Another day, another useless Outlook message. The message of the day for Outlook is “Done checking your data file”. As a user I really need to see that message with a little warning logo, personally I wondered for a second it it had been corrupted, why else bother me? But then I remember something I read once comparing Windows to Mac: Windows is the impetulant child that always wants your attention whilst Mac is the butler tries to get out of your way. I don’t have annoying messages like this on my Mac, even if Mail is perhaps doing tasks on my “data file”. RIL is annoying me again compared to Quicksilver, items aren’t prioritised and useless entries (like DLL files and HTML files I’ve never looked at before) are in list ahead of the application I really want to look at, which was the MySQL Query Browser at that point. I get around it by putting ‘exe’ at the end as I type and this usually reduces the resultset to just what I want but its still a lot worse than Quicksilver. What should I expect from a Windows tool? On the subject of annoyances and Windows, Outlook for some reason has a particular hatred of the ePrints tech mailing list. For any HTML email that comes through it doesn’t open it but decides to display the signature of the list and gives me the option to double click on it. Strangely it doesn’t think it has a document previewer for it and when I double click the file opens fine in Chrome. A mild annoyance I must admit and I’m not entirely sure if its Outlook’s fault entirely though the lack of a ‘HTML’ file previewer is a tad depressing.

I also had Moodle character fun with restores not uploading properly due to legal UTF-8 characters and what I presume is PHP’s XML parser library though I’m yet to dig into it. It shouldn’t be causing an issue but it appears to be, for the time being the work around is not to use those UTF-8 characters (in this case it was a right single quote). In other Moodle news, I wrote a new group export tool for the Engineering department’s problem solving unit. It exports in tab delimited like they requested and maybe one day I’ll get around to making the XML file format that they wanted as a preference. However, walk before you run.

Still Excel and Sharepoint forget it’s password after the Office 2007 upgrade, it is annoying to have to put my password in to get to my time sheet. I’m told by a Windows fanatic friend of mine how wonderful Microsoft is in a pure Microsoft environment – but to be honest, its looking like a sham. I’ve got Windows, its joined to Active Directory, they have Sharepoint running on IIS boxes and I’ve got Office 2007 and it still doesn’t automatically authenticate me properly. Yes, life in the Microsoft world is always so much better, can you just re-enter your password again? Thanks.