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General OLE!
This isn't the first time metadata in the Office formats has caused problems. One more reason we should be using open formats on the web:
…the size of the US national intelligence budget remains one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed.Source
Software Failure To Attach
Back when I used KDE, I was floored by two things: Amarok, and KMail. KMail did a lot of cool things, but my absolute favorite feature was attachment warnings: if you tried to send an email that sounded like you were referencing an attachment, but you didn’t actually attach a file, KMail would warn you. “This message sounds like it contains an attachment, but you haven’t attached a file. Still send?” This saved me quite a lot of embarassement over the years, and I always wondered why no other mail client had this simple yet wonderful feature!
Today, without even trying, I stumbled across the Attachment Scanner Plugin for Mail.app, which replicates the above functionality for Apple’s built-in mail client! And if you’re not using Mail.app, here’s a list of plugins for other mail clients that do the same thing!
Remember: if your mail client isn’t working for you, it’s working against you.
General The other half
My twin brother Pete's work has been internet famous this week. It started yesterday when Keith submitted some photos of his cool new Nationwide advertising campaign, and then it made the front page of Digg, getting Dugg more than 5K times before moving off the frontpage.
image credit Paul
Software Freeware Mac Software
Update: It seems I wasn’t thorough enough in my reading of Boyko’s article — apparently on Page 5 he has used many of the applications I mention below. His comment is rather enlightening, and clears up a misconception or two, but I still claim that his summarizing statement: “lack of quality freeware”, is inaccurate.
Recently, HardOCP’s Brian Boyko spent 30 Days with Mac OS X in an attempt to get a feel for the operating system. In the summary and throughout the article Boyko mentions that there’s no quality freeware for the Mac — unlike Windows which has tons of quality freeware, and unlike Linux which is quality freeware.
As Innova’s “Mac guy,” I feel forced to respond with a list of freeware applications that I absolutely love using. Yes, this’ll crossover with my previous list of Mac Software, but I wanted to point out which tools were completely free of charge.
Software How To Drive Users Away
As I was trying to leave a comment on an interesting entry at Coderific about interview techniques — I happen to like the way we do things at Innova — but their site wouldn’t let me register. It refused my email address.
I don’t know why, but the fact that a site that bills itself as “Employer Ratings for Coders, by Coders” would fail to parse an email address bothered me. I ended up leaving their site and not registering when I couldn’t find a way to report this bug in their software to them.
Now, seeing as how Innova happens to do web development, I’m aware that email address parsing is not an exact science, but they failed on a valid domain name.
Just another reason why good testing is a must in our field.