If you’ve been trying to figure out what the final episode of The Sopranos was all about, read this thought-provoking deconstruction.

As I noted in the previous post, I’ve been tearing my hair out for nearly two weeks now trying to debug a problem with the WordPress 2.2 upgrade that caused many administrative tasks to fail with an error that tells me “You don’t have permission to do that.”

I found lots of other people (here and here and here, for example) having similar problems, and none of the fixes/workarounds they suggested had any effect.

This morning I stumbled upon the cause and the solution. The cause is a snippet of script code that I used in the sidebar for this site, allowing a third-party ad network (Text Link Ads) to serve up ads. When that code was included in the sidebar, the error occurred. When I removed it, the errors went away. As it turns out, the Text Link Ads people have some alternatives to offer, one of which is a WordPress plugin with matching theme widget. When I switched to that option instead, the error messages vanished.

So, if you’re using WordPress 2.2+ and you’re experiencing the “You don’t have permission to do that” error, look for any third-party script code in your template. It could well be the culprit.

We now return to normal posting. Thank goodness.

Well, it’s been an interesting week. I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.2 last week and since then pretty much nothing has worked right.

The latest hassle is that all comments were immediately flagged as spam, without notifying me. I just retrieved about 30 of them from the spam catcher.

I think/hope it’s all fixed now.

Meanwhile, if there are any WordPress experts out there, I’d love to know why just about every administrative task I try (like editing a template in the Theme Editor) is failing with a “You don’t have permission to do that” error. It’s happening to a lot of other people as well, based on the forums at WordPress.org, and no one seems to have an answer. File permissions are correct. This is a squeaky clean installation. I’ve disabled all plugins. Still no joy.

Ugh.

PS: Thanks to Jake for letting me know comments weren’t working. I just thought it was a quiet week.

Update: The WordPress bug is described here and here and here. This comment is a perfect description of what’s happening to me. However, the recommended fix (and this variant) do nothing to solve the problem. And just to reiterate, it’s not a file permission issue and it is not resolved by disabling all plugins. Ugh again.

Update 2: All fixed. Details here.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, permissions

Stopwatches at 30 paces.

Dylan Tweney:

The results show that Safari is slower than both IE 7 and Firefox in the login page and message index tests, in both cases by a substantial margin. Only when loading Google Calendar does Safari have a slight edge, clocking in at 12.8 seconds to IE’s 17 seconds. But even there, Firefox has both the other browsers beat.

Scott Hanselman:

Safari on Windows is not slow. The question is, are you willing to put up with a Mac-like interface, wonky text anti-aliasing and some weird rendering, without your FireFox plugins? I’m going to give it a try and see how it goes. It’s a lot to ask.

Bonus: Scott has video.

I am not getting in the middle of this one.

Josh has a good question:

Ultimate Extras, Where are you?

Indeed. Seven months after Vista’s RTM and more than four months after the January 30 retail kickoff, there are no “cutting-edge programs or innovative services,” only Hold ‘Em, which lets you play poker against imaginary opponents, and DreamScene, which allows you to use a video clip as your desktop background.

That’s it?

Update: Here’s how to see if you have Ultimate Extras installed.

The other day I mentioned what happens when you don’t pay attention to potentially embarrassing data that might be buried in Word documents. So I was especially amused to find an example on Microsoft’s own site.

Microsoft UK offers a FAQ on licensing, which in turn contains a link to a “Virtual-machine environment brief” (link leads to a file in Word .doc format). When I opened the document in Word 2007, I saw a slew of proofreading and editing changes, plus this comment:

Oops.

Let me reiterate a point I made in the earlier post. The programs in Office 2007 automatically expose this sort of hidden data by default every time you open or save a document. The idea is to make it impossible for you not to notice that your draft document contains artifacts from the editing process. If the person who posted this document had been using Word 2007, they might have been spared this embarrassment.

I thought it was just George W. Bush who called the world’s biggest search company “the Google.”

But apparently everyone in Washington does it. Witness this report from today’s Washington Post:

I’m updating my style guide now.

No, not the robot from 2001. I’m talking about the Hardware Abstraction Layer in the Windows NT family. This week, I was using the Microsoft System Information tool (Msinfo32.exe) to gather some details about three systems here in my office. I was surprised to see that all three machines reported different HAL versions. Checking in with my Windows Vista Inside Out co-authors, I learned that they’re all seeing the same number:

6.00.6000.16386

That’s on a total of seven systems, including one here. But on two systems, both Dells, I’m seeing later build numbers:

6.00.6000.16407
6.00.6000.20500

A quick search turns up nothing to explain the differences.

If you’re running Vista, do me a favor and check the HAL version on your system. Run Msinfo32 from the Run box (Windows logo key+R) of from Search box on the Start menu. Look about two-thirds of the way down the System Summary page, above the user name and time zone fields. If you see a number other than 16386, leave a comment here with more details about your system (especially mfr and OEM/retail status)

Update: Microsoft’s John Gray posts a comment that explains it all. Executive summary: these are fixes described in KB 929777 and 930261, delivered via Windows Update or preinstalled by some OEMs. During and after beta testing, I remember hearing many complaints from testers with Nvidia chipsets about performance problems, crashes, and general instability, especially in configurations with lots of RAM (3GB or more). This is the fix, apparently. Read John’s entire comment for more details and some interesting links about the differences between XP and Vista dual-branch development.

Last week, a company I worked with e-mailed me a contract and a cover memo explaining the contract’s terms in plain English. Both documents were in Word document (.doc) format. What the sender didn’t know was that the cover memo contained some comments, written by various people as the document went through the approval process. When I opened it in Word 2007, the comments appeared in the margin, giving me an insight the sender never intended for me to have. (The default settings for all Office 2007 programs automatically display hidden comments and tracked changes whenever you open or save a document.)

In this case, the damage was minimal. In fact, I worked with the folks involved to get the document scrubbed so that they wouldn’t be embarrassed the next time they sent it to a potential contractor. But with a more sensitive negotiation or a less friendly relationship, the consequences could have been catastrophic. So I thought it might be useful to share the details with you so you can avoid potentially embarrassing or incriminating yourself with a document you create.

Continue reading “What’s hidden in your Word documents?” →

Kent Newsome is doing an interesting experiment, asking some of his favorite bloggers to help him rebuild his reading list. I’m in Group 3 (with some pretty good company, I might add). Kent wants me to recommend 5 of my favorite blogs. Happy to oblige.

1. Scott Hanselman is the rare programmer who can write and think and chew gum and sling code at the same time. His writing is always entertaining, generally useful, and often inspired (far more often than pure chance would explain). I look forward to reading anything he posts.

2. Jon Udell went to Microsoft and appears to have negotiated a contract that allowed him to keep his soul and his sense of humor. Well done! He writes about big-picture topics with genuine insight and has given me all sorts of good ideas on how to work smarter.

3. Long Zheng is a whip-smart, funny kid from Australia who will someday work for Microsoft, who will have to figure out how to harness his creativity. After this spoof of The Matrix, he’ll have to tiptoe past Steve Sinofsky’s office or risk being vaporized.

4. Wondermark is David Malki’s brilliant cartoon, which frequently makes me burst out laughing. There’s very little technology in it (although his strip on a world ruled by Wikipedia is spot on, as is #285, which explores the creative potential of “pirated software and zero social life”):

His perspective is, shall we say, a bit warped; in fact, most of the characters appear to be drawn from Victorian days. If you’re over 40, check out these musings on aging:

• #280; In which Jamie feels Old
• #301; In which Hair Growth is noted

5. And finally, there’s John Walkenbach, proprietor of the J-Walk Blog, whose tag line is “Stuff that may or may not interest you” and is far more often the former than the latter. John is an Excel MVP and author of some authoritative books on Excel. His blog typically has no content on Excel. Which is fine by me.

I’m fascinated with the list Kent has come up with so far. I don’t believe a single one of those sites is on my current reading list. Clicking around turns up several interesting candidates. (Like I need more things to read. Sheesh. However, I was able to immediately reject one site based on a post entitled “I Feel Old,” which begins: “As I mentioned in a previous post, I turned 30 last week…”)