Runaware? Runasleep!

6th August 2008. For some reason I was thinking about trying another online trial of Microsoft Office 2007 and found myself here at a site apparently belonging to "Runaware" - except that it looks like Microsoft. It looks good... maybe I should trust it. Ha! I wasn't born yesterday. We shall check the site identity...

Except that "This website does not provide any identity information" according to Firefox, and when I think about downloading I am offered "TestDriveWizard-v1.4.4.exe" from http://a4156g.akamai.net.

So... someone who can't establish who they are thinks that because they have "Microsoft" slapped all over their webpage I am going to allow some random download (from yet another site)? (Yes, I know who akamai are but so what?)

No thanks... but feeling decidedly suspicious, I think... phishy people are sloppy people... let's see what else there is to reassure or raise further doubts.

Checked the "Privacy" link... where I find such beauties as...

Control of Your Personal Information
Except as otherwise described in this statement, personal information you provide on the Site will not be shared outside of Microsoft and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates without your permission

Insert description of any mechanism available for users to excercise [sic] choices regarding secondary uses of personal information. These include contact preference questions, the inclusion of unsubscribe language in promotional e-mail, etc.

and

Changes to This Privacy Statement
We may occasionally update this privacy statement. When we do, we will also revise the "last updated" date at the top of the privacy statement.

...of course there is no "last updated" date at the top...









and

"Microsoft" may also "collect information about" "the pages that you access while at the Site"

Notice not "pages on this site" that you access, but "pages you access while at the site" - which is carte blanche to go snooping around my browsing. No thank you. I Object - none of your damn business! Keep out of my browser except for the purposes of the "testdrive".

So, like a decent chap, I do send an email to the offered email address in a suitable tone (suitable for dealing with an idiot or a phisher - or both) saying basically...

Insert statement of deep suspicion about data collection and the need to run an executable from a site that does not provide any identity information (and hence cannot be verified) and hence decision to completely ignore the test drive. So, Runaware is an (unsubstantiatable) "Microsoft Vendor" - what does that mean? All very phishy…

Insert statement of intention to publicly humiliate by any means including but not limited to blog, email etc. whoever Runaware may be unless appropriate action taken immediately

And guess what - 6 weeks later absolutely nothing has changed (and there was no reply either)

See? They really are well organised, efficient, professional, caring Microsoft affiliates/providers/whatever after all!

If after 6 weeks you can't correct your mistakes once they have been pointed out for you, you don't deserve to be in business.

And if having incompetence, stupidity, negligence implied is not enough to send you shame-faced to your website, then just wait till either Microsoft notice and choose another partner or your own shareholders take notice and bring a class action suit for the all business you have thrown away.

Mind you, don't know why I bother... look at these shoes, only had them three weeks and already they're falling apart...

Pointless Stuff

"Klum" - A Vital Vista Update

I may need to restart my machine after this - they are clearly tinkering with deep OS code in the update KB955020... it is marked as "Important" - which usually means it fixes something that causes crashes or let's some teen bit-racer leave his hack-tracks all over your disk drive.

What is it about, I hear you ask?

"The words "Friendster," "Klum," "Nazr," "Obama," and "Racicot" are not recognized when you check the spelling in Windows Vista..."

Oh My God! How could they be so stupid?

Or [irony off]... WTF? Is the built in dictionary supposed to know every proper name under the sun? And more to the point, is it not supported by a "Custom Dictionary" to which new words can be added?

When I think of all the little things that Microsoft should be attending to, such as, including but not limited to:

The File Delete/Copy dialog that stays on screen muttering about Zero Seconds to deal with Zero Items after I hit the Cancel button, instead of just disappearing?

The way the Sound Volume, Network and Battery icons disappear from the Sys Tray a.k.a. Notification Area and require a Registry Edit to get them back (hardly beginner stuff, mucking around in the registry).

That folders - and things like the Add/Remove Progams control panel - still forget what columns you chose; that you can't set "File Preview" on a per folder basis.

That if you use 3rd party gadgets in the Sidebar, you get two instances of the Sidebar process - each using up valuable resources - instead of just adding all gadgets to one instance.

That shortcuts to mapped network drives still don't correctly indicate whether or not they are connected/mounted.

[Yes they are getting progressively more trivial... I trust I am making my point]

That if you use the Start button search facility, you don't always get an "Open File Location" option.

No... much more important to ensure that "Klum" is recognised (I suppose that is Heidi Klum), and in all fairness I suppose, Racicot - whoever he/she/it may be. On second thoughts the dictionary should be updated - because unless it is sentences such as "In lieu of serious functional updates, Microsoft has recently taken to issuing turdbright updates in order to better fulfil 'customer expectations'." would get seriously annoying little wiggly lines in them...

Turdbright: chrome-plated faeces. Crap Stuff.

Vista SP1 - BSOD, Bugs and Aggravations

I'm fed up with this particularly useless piece of "assistance" from Microsoft. Nice idea the "Problem and Solution Centre", especially since this Vista HP laptop is BSOD'ing every day now, so I thought I'd check to see what it had to say about the current state of my somewhat poorly system...

Aha! Let's follow that link and follow those obviously helpful steps...


What driver? Which device? How about a link to the Knowledgebase?

I have lost count of the times I have clicked the "No" brackets- this-was-not-helpful-at-all-quite-the-reverse-thank-you-very-much- if-you-want-to-add-my-blood-pressure-to-the-list-of-problems-now- close-brackets button and conveyed my displeasure (in decreasingly moderate terms of course) in response to the helpful question "Was this information helpful?", so maybe, just maybe, a little humiliation is in order.

Yes, it's in order - but whether it will help or not is another issue.

(BTW, the laptop manufacturer reliably informs me that the BIOS does not need to be updated and rather wished that MS would stop suggesting this as it creates an inordinate amount of completely unnecessary work for them...)

And, just to round things off, in case you are ever worried about whether your Drivers are properly signed and aren't entirely certain, please be aware that neither is Vista, so don't expect much help there either...

So, as you can see snapman.sys (of which there is only one on the system) is both signed and not signed... maybe Acronis signed for the fact that they weren't signing it? Who knows, but I see the imprimatur of MS behind it all.

By the way... the BSOD's are all 0x9F "DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE" errors and I suspect MS again with regard to the USB drivers: instead of just dying some 10-20 minutes after plugging in my Lexar JumpDrive Lightning II drive when I plugged it in today Vista refused to acknowledge the existence of the device at all then crashed when I took the non-existent device out again...

Of course everything was just dandy before SP1... but, 'tis true - plus ca change...

As as I saw in a forum sig recently "The mouse has been moved - please restart your system to apply the new settings"...

Annoying Stuff

Part II of The Case of the Disappearing System Restore Points in Vista Home Premium

The Scene: a variety of rooms around the globe. People are gathered at the PC's reading "The Lotus Position".

The Story So Far: Vista Home Premium is throwing away restore points; this led to a messed up PC becoming unrecoverable except by the good fortune of an external Acronis backup. It seems that Vista's Shadow Storage system is taking copies of everything not just System Restore points; as a result the storage space is quickly consumed and old restore points are lost... The question is, is it a bug?

Enter: Inspector I-Do-Stuff....

You may be wondering why I have asked you here... the answer is that this is the denoument - all is about to be revealed...

[A subtle piece of code injection locks the electronic doors...]

One of you works for Microsoft. One of you - you know who you are - is responsible. One of you is going down...

Yes, I have the answer. It is not a "bug", it is not something that has recently changed so as to render my System Restore functionality totally and absolutely bloody useless, it was a cold, calculated decision by Microsoft to remove the "Restore Previous Versions" feature from Vista Home Premium and Vista Home Basic.

I don't mind that there are backups I can't access; if I had really wanted that I could have upgraded to Ultimate. What I do mind, what I do mind very, very much is that I am left with no control over this system... Vista is deliberately - wasting time, space and resources - taking shadow copies of everything that changes on my C drive and putting them in ShadowStorage where

a) I can't get at them, but so what
b) So rather a lot, they are taking up the space that I want for System Restore Points.

Apparently this "feature" is not quite as obscure as I had thought - it was written about some time ago (see The Vista backups You Can't Have, and The Illusions of Vista, or here for example, to give but a few examples once I knew what I was looking for).

I am however absolutely furious about this.

System Restore is a major feature - under XP I used to have a restore point history going back weeks, now I am lucky if I have 5 or 6 restore points spanning less than a week.

This is catastrophically useless. But what are the chances of Microsoft doing anything about it?

Negligible I expect.

However, I remain on my high horse until hell freezes over if necessary to get this fixed.

We have ways you know...

Stuff moves in mysteriousways...

Niblike and Spooky!

Georgina Mitcham's "Microsoft Technet Newsletter" of 7 Nov begins with the words:

I hope you are adjusting to the early dark evenings now.

Unfortuntately, those weren't the first words I read: thanks to the artful use of language and the formatting of a hyperlink, what I saw and read first - in complete isolation - was:

carve my spooky pumpkins

which, suffering as I do from a slightly dislocated brain, caused - and still causes - bewilderment and a strange anti-gravity eyebrow effect. Of course, if you followed the hyperlink (here) you would see that it means exactly what it says it means. Nicely done Georgina!

However, hot on the heels of that random cogntitive dissonance comes this lovely quotation from the OED (my daily wordsmithing tool), spotted entirely in passing (I wasn't actively hunting, though I shall certainly keep my eyes peeled now).

All my togs were so niblike and splash

which was of course by that famous author H. Ainsworth (in Rookwood iii. v, 1834).

Now there's a phrase I'd love to see back (?) in circulation...

[Gentleman A] Yo! How's it hangin' bro'?
[Gentleman B] Chillin! All niblike and splash!
[Gentleman A] Cool/Wicked/Rad/...

(or whatever argot is now current within modern beat combos and their afficionados...)

Henceforward, under the label Carve My Spooky Pumpkins (to celebrate Georgina's creative genius) will be other bizarre yet potentially wizard words and phrases for your delectation...

Linguistic Stuff - just rolls off the tongue...

Suggestions for Microsoft Word 2007

I'm only doing this because Microsoft are limiting me to 650 characters on the Office.com suggestions page - and I bet it can't count accurately anyway (web pages never seem to count characters properly, never allow enough space so you can see what you've written - Office.com has a miserly 3 line display and seem generally set up to discourage detailed and specific suggestions; I wonder if that's because they typically get "Your app sucks!" and just don't want more of the same? Chickens and Eggs here I suspect).

So, away from the chickens and on to the sheep!

This is almost entirely about the way comments are handled as "mark-up" in Word 2007; whilst I quite like the new Ribbon UI, I shan't be using Word 2007 - and hence any Office 2007 products because of (persistent) shortcomings in the way it handles comments. Pity. What has been done since Word 2002/XP in the comments area is... negligible it seems. Minimal comment handling probably goes even further back, but I can't check, so I shall make an unsupported assertion and claim that it's never really been thought through.

Firstly, W07 now highlights commented text automatically - and does so in a colour corresponding to the reviewer who created the comment, unfortunately either you accept colouration by reviewer name or you choose from a woeful palette whose colour content hasn't changed in living memory.

Would it not be a marvellous thing to have Categorised commenting via some sort of tagging system, and for the user to be able to create their own categories/tags? For example, one tag for "factual error", another for "dubious fact", another for "unclear phrasing"; or one for "minor issue", one for "medium issue", one for "major issue" - and so on.... with the specific ability to be able to apply multiple tags to a single comment. It would, wouldn't it? I've already done the same thing for Word 2002 using VBA. If only I had the choice of comment colours...

Then one can add (as I have done) features to selectively show and hide comments according to the assigned tags, which makes reviewing a lot easier; and to sort the reviewers list (more of a work-around really...); and to selectively review comments by category and and and...

One should also be able to control whether highlighting of the commented text is on or off, where applicable (done that - it's dynamic... click in the comment and the "scope"is highlighted, click elsewhere and it unhighlights). I mean, really! This is Microsoft at it's most nannyish - you must have comments highlighted, all the time... it will only end in tears if you don't!

And one should of course be able to delete the content of a comment without deleting the comment itself; as it is, try Ctrl+A in W07 with the selection point in a balloon comment and hit Delete or Backspace. It doesn't work because Ctrl+A has picked up the trailing paragraph mark, which is undeletable. It would be easy to fix - and it should be.

Of course the comment pane is now in the right (or maybe you can choose where it goes, I'm just going by the Test Drive default presentation) - all I can say is I hope it deals with large numbers of comments... I have about 5,000 now in "IT" (the book) - all automatically numbered starting at 1 for each category. I don't see any reason why there should be any limit on the number of comments and I haven't hit one yet, but repagination is a pain on a large document when it keeps doing it because of changes to comments - I can understand it for footnotes, but comments? [Hope I'm right about that - I think so, but...]

Alas my VBA ain't perfect - because I haven't had time to productionise it - otherwise I'd sell it as an add in... along with outlining for tables similar to the way Excel does it (no, you still can't use the document map to navigate within tables. But that's another topic.)

OK - I can send them the URL now!

Cancel or Allow

Yes... it does feel like this to have Vista.

Why You Don't Want to be a Geek (The Flesch-Kincaid Formula is Wrong)

Well, I'm not sure if "Geek" is the right word - perhaps I mean "Nerd"? - but you can see the problem instantly: obsessing about the trivial. Does it really matter which word I use when, whichever I do choose, you know full well (or will do by the time you've read this, or other parts of the blog) that this guy...

a) Is Eccentric (I'm English; "eccentric" is not only acceptable, it is possibly even mildly flattering...)
b) Is Quirky (thanks for that one Gary)
c) Isn't Two Bricks Short of a Load - in fact probably has two loads of bricks, but doesn't know what to build with them
d) Is Weird

i.e. is, not to beat about the bush, more than slightly geeky, possessed of a high coefficient of nerdulence (let's make that my CoN for future reference)

The nicest reflection I've had on my idiosyncratic disposition is that "Julian doesn't just answer questions that no one else can, he answers questions that no one else even thought of asking."

Sadly the corollary to that is probably "Actually, he answers questions no one else thought worth asking," (some examples later) but...

Here I am, brain the size of a (dwarf) planet and it's full of Stuff! And useless Stuff at that.

Life, don't talk to be about life... (Actually, do talk to me about life - isn't it fascinating?)

However, about those sheep...

What prompts this (hitherto promised but thus far undelivered) piece of naval gazing?

The Flesch-Kincaid readability statistics, Reading Ease and Grade Level as implemented in Microsoft Word (hopefully as per DOD Standard MIL-M-38784B. Detail! The Geek or Nerd must attend to detail... which means, having finally tracked it down, that MIL-M-38784 of July 1995, superseding MIL-M-3978C of October 1990... still with me? ... doesn't in fact contain the Flesch-Kincaid formulas... at least any more. Maybe it did. Who knows?)

And what is the precise problem?

I had Word do the readability statistics for IT - Reading Ease 83.2, Grade Level 5.9. So far so good (in fact rather too good - I don't believe an 11 year old could read IT). But then I noticed that the formulae:

• Grade Level = (0.39 * Average Sentence Length) + (11.8 * Average Syllables per Word) - 15.59

and

• Reading Ease = 206.835 - ((1.015 * Average Sentence Length) + (84.6 * Average Syllables per Word)

would allow me, given the stats I had, to work backwards and calculate the average number of syllables per word (ASW), which is of course Trivial and therefore, almost by definition, of riveting interest to the Geek or Nerd.

So, I invert the formulae, plug in the values and uh oh! I get two different answers.

Check I've got the formulae right in Excel and then that I get the right answers for something (I used the Dr Seuss Green Eggs and Ham stats in the Wikipedia article on Flesh-Kincaid - advanced warning/plot spoiler: I think they are using the wrong formula at the moment) - which I do.

So, is Word miscalculating or is the problem that the ASL of 18.6, Reading Ease and Grade Level scores are all inappropriately rounded...?

Hmmm...

Some time later...

Word says there are 18.6 words per sentence, but using its own figures for word count and sentence count the average appears to be 19.16 (2 S.F.). Aha! Word's Average Sentence Length is Wrong! But no, that doesn't fix it. Nor does undoing any rounding that may have occurred.

So what's going on? Beats me. I blame Microsoft.

Hastily, and erroneously it seems. I found somewhere else on the web a slightly different version of the Grade Level formula.. it should in fact be:

• Grade Level = (0.39 * Average Sentence Length) + (11.8 * Average Syllables per Word) - 15.9

And then, once you've made allowances for rounding errors in Word's stats, everything seems OK at last (well, almost, to get precise agreement that constant has to become 15.96536ish - I think I'll settle for 15.9, it's close enough)

Except that the Word help files says they use the value 15.59.

But at least I can semi-reliably calculate the average number of syllables per word in IT. We'll talk about the ARI, Gunning-Fog and Coleman-Liau indices some other time...

Now wasn't that worthwhile? No. This is why you don't want to be a geek.

Now, as to the Meaning of Life as to be revealed in "IT", what is it - exactly?

Well, the answer is:

The Lotus Position has unexpectedly encountered an error. Connection Refused by Host Either you do not have permission to access the site, your password is incorrect or you have failed to understand the question...

Word 2007

I think I'll like the new ribbon UI when I get around to it. My problem with Word as it stands is probably trivial for most people, but it's my problem. The problem is that in Page Layout view and using Balloon comments, the text with a comment attached his highlighted in the colour associated with the reviewer who created the comment.

It's a nice idea - I had to implement something similar in VBA for myself in Word 2002 - but not when there are LOTS of comments - the page just becomes unreadable. Unfortunately, IT (The Book) now has about ~4000 embedded comments and consequently the screen is like an explosion in a paint factory.

What I have suggested - but who's listening? - is that this is precisely the sort of feature what should be under user control - Highlight Always, When Selected, Never - the sort of options provided for Field highlighting.

I had a long debate with others about what should or should not be implemented as an "option", but I am still firmly of the opinion that the developer should not be overzealous in second guessing the user - don't ask "Why on earth would anyone want to do that?", or "This is sooo good we must make the user do work this way!", just make sure you don't deliberately close off choices unless they are meaningless or harmful i.e. (pace my old biology teacher, Mr Baron I think was his name) likely to lead to the application equivalent of "Blindness, Sterility or Death".

When I can work out how to install Office 2007 alongside Office 2002 to use Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 but leave me Word 2002 I'll let you know... last time I tried the Office 2007 install alongside Office 2002 a lot of things - mostly shortcuts - were "altered" in undesired ways.

But, we live in hope.

Office 2007 Trials

A word of warning. Microsoft does not provide "Technical Support" for Trial software. It's a bland general statement and difficult to complain about as such... but I'll try.

I've been using Microsoft Office since it came into existence. Once upon a time (and to be fair, this was a long time ago - early 90's I guess) I used to find fatal errors in Word and Excel at the rate of about 1-2/month each... but we've come a long way since then and they remain for me extremely powerful, flexible and reliable tools; I use them for hours daily.

So, having gone from an HP Pavilion laptop with Windows XP to this new Rock laptop with Vista Home premium I was keen to trial Office 2007. However, paranoia to the fore - and having done a lot of customisation with VBA, toolbars etc. etc. I thought I'd move my Office 2002 over and install Office 2007 alongside it.

This decision was leveraged by my first real irritation with Vista - the removal of Protected Storage functionality relied on by Outlook 2002 to store email account passwords. The result is that Outlook cannot remember passwords (XP's Protected Storage wasn't included in Vista), so every time I start it up I have to type in my POP3 and SMTP passwords - and I can find no workaround - so moving immediately to Outlook 2007 while I migrated Word, Excel and PowerPoint was a real incentive.

Downloaded Office 2007 Standard trial. Installed Trial. No Outlook 2007. Odd.

Tried to re-install it and looked carefully at the options - only to find that apparently Outlook 2007 wasn't in the installer! Of course this isn't true - it is in the installer, but the fun thing is that if an earlier version of Outlook is already installed on your system the installer says Outlook 2007 is "not available" to install. Not can't install over, or won't install over or alongside, just not available. Not that I was able to discover this without Herculean efforts.

(Apparently I could have discovered the key facts for myself - yes, I put my hand up to blindness/stupidity - but it took a lot of effort to find anyone who could tell me how I could and should have worked it out for myself. My thanks to Tim and Ben of Microsoft in Reading for helping eventually resolve the issue)

Anyway, the search for "pre-sales" support before I got to Tim & Ben. Try as I might, I couldn't seem to communicate the fact that I didn't want "technical support"
- I wanted to know why the package that said it included Outlook 2007 "patently" (my mistake) didn't.

Round and round and round we go on not inexpensive support calls routed to India. Eventually someone suggests online technical support - just enter the product key! Aha! But... Trial product keys are not valid for online support.

Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

My point being: finding out why the installer is apparently not working is not the usual sort of technical support, it's "pre sales support". Imagine going to buy a new car, you visit the showroom... that one looks nice...

"Can I take it for a test drive?"

"Certainly sir, here is the key."

"Oh... I can't start it."

(because it has that

Gearbox-Must-Be-In-Neutral,
You-Must-Have-Your-Foot-On-The-Brake Pedal,
I-Am-Not-Even-Going-To-Start-Until-You-Are-Wearing-Your-Seatbelt.
Did-You-Clean-Your-Teeth-This-Morning?

nannyism programmed into it)

"I'm sorry sir, we don't provide technical support..."

So, either provide some appropriate Pre Sales Support Mr Microsoft or stop offering Trial Software.