I know you’re rich enough to afford the best drugs, but you really shouldn’t take them right before giving an interview (emphasis added):

"You know, they like to act like Macs are lightweight, there are much lighter weight PC notebooks. Macs—do they have the best battery power? Of course they don't have the best battery power. Macs tend to have nice screens, but can you get nicer screens for a PC? Of course. Do Macs work in business? No, they do not. Can you get Macs made in your own country? Because in some countries, there's a lot of sort of, you know, what do you call them? Import duties? Taxes? You can't get Macs made in those countries, they make them basically one place in the world, and therefore they get even more expensive.

"You know, there are so many—you know, can you find Macs in—I'm very sensitive to exactly what mouse I have on my laptop. Can you find a range of choices? Of course you can't find a range of choices. You know, anyway—can you find the applications you want on the Mac? Well, you don't really get full Microsoft Office. Everything from Apple is available, there are still tons of business applications and there's games—anytime somebody does client software—over time they'll do a Mac client. Maybe nowadays people do the Mac clients mostly to save time, but that's only on the high-volume applications."

Maybe I should remind Steve about the years that I ran 600 Solaris servers for him from my PowerBook. With a Microsoft Mouse attached…

He’s right about Office, though. Whose fault is that, anyway?

In Microsoft Word 2008, there’s a menu called “Work”. At first, it contains only one item, “Add to Work Menu”. If you select this, the location of the current document is permanently added to this menu. There is no obvious way to rearrange or delete items on this list, or inform Word that they’ve moved to a different folder.

The only way to modify this list is to open the “Customize Toolbars and Menus” screen and bind a key or menu item to “ToolsCustomizeRemoveMenuShortcut”. When you run that command, the next menu item you click on will be deleted. Any menu item, in any menu, and the only indication that you’re in this mode is a different cursor that reverts to normal when you open a menu…

The work menu was apparently in Office 2004, too, but I never noticed it. Apparently the only difference was that there was a default keybinding for the magic command, which was removed for 2008 because people sometimes typed it by mistake and had no idea what had happened to their menus.

How does Microsoft feel about this? Read this thread. Short version: “stupid things only get fixed if more than 1000 people use the Send Feedback form and describe the problem precisely enough for the automated system to collate them together”.

When I turn on Japanese support in Word, that means that I want to enable features like vertical text and kanji grid spacing. It does not mean that I want to format all new documents for A4 paper.

While we’re on that subject, thank you for changing the Language Register application into something that you run in Office 2008, and no longer something that you drag other Office apps onto, as in previous versions. Also, thanks for no longer switching the input method from English to Kotoeri every time I launch Word; that was always a real pain in the ass.

Responding to the recent Windows Genuine Advantage outage that caused thousands of Windows XP and Vista machines to incorrectly decide they were running a pirated OS, Microsoft has announced that they will no longer disable minor functionality in this situation to encourage compliance.

Instead, it’s being reported that Vista will now shut you down completely. No worries, eh?

Good afternoon, as of this week, Microsoft has activated a function in Vista called 'Reduced Functionality.' This is a specific function in Vista that effectively disables nongenuine copies of Windows. Therefore anyone who has a pirated copy of Vista will experience:

A black screen after one hour of browsing
No start menu or task bar
No desktop

I hope that this is just Computerworld Australia being scammed by someone with a phony email. If not, it’s a really, really bad idea.

This morning, one of our executives sent email that her laptop crashed, and then refused to boot, asking for the original install media. Ordinarily, this would mean looking at it on Monday morning.

Unfortunately, she was at the airport, getting onto a plane for New York, for Very Important Business. So she took the dead laptop with her, and asked us to FedEx her the install CDs. That really wouldn’t have worked out very well for her, so we’re sending another laptop out there ASAP.

At least, we’re trying. It seems that no amount of money on our part will get any shipping company to let us use their same-day service. We’re not TSA-approved for such things, and having an established account doesn’t matter. The only way we could get it to her before Tuesday morning is to buy a ticket and fly it out there ourselves. Grrrr.

[yes, the dead machine is a Sony, but it’s not one of the BXs that have been causing us trouble.]

[Update: finally got details from her. It’s not dead dead, it’s giving up during the Windows startup, complaining about a missing or corrupt DLL, which it would be happy to retrieve from any Windows XP disc. So, we’re not looking at a major hardware failure, at least.]

The Windows Genuine Advantage servers, used to validate your Windows install, are down. Unfortunately, if you can’t reach them, WGA assumes you’re a software pirate and deactivates.

Under XP, this prevents software updates. Under Vista, once you’re marked invalid, rebooting will disable OS features, including the Aero Glass user interface that was one of the flashiest features. And you can’t get any of it back until they fix the servers, which have been down for about 12 hours now. I don’t know what it does to Office…

Meanwhile, MS tech support has been terribly confused, giving out advice that assumes you’re an idiot or a pirate. They seem to be getting the word now, but some of them have told users to try again on Tuesday (!).

Some people are assuming that nobody’s working on it, because Microsoft is closed on weekends. WGA PM Phil Liu responds.

I like Parallels, even if it can be a real memory hog, but even the latest version doesn’t have very good USB support. Unfortunately, there’s a Windows application I want to use that requires good USB support. Even more unfortunately, it will never, ever run under Vista.

Why not? Because Minolta sold off their entire camera business to Sony, who has no interest in updating the remote-control software for the Dimage A2.

I don’t currently own any computers that run Windows XP, and I don’t particularly want to. But if I ever find the free time to start playing with studio lighting again, I’ll want to remote-control the A2, and with XP gradually disappearing from the market, now’s the time to figure out how.

With the latest Parallels 3.0 build, plugging the camera in while it’s in remote-control mode locks up the virtual machine.VMware Fusion not only handles the camera correctly, it seems to use about half as much memory.

[Note that there is an abandoned open-source project to decipher the Minolta protocol and write a GUI capture tool. I’m not really interested in hacking on it.]

Okay, I’m stumped. We have a ReadyNAS NV+ that holds Important Data, accessed primarily from Windows machines. Generally, it works really well, and we’ve been pretty happy with it for the last few months.

Monday, the Windows application that reads and writes the Important Data locked up on the primary user’s machine. Cryptic error messages that decrypted to “contact service for recovering your corrupted database” were seen.

Nightly backups of the device via the CIFS protocol worked fine. Reading and writing to the NAS from a Mac via CIFS worked fine. A second Windows machine equipped with the application worked fine, without any errors about corrupted data. I left the user working on that machine for the day, and did some after-hours testing that night.

The obvious conclusion was that the crufty old HP on the user’s desk was the problem (it had been moved on Friday), so I yanked it out of the way and temporarily replaced it with the other, working Windows box.

It didn’t work. I checked all the network connections, and everything looked fine. I took the working machine back to its original location, and it didn’t work any more. I took it down to the same switch as the NAS, and it didn’t work. My Mac still worked fine, though, so I used it to copy all of the Important Data from the ReadyNAS to our NetApp.

Mounting the NetApp worked fine on all machines in all locations. I can’t leave the data there long-term (in addition to being Important, it’s also Confidential), but at least we’re back in business.

I’m stumped. Right now, I’ve got a Mac and a Windows machine plugged into the same desktop gigabit switch (gigabit NICs everywhere), and the Mac copies a 50MB folder from the NAS in a few seconds, while the Windows machine gives up after a few minutes with a timeout error. The NAS reports:

smbd.log: write_data: write failure in writing to client 10.66.0.151. Error Connection reset by peer smbd.log: write_data: write failure in writing to client 10.66.0.151. Error Broken pipe

The only actual hardware problem I ever found was a loose cable in the office where the working Windows box was located.

[Update: It’s being caused by an as-yet-unidentified device on the network. Consider the results of my latest test: if I run XP under Parallels on my Mac in shared (NAT) networking mode, it works fine; in bridged mode, it fails exactly like a real Windows box. Something on the subnet is passing out bad data that Samba clients ignore but real Windows machines obey. The NetApp works because it uses licensed Microsoft networking code instead of Samba.]

[8/23 Update: A number of recommended fixes have failed to either track down the offending machine or resolve the problem. The fact that it comes and goes is more support for the “single bad host” theory, but it’s hard to diagnose when you can’t run your tools directly on the NAS.

So I reached for a bigger hammer: I grabbed one of my old Shuttles that I’ve been testing OpenBSD configurations on, threw in a second NIC, configured it as an ethernet bridge, and stuck it in front of the NAS. That gave me an invisible network tap that could see all of the traffic going to the NAS, and also the ability to filter any traffic I didn’t like.

Just for fun, the first thing I did was turn on the bridge’s “blocknonip” option, to force Windows to use TCP to connect. And the problem went away. I still need to find the naughty host, but now I can do it without angry users breathing down my neck.]