Avi :)

Sometimes, on trying to scan a PST with MS Office's bundled scanpst.exe, you get the below error:

And a log that ends:

Fatal Error: 80040818

What MS meant to say was:

You're scanning an Office 2003 PST file with the scanpst tool that shipped with Office 2007. For some reason, we decided that while Outlook 2007 can cope with both, scanpst can't

In an attempt at usefulness:
On my WinXP/Office 2007 box, scanpst is at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\SCANPST.EXE and downloadable here.

On our Server03/Office03 box, it's at C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\SCANPST.EXE¹ and downloadable here.

I've no idea if these downloads are of any real use. Try them and see.

1. I'm told the '1033' pertains to geographic location, but I've no real idea. Browse if it's not there. [↩]

I've had this knocking about for a while in various forms. Following TheOpenSourcerer's post, I figured I'd get it in while he's getting the flack.

About a year ago, I remember there being some rejoicing at the prospect of Canonical open-sourcing Launchpad, their bug/issue/ticket tracking web application. I also remember being a mite confused by it. Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu Linux, the popular open source operating system. Surely they, of all people, had opened the source from the start? What does it say when the company most loudly and successfully pushing open source as an efficient means of software development to your average computer user, develops its in-house software behind closed doors? And, accepting that, why is opening the source means for rejoicing? It is surely the belated Right Thing To Do. If anything, the response should have been along the lines of "Why so long?"

More recently, I decided that a hodge-podge of scripts to keep my files in sync between PCs wasn't a good idea, not least because it didn't actually work, and since my home PC and my laptop were both Ubuntu, and Ubuntu One seemed easy enough to install, that'd do the trick. So I installed it and started using it. Then I decided to get my work PC in on the game. And find this message:

Requirements: Because we want to give everyone using Ubuntu One the very best experience, we require that you run Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) or higher.

Which is something I don't think I've come across before - a Free Software company producing software and inventing restrictions. Why shouldn't Ubuntu One work on my Debian desktop?
This incompatibility for the sake of it is something I remember from Windows, and it's not a good memory. I know it's possible to write a client for it - the client is at least open source - but the message that I am required to use Ubuntu to use it? What good does that do anyone?

Most recently came the news that on the netbook edition Canonical have decided to drop OpenOffice.org (which *is* undeniably bloated) and use Google docs in its place. Google Docs is completely proprietary. It's about as closed source as software can get, since you can't even study its behavior, only those interfaces you're permitted with it.
Why wasn't AbiWord used, with it's online service, for example? Or a pared down OpenOffice, perhaps? Canonical has shown in the past that it has the developer hours to make fantastic, awesome, changes to software. Why not do that now?

Ubuntu is the most popular desktop Linux distro. I'm sure there are ways of counting such that Fedora wins, but if something's packaged for Linux, it's available in a Ubuntu-pointed deb. And so it occupies a unique position for free software - it's an opportunity to be a fantastic demonstration of what is possible with free software. It is possible to make commercial progress without restricting user freedom, and it is possible to make a wonderfully usable operating system under these conditions.

Except Ubuntu's not demonstrating that. It's showing that using a billionaire benefactor and a bunch of closed source software we can turn a free operating system into a mostly-freeish wonderful one.

And I'd rather like Canonical to stop doing that, and get back to making free software look good.

Some of this might well be rendered obsolete by the 1.6 update I've just received.

GMail Client
No bottom- or inline-posting, only top-posting. And, while you're at it, there's no way to read the quoted text while replying.
You have to read to the bottom of the email to get to the reply button, which is an odd move from someone who promotes top-posting. It's not even in the Menu.
There's no way of editing Labels or Filters.

POP/IMAP Client
This is very different to the GMail one, I don't know why.
It also doesn't honour read/unread flags in IMAP folders, and I continually get notifications that I've got new mail that arrived six months ago.

Calendar
To set the date in the calendar you have three boxes, year, month and date¹ which are adjusted by either entering in the date, or a + and - button on each. This is fine when you don't go over a month boundary, at which point it gets confusing. Since nearly everything I plan is for 'next wednesday' or so, about one in four of my appointments require more thinking than I think they should.
There's no way to add calendars that are not already available to the www version of your calendar.

Google Docs
Editing documents is possible, but creating for some reason isn't. Also, no control over labels.
As in Mail and Calendar, there are web versions of these optimised for the Android screen, but they're similarly crippled.

Contacts
When viewing the contact, everything that has a number has a 'call' and a 'text' option, which fills the screen with never-used options.

SMS
When entering a name into the To: field, the first suggestion is as if you were writing a word with a keypad. For example, entering 'mum', the first option is '686'
Once you've scrolled past the useless entry and selected the one you want, the field is populated with name . Which is only an issue if you want send a message to more than about ten people, since you run out of characters in that field.
Enter is send. This is not a problem, but I _never_ remember and send multiple messages when I mean send.

Google Maps
When selecting start and end points for directions, recently chosen points are arranged alphabetically, not in the order in which you used them. And they're not named by how you searched for them, but by what Google calls them.

Everything's Massive
Google took a very straightforward approach to lists and fingers - make the buttons huge. I'd like more than two options per screen, though, and I think varying the length of the buttons would be a better approach.

1. The order is configurable [↩]

Karmic ships with a new version of GDM (2.28) which is rewritten, and by default presents a list of usernames, in much the same way as XP does by default. Lots of people dislike this. It's also currently lacking a graphical config tool (it is in beta...).

To change it, run this:

 
# gdm gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true
 

This, I feel, is non-ideal since it just replaces the users list with a 'log in' Window and button which is completely superfluous - if I'm at the logon screen, I probably do want to log onto the PC, and the most logical thing for it to do is to be already asking for my username, ideally with that text box in focus. The previous login screen was pretty much ideal, and I'm not sure what benefit the new one has.

Source: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+question/86506

On right-clicking an executable¹ in XP and choosing `Run As...', you are presented with the below box.

How on earth is 'Current user' a reasonable default value? If I wanted to run it as me, I'd just double-click it...

1. Though not every executable. If you want to run something in the control panel, probably the most common place to want to runas, you need to shift+right-click. Several MSI files don't do it, and nor do any apparent CAB files. Let alone the inability to directly open a non-executable file as someone else. [↩]

Sometimes, you're replacing a PC for someone, and they notice afterwards that a bunch of cool fonts, the names for which they've forgotten¹. "No bother", one thinks, "I'll just copy and paste the contents of c:/Windows/fonts across from one PC to the other".

"And then I'll click 'OK' 296 times because "Yes to all" still hasn't made it into MS's vocabulary.

1. quite understandably. font names are never sensible [↩]