and use Chrome for checking multiple Gmail accounts without changing logins, mostly because it was king of the hill, and it therefore followed that it had the widest support at websites.

So I have withstood the many security problems with IE, the lack of support and lack of direction between 6 and 7, and the ribbing of friends and advice of pundits, for literally years and years. However I am now thinking of changing my browser. What is driving me over the edge?

Strangely enough it is Windows 7. IE8 on Windows 7 sucks. Yes IE is a beta and Win7 is too. However they rev'd the IE8 beta for everything but Win7. And the general improvement in perceived speed and power in Win7 makes the problems I am having with IE8 really annoying.

Some concrete examples would probably give this diatribe more weight. Besides a tendency to crash or lock up, my chief pain point is the time to open the first window. I click on the link in the start menu and literally see no evidence my click "made it" for a minute. Chrome comes on like flicking a light switch in comparison. Firefox is only slightly behind Chrome.

It boils down to one thing. Computers have to get out of our way now and let us do work. We have tolerated the non-toaster-like behavior long enough. Enough computing power is available at this point to make the device disappear into the background as it should.

Update to Evernote problem

Update: I did some perusing of the Evernote forum (for example http://forum.evernote.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=8694&p=33366&hilit=plain+text&sid=cbb2da7fe3c575e3cfa863943d1013b9 ) and it turns out the problem I described in my last post ( http://iponderus.com/2009/02/windows-7-and-evernote-problem.html ) is in Evernote, not Windows 7.

Specifically plain text (as pasted from Notepad) now is pasted by default as "Plain space formatted text" rather than "Plain Text" as a response to complaints from people working with source code and the like.

The work-around for now, is to use Ctrl-Shift-V (rather than Ctrl-V) to paste, which is the keyboard shortcut for "Paste Special" so that you can choose "Plain Text".

Hopefully Evernote will fix this soon.