Category Archives: Technology

Office 2008 Bug and MacBU

Was reading my technology news today and I saw this post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog. In short there’s a bug with the installer for Office 2008 that results in the wrong UNIX permissions being set on some of the libraries and support files installed with the suite. In and of itself this isn’t a big deal but, as the blog points out, Microsoft tends to get crucified even for little things that are honest mistakes. In my opinion Microsoft does some really stupid stuff, but not everything they do is bad. If you deal with enough technology vendors you soon discover that Microsoft is nowhere near the worst vendor in any respect. In fact I can think of several vendors which are regularly lauded in the Free/Open Source Community which are far shadier and routinely spew forth far crappier software. In fact, just the other day I was saying that I never thought I’d think Exchange was a good mail solution until I saw some of its competition.

Firebug

As you can tell I’ve been in the process of migrating to a new site design and toolset over the past few days. I’m trying to avoid too much custom code but I did make a slight modification to the plugin that renders the quotes feed on the rightmost column. In the process of troubleshooting the problem I discovered the Firebug plugin for Firefox. It’s most a most excellent debugger for walking through the code when there are issues (as well as flagging that there is a problem in the first place). In addition it can provide some useful profiling information regarding how your page loads, etc. In any event it was very helpful getting the page to render valid XHTML and JavaScript.

FSF Associate Member 6293

Partly as a response to some of the slippery slope behavior I see taking place with some major GNU/Linux vendors regarding patents and licensing I decided to get off my figurative lazy ass (as opposed to getting off my actual lazy ass) and join the Free Software Foundation today. I would encourage anybody who feels strongly about technology and free software, or who has benefited from the GNU Project to consider contributing.