Author: Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

17 billion cells

No, that’s not the projected population of Guantanamo Bay in 2008. It’s the new maximum capacity of a worksheet in Microsoft Excel 12. The word comes from David Gainer, Group Program Manager for the Excel team at Microsoft, in his new blog:

Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is “when are you going to add more rows/more columns/more rows and more columns”. There are many different scenarios behind these requests. Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements. There are plenty of other scenarios too. Well, the answer to the question is “in Excel 12.” Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.

I shudder to think what the screen shots will look like when we get to work on Special Edition Using Office 12.

(via Excel Watch)

Windows Explorer, Media Player, and big libraries

Thomas Hawk ranted about Media Center the other day. Charlie Owen and Matt Goyer of Microsoft’s Media Center team responded (Matt on his own blog and in comments on Thomas’s blog), and the upshot is that Thomas’s complaints are being taken very seriously.

I’ll have more to say about the MCE part of this post over on Ed Bott’s Media Central, although probably not till next week. But I want to address one of Thomas’s specific complaints here, because it’s more related to Windows in general.

Some background: Thomas has a very, very large digital music library. Last December, when he and I first exchanged details of this problem, Thomas’s library contained 141,000 files. I’m sure it’s larger now.

Thomas says he encounters disk errors when he tries to copy or back up those files:

Windows Explorer sucks. With a large digital library I simply cannot effectively copy files or back files up without having disc errors. Large batch copy jobs are super difficult as one little error aborts the whole job.

Let’s break this down. As Charlie Owen noted in his response, and I can attest, this is not normal behavior. I have 19 hard disks, internal and external, distributed among seven computers in my office. Collectively they represent well over 3 terabytes of storage. I move large numbers of files between computers constantly. I routinely copy the 16,000 files in my music library over network connections between external hard disks, and I don’t get disk errors. Now, if I try to copy a group of files, one of which is in use and locked by a running process, then Windows Explorer will stop. That is a weakness in Windows Explorer that is (1) being fixed in Windows Vista and (2) easily avoided by using third-party file-management tools. (It’s also what I was referring to when I said Thomas had a “legitimate complaint.”) But aside from that known issue, I’ve never encountered the problems Thomas describes. Nor should any properly configured Windows system, Media Center or otherwise.

So why is this happening to Thomas? I’ve read his complaints on this issue and we’ve exchanged some e-mail messages on this topic in the past. Thomas has told me that MP3 files are being randomly corrupted at frequent intervals. This is not normal behavior. It is not caused by Windows or Windows Media Player. There is no reason why any Windows user should get even a single corrupted file. If this happens, it indicates either a hardware problem (such as a buggy USB controller), a bad configuration (like cached writes being lost during copies), or data being damaged by software.

If I were Thomas, I would do the following things:

First, I would run a thorough diagnostic tool (like Ontrack’s Data Advisor) on all of the hard drives that were giving me problems.

Second, I would convince one of my buddies at Microsoft to put me in touch with an engineer who could verify that all drivers in my storage subsystem were working properly. If necessary, I would have that engineer hook up a remote debugger and then start the copy process until it fails, so that the exact error could be captured.

Third, I would find an MP3 diagnostic utility and check all of my MP3 files to see if any of them have damaged tags. The MP3 file format is flaky, especially in files that use the older ID3v1 format. If the file format is damaged, it could be causing problems during copies. I suspect that the WMP option to save star ratings to music files might be at least partially to blame for this problem. (In fact, I would recommend that Thomas use a batch MP3-editing program to translate all ID3v1 tags to ID3v2 and then rewrite all tags. This would be time-consuming but would have long-term benefits.)

Fourth, I would temporarily disable all features in WMP 10 that update or change music file metadata, especially those that affect star ratings. (This would not have any impact on currently stored ratings.) I would also disable folder monitoring temporarily.

Somewhere in that process, I’m sure the real cause of this problem would become apparent. Is this a lot of work? Well, yes, but this is also an absolutely certain way to fix the problem once and for all.

Google’s brilliant new service

From The Onion (tagline: America’s Finest News Source) comes the shocking news. Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index:

The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.

As a part of Purge’s first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

“A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest,” John Battelle wrote in his widely read “Searchblog.” “Thanks to Google Purge, you’ll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music.” …

Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.

Be sure to read both pages. The second page has these alarming details about where the technology is going to go next:

Google’s robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: “The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it’s Google. It’ll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain.”

I haven’t checked, but I assume Google’s stock is up several hundred dollars on this news.

(Now waiting to see how many nasty comments appear from people who don’t know satire when it slaps them on both sides of the face.)

Tip of the day: Find your e-mail folder fast

Do you know where your e-mail messages are stored? That’s not just a theoretical question. If e-mail matters to you, you need to back up the files containing your messages so that you can restore them in the event of a hard disk crash or other problem. Here’s how to find your e-mail files with three popular programs:

  • Microsoft Outlook 2003: With Outlook closed, open Control Panel and double-click Mail. In the Mail Setup dialog box, click Data Files and then click Open Folder. This opens Windows Explorer using the folder where your Outlook Personal Stores (PST) file is located. The default name is Outlook.pst. Back up that file, which contains all your messages, rules, contacts, and appointments.
  • Outlook Express: Open Outlook Express and click Tools, Options. Click the Store Folder… button and highlight the entire string contained in the Store Location box. Press Ctrl+C to copy this location to the Windows Clipboard. Close all open dialog boxes, open Windows Explorer, and paste that location in the Address bar. Back up the complete contents of this folder, which contains all of your messages. Note that it does not contain your Address Book, which must be backed up separately.
  • Mozilla Thunderbird: Click Start, Run. In the Open box, type %appdata%\Thunderbird\Profiles and click OK. Windows Explorer opens, showing the contents of your Profiles folder. In a normal installation, this should contain a single folder with a random name (like uepsg00s) followed by .default. Copy this folder, which contains all settings and data for Thunderbird. You can restore it in the event of a crash.

If you use another e-mail program and you know how to find its data files, leave details in the comments section.

Tip of the day: Allow Outlook to send and receive URLs

Internet Explorer has a very cool feature. When you find a page you like, you can click File, Send, Link by E-mail to open a new e-mail message with your link included as an attachment and as text.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to send the memo to the folks who designed Outlook. In their zeal to block dangerous attachments (a campaign that has been amazingly effective), they added shortcuts ending with the .URL extension to the list of unsafe attachments. That means when you try to send a link from Internet Explorer using any version of Outlook since Outlook 2000 SP3, you get an error message instead of a usable message.

The solution? Take your pick of three workarounds:

  1. Switch browsers. Firefox and Maxthon are smarter when it comes to sending links.
  2. Edit the Registry. Run Regedit.exe and find the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security (that’s for Outlook 2003; the key will have a different version number for Office XP or Office 2000). Under that key, add a new String value, name it Level1Remove, and fill in the value as url. Restart Outlook and your URL-sending capability is restored.
  3. Uncomfortable with hacking the Registry? Get Ken Slovak’s free Attachment Options add-in for Outlook. It adds a new tab to the Tools, Options dialog box, giving you the freedom to decide which attachments are blocked and which are allowed.

Why is wireless security so difficult?

Dwight Silverman just set up a new PC for his parents. It’s the thankless job that all geeks do; in fact, I think Dwight was really smart to get this over with now, so he can enjoy the holidays more.

One aspect of the setup struck me in its absence, and I asked about it in the comments section of Dwight’s original post. Did he enable the security settings on the folks’ new wireless router? Yes, but only the old and very weak WEP instead of the newer and more secure WPA and WPA2 standards.

I don’t knock Dwight for making this choice. Setting up WPA is still too hard, and it can take a long time to get all the hardware talking properly.

Two years ago, around the time that Windows XP SP2 came out, Microsoft announced a standard called Windows Connect Now, which was supposed to make it ridiculously easy to set up WPA security with a USB flash key. So far, though, only one router supports the standard, D-Link’s DI-624S. And it doesn’t work as advertised.

There is a workaround that allows you to use the wizard and a flash key to set up WPA on a network even when the router doesn’t support the standard. I’ll try to post those instructions later this week.

Meanwhile, shame on the router community for not making it easier to turn on effective security.

Where’s the Office 12 code?

Joe Wilcox was at the PDC and had these post-show thoughts:

Much of the [Office] stuff Microsoft showed off seemed very insubstantial, like works in progress. Early works in progress. The forms stuff demoed well, yet felt very surface area. Maybe the breakout sessions got down to business (I simply couldn’t go to them all). But I talked to some other people checking out the Office breakouts and most had more questions than answers.

Maybe the Office folks are holding back–and that would be pretty reasonable this far from launch–but I don’t think so. Office gave out no code at the show, not even rough, preliminary stuff. Unlike the Windows team. Sure Windows Vista is rough, but developers for the platform have early code. If Office System also is a development platform and developers are supposed to be preparing now for Office 12 release, where’s the code?

Joe, that’s the way the Office team has been for as long as I can remember. The Windows team puts out lots of beta releases. After Windows Vista Build 5219, which was handed out to PDC attendees, they should release Beta 2 to a very wide audience, with monthly builds for technical beta testers and several release candidates. Knowledgeable product people are all over the beta newsgroups to answer questions in most areas.

This is the pattern the Windows team has followed on previous betas as well. If you’re a technical tester, you better have a high-speed connection, because you’ll be downloading lots and lots of bits.

By contrast, Office usually drops two betas, period. Interim builds are practically unheard of, and the level of information sharing in the beta newsgroups is similarly sparse. Testers talk to one another, but they don’t get much feedback from the product team.

Maybe I’m wrong and this will all change on this cycle, but I certainly wouldn’t bet on it.