Khoji On Tech (and more)

I’ve now been using Office 2008 for about five days and I’m already ready to remove it from my Mac. It is painfully, embarrassingly, frustratingly bad. Either the Microsoft Mac team screwed up completely and lost all track of what they were trying to do or Microsoft is consciously trying to force users away from the Mac and back onto Windows. Possibly a little bit of both. This isn’t just my opinion — c’t, Germany’s most reputable professional computer publication, comes out very strongly and warns all users against installing Office 2008 in their new issue due to be published on Monday.

Read the rest of this entry »

You often hear about how tough it is to get good information from software support desks. What you don’t so often hear is how tough it is for software support staff to understand the mails that they get from some users. Many users write clear and comprehensible mails to support, but there are others.

In addition to my other work I often have to answer questions in technical support mails from users of a professional authoring system for technical writers. Before I started doing this I thought that it would be relatively easy — after all, I thought, they’re writers, I’ll only be getting well-written, comprehensible questions. Don’t you believe it — the Dilbert cartoons on software documentation are not only close to the truth, they are actually the opposite of an exaggeration. When I read some of the questions these “help authors” and “technical writers” send in I often wonder how they manage to tie their shoelaces in the morning, let alone produce comprehensible documentation.

So let me give you a few little tips that may help you to be a little more successful when you write an email to a support desk:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the few really annoying things about WordPress has always been its stone age updating mechanism. Actually, it doesn’t really have an updating mechanism at all - you have to do everything by hand and so many WordPress bloggers never update.

No longer! If you don’t have it already go out and get the WordPress Automatic Updater. It’s brilliant, it works and it just takes a couple of minutes on any WordPress installation from 1.5 and higher. Highly recommended!

On his blog, Nick Bradbury posts that many inexperienced users are afraid to install programs. Actually, it is not just inexperienced users who hesitate to install programs on Windows. Many experienced users do too, because they know from painful experience that installing a new application can easily make their system start malfunctioning in strange and creative ways. In addition to this, they also know that it may be impossible to really remove the application. This situation is partly the fault of Microsoft for making Windows the way it is and partly (possibly even more) the fault of the armies of lazy, slovenly programmers out there who think they can do anything they like on users’ computers.

What many Windows programmers do to their users’ computers is the digital equivalent of vandalism.

Read the rest of this entry »

Germany’s Federal Court of Justice (BGH) recently ruled that hacking activities by the German police are illegal, according to a report published by the daily newspaper TAZ (die tageszeitung — it is not possible to link to the articles directly because TAZ requires registration for access).

It seems the German police have been using hacking tools to break into suspects’ computers via the Internet and examine their contents. It’s no big surprise that the court thinks that the police don’t have the right to do this. What is intriguing is that the police have apparently been doing this for some time, with the backing of official court orders. It makes you wonder what is going on in other countries.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Bradbury just put a great post on his blog titled Why do firewalls have to be such a PITA? Right, software firewalls are generally a serious pain, and so are “security suites”.

Read the rest of this entry »