It’s annoying to have to configure each Office 2007 application for each user on each machine to save in an Office 2003-compatible format by default.

It’s fucking stupid to randomly ignore that option once I’ve gone to the trouble to set it. I have non-stupid users whose documents are ending up in the new 2007 formats through no fault of their own, which means I now have to run around manually installing the compatibility update on everyone else’s machines. Gosh, thanks.

PS: any chance you’ll include this as a normal Office update someday? You know, so that the users who actually apply downloaded updates will get it without me walking up to their machines with a flash drive?

PPS: please release the Mac converters soon…

…here’s the hotfix. The symptom is an “Illegal System DLL Relocation” dialog and one or more drivers that fail to load. It affects a number of third-party applications, although the hotfix page currently only mentions one. Fortunately, that was the one that bit me, and it does indeed fix the problem.

I’m always intrigued when a kanji study guide includes “unlikely” vocabulary choices, such as today’s surprise proverb, 弱肉強食. The four characters are common and important, and taught fairly early in most books, but the combination isn’t a phrase most students will use, and one hopes that they won’t be hearing it much, either.

Loosely translated, it’s “the strong eat the weak”.

Another one that jumped out at me was 帰国子女, “children who return to Japan after living abroad”. It’s a lot more useful, especially if, like me, you were trying to figure out the meaning of the title of the light novel 彼女は帰星子女.

It’s very easy to find free pictures of naked women on the Internet. Some of them are pretty. Some have nice bodies. Some are comfortable in front of the camera. Some contain only OEM parts with no aftermarket accessories. Some are decently made up, lit, posed, focused, photographed, and edited.

A casual google for the name “Faith Lightspeed” will turn up a few hundred nude pictures of an adorable, cheerful redhead whose only significant flaw is being excessively shaved. A pay site is available. Also DVDs.

…I expect it to actually work correctly. The Luxor in Las Vegas fails this test. They redirect any outgoing port 25 connections to their server, which silently discards the messages, and they do something peculiar to SSL traffic that made it impossible for me to establish a secure IMAP session with my server. The server showed a connection attempt, but never saw the username and password, and my mailer took a long time to time out.

Why did Spotlight suddenly stop indexing my email, and completely lose track of all previously indexed email?

… mdfind, mdutil, …

Ah, I see; it spontaneously disabled indexing on the entire drive, and masked this by continuing to report file-name matches. That’s nice.

Why? Because if I have one, each visitor will request it once and cache it indefinitely. If I don’t, they’ll ask for it again and again (with some browsers, every time they load a page), crufting up my logs.

I own a Toshiba SD-K700 DVD player. It’s a nice DVD player, and it’s never given me any trouble. Until tonight.

Tonight I attempted to watch Casino Royale, and it wouldn’t load. So I switched to Stranger Than Fiction, and that wouldn’t load, either. Then I tried The Prestige, which worked fine. All of my other DVDs still worked, too. (and yours worked in another player)

Three brand new releases, and the two that don’t work say “Sony Pictures” on them. Hmm…

[Update: the story has finally hit Slashdot]