An old bug seems to have resurfaced in the current build of Office 2010 Beta. Normally, you should be able to use Windows Desktop Search to return search results from your OneNote notebooks. But on 64-bit versions of Windows, while the search results show up, they have generic Explorer icons and clicking on them doesn’t do anything. The problem is that the system isn’t seeing the right version of the OneNote Search Connector DLL. If you’re seeing this problem, read on to find out how to get your searches working properly on Windows x64. » More... » More »

I’m singularly unimpressed with the Slashdot gang’s attempts to reinvent the site’s UI. Every new change seems to make the interface uglier, more bloated, and harder to use. I liked the mechanics of the old, pre-AJAX site just fine, thank you.

But the most recent insult was the sudden, unexpected change of the User page. Previously, if you clicked on your username in the upper lefthand corner, it would take you to a page that listed your recent comments. Now you get dumped to a Firehose page, forcing you to do an extra page load to get to where you’re going — and don’t get me started on Firehose.

So I decided to write a Greasemonkey script to fix it. You can download the script here. » More... » More »

My LibraryLookup script for the San Francisco Public Library has been returning a lot of false positives lately. I finally managed to sit down and address that issue, in addition to some other general maintenance. You can grab version 1.5 of the script at its new, permanent page under “Odd Bits.” » More... » More »

Last night as I was walking home I pulled my BlackBerry Pearl 8120 out of my back pocket and noticed that the LCD was cracked (image here). I have no idea how this happened — I didn’t drop it or anything. The phone is only two weeks old! Unfortunately, no matter how it happened I knew T-Mobile wasn’t going to have much sympathy for my plight. T-Mobile, like most carriers, considers any screen breakage to be the customer’s fault, and it’s not covered by warranty.

This particular Pearl, however, was a replacement for my old Pearl — an earlier model 8100 — which I accidentally dropped in the toilet about two weeks ago. And that gave me an idea: Why not swap out the broken screen in the new Pearl with the working screen from the old one? » More... » More »

For the truly geeky among you: In the latest post to my Fatal Exception blog over at InfoWorld, I’m taking a look under the hood of Chrome, Google’s new Web browser. A lot of articles make mention of how Chrome is open source. I actually put it to the test, by building a custom copy of it myself.

Along the way I found out a lot of interesting information about Chrome’s internals and how Google built it. On the plus side, it’s very clean, well-organized code. On the minus side, it looks like it’s going to be Windows-only for a good while, yet.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this piece (it’s been a long time since I had a legitimate excuse to pull out a compiler on Windows), so if you have the hobbyist spirit, drop on over and join the discussion.

Another minor upgrade to my LibraryLookup Greasemonkey script; a couple of tweaks seem to be necessary to get the script to work in Firefox 3. This fix should have it working in either version of the browser.

As usual, you can download the script here. You should delete the old version by hand before installing this one, because I’ve updated the namespace to reflect my own site instead of Jon Udell’s (finally!).

If you don’t understand what this is all about, check my earlier post on the subject. (And if you don’t live in San Francisco it probably won’t be much use to you anyway. Try a Google search for a similar script that works with libraries in your area.)

If you have any questions or problems with the script, post here and I’ll try to address them.

Ubuntu 8.04, codenamed “Hardy Heron,” was released today. As usual, the download servers are experiencing heavy load due to high anticipation of this release. In the interest of doing my part, here are BitTorrent files for the server and desktop versions of the OS, in both the i386 and amd64 flavors. » More... » More »

My GreaseMonkey script that links Amazon.com search results with the San Francisco Public Library catalog seems to have broken recently. I’ve now published an updated version with a couple of additional improvements. It now returns search results for all of the branches of the library, rather than just the first few; and the output is now a little nicer looking.

If you want to know more about this script and its history, you can check my earlier post on the subject.

If you just want to dive in and start searching for library books via Amazon, you can download the latest script here. (Note that you must have the GreaseMonkey extension for Firefox installed for this to work.)

I don’t know why I do these things.

It occurred to me this afternoon that it might be nice to have a native Ubuntu Linux partition running on my main Windows Vista machine. “Should be easy,” I thought. So I whipped out my trusty Feisty Fawn CD, resized my Vista partition with GParted, and proceeded to install Linux.

Big mistake.

The installation itself went fine and Linux started right up. The problem came when I tried to boot back over into Windows Vista. In a nutshell, it wouldn’t. I’d get the green “Knight Rider” screen, but then the system would switch to a black screen and everything seemed to grind to a halt. » More... » More »