John H. Mutchek V

I have not completely tracked down the culprit here, but if I have seen this behavior, chances are somebody else has (or will) too. When I double-click on an old .doc or .xls file and open it in Office 2007, a shortcut to the file does not appear in Vista’s “recent items” list off of the start menu. New (or converted) .docx or .xlsx files opened in a similar way do appear in the list.

Further investigation revealed that the shortcuts to the .doc and .xls files were indeed being added to the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent folder… they just weren’t being displayed in the UI. Strange.

The machine has Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 Professional, but I have another machine with (what I think is) the exact same configuration that does not exhibit this behavior.

Having not found a solution, I’ve settled for a workaround; convert old Office 2003 files to 2007’s open XML file formats. There are a host of other reasons to do this anyway, so it’s not a difficult pill to swallow.

I’ve been running Vista on two Dells pretty much since its retail release. Overall, I have been very (very) pleased with the upgrade. Power management is much improved and the quick wake-time from a hybrid sleep has allowed me to be a bit more aggressive about how quickly I let my machine go to sleep. Sleep mode keeps the power bills down and the rooms a bit cooler in the summer.

I’ve noticed that the machines wake up from time to time and I haven’t been able to put my finger on the cause. It’s never been a big deal, just a bit annoying. Maybe it’s a USB device not behaving properly. Maybe something to do with updates (can Vista do that?) Well, this morning I heard my rig wake “sleepwalking” and decided that I should probably figure out what was causing it. (It’s more than a bit creepy to have your machine wake up in a dark room with no corporeal being at the keyboard).
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Microsoft’s TechEd conference this year was every bit as good as it has been for the past few years. This was my sixth TechEd in 8 years and I’m already looking forward to 2008. The week in Orlando was a whirlwind: a firestorm of products, solutions, patterns, and partners. Way too much good content for a blog post, but here are some items that caught my attention.
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When scanning a stack of multi-page documents to PDF, I find it easier to scan each page individually, then combine them in a post-processing step. Here’s a simple Monad script that merges multiple PDFs into a single multi-page document.
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Here’s a simple screensaver I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Tested on Windows XP SP2, the saver gradually dims your desktop. From descriptions I have read, it is probably similar to a MacOS X screensaver that’s pretty popular. The target tint (transparency) and the time (in seconds) it takes to get there are configurable. Unless you choose 0% target tint, the end result is the ability to see activity on your desktop without deactivating the screensaver.

This obviously doesn’t do a great job protecting a CRT from burn-in, but it’s a nice way to crank the brightness on an LCD down while you are away from your computer.
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