ITauthor

There's a periodic problem with creating PDFs where the application you’re using to create the PDF (e.g. Word or FrameMaker) crashes or, worse, it completes, seemingly successfully, but the resulting PDF has chunks missing from it.

The example Microsoft gives is a document with three sections in it but the PDF that you generate ends up containing Section 1 followed by Section 3.

You might have encountered this problem if you’re a FrameMaker user and assumed it was an Adobe issue. It wasn’t, it was a Windows issue.

Here's the hotfix:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=952909

Despite all the bad press it got, I’ve always liked Vista. I actually don’t think it was any great shakes. There are no huge benefits as far as I can tell. Being able to start an application by pressing the Windows key, typing the first few letters of the application’s name and pressing Enter is great if, like me, you like to keep your hands on the keyboard rather than using the mouse. Perversely, some might say, I like UAC, and over all Vista does look nicer that XP.

But one thing that’s always irked me is the fact that, for some reason, Microsoft decided to remove the Text Document option from the right-click > New option in Windows Explorer.

I quite often add little text documents here and there and I always found this shortcut in XP provided a handy way of doing this. You could just right-click > New > Text Document, then double-click the file that was created and edit the document in your default text editor.

Putting this shortcut back again involves editing your Windows Registry. Not for the feint-hearted. But fortunately, someone has done this for us and created a .reg file that you can just save and then double-click to add the settings (provided you have administrative privileges for your PC).

You can get this file here:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/154554-new-context-menu-restore-default-menu-items.html

Scroll down the page to the heading To Restore Text Document and click the Download button.

Follow the instructions on the page. It says you need to restart your computer. In fact you can just end the Explorer process in Task Manager and start a new Explorer process and you’ll have the shortcut.

In this interview, from Channel 9, April Reagan (a Program Manager at Microsoft) talks about the up-coming Microsoft Help 3. This client-side help system will be used first in the MSDN Library within Visual Studio 2010, but will be made available for other software companies to use.

Note: I found the first half of the video the most interesting. After that the interview moves onto other things and only returns to help towards the end. Unfortunately there’s not a whole lot of detail about how the new help system will differ from good old HTML Help. There’s no demo, for instance. Still it’s interesting that Microsoft are still investing in the idea of client-side help.

Note: This video belongs to Dan Fernandez and Channel 9.
If you're having problems viewing the above video, try the orignal video on Channel 9,
or view it in Windows Media Player.

Disk defragmenter in Vista no longer gives you the graphical representation of a fragmented disk gradually becoming less and less fragmented. It doesn't even tell you how fragmented your disks are. Instead all you get is a message telling you that the disk is being fragmented and "This may take from a few minutes to a few hours."

This is annoying, because you have no idea where in that vague time range your defragmentation job will fall. Can you kick it off when you go for lunch and expect it to be complete by the time you get back? Or is it an overnight job? However, it's better than so many other progress messages that attempt to tell you how long you need to wait, but inevitably lie to you. For example, I've been having problems with Outlook recently. I had to kill and restart it twice today. The second time it came back it had the familiar message "The data file 'Personal Folders' was not closed properly" and a progress bar with a “seconds remaining” count.

Microsoft seconds obviously don’t work like normal seconds because after waiting for the count to work its way slowly down to "20 Seconds Remaining" I had to sit there for at least 30 seconds before it changed to 25 Seconds, then 30, then 35, then 40, then 45, then 50. From "50 seconds remaining" it took 2 mins 10 seconds before it finally finished and Outlook came to life.

If you don't know how long something's going to take, don't just make something up. And don't mislead the user into expecting something to take less time than it really will. The principle should be that software should not lie.

And don’t believe the Microsoft hype that disk defragmentation is now automated in Vista, so you don’t need to think about it any more. In fact, the Disk Defragmenter’s scheduler is set, by default, to kick off at 1.00 am every Wednesday morning. That’s fine if you leave your computer switched on every night. But if you never leave your computer on on a Tuesday night, it’ll never get defragged.

Personally, I liked the old Disk Defragmenter, with its coloured bands.

I was late leaving work this evening and I was rushing to close down my applications so that I could shut down my laptop. I closed a Word document and immediately pulled the cable to my second monitor. The following error message popped up:

This isn’t a Photoshop job, it’s a real error message, presumably tucked away in some remote corner of Microsoft Word.

Update:

Turns out it's nothing to do with Word (more's the pity). It's a "feature" of Notepad++, which is my text editor of choice right now. I must have been closing down Notepad++ at the same time as Word.