bugs

Microsoft: Excel 2007 bug is skin deep

A bug in Excel 2007 reported earlier this week may be ugly, but it's only skin deep, Microsoft said late Tuesday.

With the bug, results that should have been shown as 65,535 showed instead as 100,000, and a related problem cropped up with 65,536, Microsoft's David Gainer said in a blog posting. But the problem affected how Excel showed the number, not in what the spreadsheet software actually "knows."

"This is an issue in a function that puts numbers in cells, so the values in Excel's memory are actually correct," … Read more

Binary? Decimal? Excel 2007 finds it all so confusing

Microsoft on Tuesday confirmed a bug in Excel 2007 that can cause it to produce erroneous answers for a particular multiplication task.

Specifically, the problem can crop up when the answer to a multiplication problem should result in 65,535. You fans of binary arithmetic don't need to be told that's 2 to the 16th power minus one, or maximum integer that can be described with two bytes, counting up from zero. So it's a good bet some binary-to-decimal translation is involved in the problem.

A repair is in the works, Microsoft said, without sharing much more … Read more

TV viewing to be plagued by a rising tide of snipes and bugs

Monday's New York Times highlights one of my growing pet peeves: increasingly invasive on-screen ads and information that are invading all manner of TV programs. The article ("As the Fall Season Arrives, TV Screens Get More Cluttered") explores some of the supposed reasons behind the trend, which runs the gamut from "bugs" (channel logos) and on-screen data dumps (news and financial market tickers, scoreboards), to--in my opinion, the top annoyance--"snipes" (animated ads, for either upcoming programs or sponsored products).

On news, financial, and sports programming, I'm a lot more forgiving of … Read more

The Gizmo Report: One new iPod classic, two new iPod bugs

As I said last week in my post about Apple's iPod announcements, I ordered a new 160GB iPod classic as soon as the Apple Store was back online.

It arrived today (Monday)--five days later, from Shanghai--with my custom engraving. I think that's pretty darn excellent.

The iPod packaging has gotten a lot smaller. A box the size of those that contained my first two iPods (a third-generation model, then a fourth-generation iPod when the third-gen model died) could probably hold about six of the new iPod classic packages. I saw the new iPod nano packaging at a local Apple Store this evening, and it's much smaller--and very cool, since it presents the iPod itself under… Read more

Sidesplitting tech comics

Whoever said geeks have no sense of humor was wrong--laughably so. Some of the funniest comics out there are Web comics (or those rendered for the Web,) written by techies, for the techies who love them. Here's a bushel of geeky favorites, in no particular order.

1. xkcd Randall Monroe, physicist, cartoonist, and at-heart romantic, is behind xkcd, a Web comic whose name curiously holds no mathematically obscure meaning. In his own words, Monroe's stick-figure style "occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)." See? Funny.… Read more

BugLabs grows the open-source hardware ecosystem

In the beginning was the Chumby. And on the second day the community created the BUG, the latest entrant in the open-source hardware market.

Open-source hardware hasn't really taken off...yet. But Dave Rosenberg today alerted me to a new player in the space from BugLabs, which hopes to develop in much the same way that open-source software does. Here's BUG's premise:

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use, open source hardware modules, each capable of producing one or more Web services. These modules snap together physically and the services connect together logically to enable users to easily build, program and share innovative devices and applications. With BUG, we don't define the final products - you do.

Silicon Alley Insider took a look and likes what it saw. But the most interesting thing from its report was how small the (initial) market is:… Read more

My iPhone's metrics: Various measures of life with the iPhone

Like the Harper's Index, here are some numbers I've observed over the past 40 days... (well, 42 days actually).

Number of days in my possession: 42

Number of iPhones I purchased: 2

Number of which I kept: 1

Percent, to the nearest whole integer, of commission I took for getting a certain someone their iPhone: 0

Approximate number of hours waited in line: 10

Approximate number of days after I waited in line until the iPhone was sold out: 1

Number of people who cut in front of me in the line: 40

Number of people I allowed … Read more

Southern Cal gets its due at Twiistup 2

Last night, members of the Los Angeles tech community (and one Bono impersonator) gathered at the Air Conditioned Supper Club in Venice for Twiistup 2, the second of a series of Valley-style blowouts for Southern California Web companies and geeks. In front of a backlit, Mondrian-style bar, attendees of the sold-out event talked tech, networked, and vetted business plans over music spun by DJ Quickie Mart. I had a chance to talk with most of the event's "showoffs," two of which--community site Faqqly and the social shopping site ThisNext--we've already covered. Here's a brief … Read more

Life with the iPhone after 30 days: More shortcuts and more freezes

I usually get up in the mornings and go to my office and turn on my desktop CPU to check the day's news, my email, etc. But before I even turn on my desktop on a given morning, the iPhone, which sits atop my office desk, will now tell me if I have new email that has come in overnight. (Note: I have to leave my iPhone outside of my room because the GSM signal interferes with my iPod/JBL music dock's speakers, making that noise--you know that noise). Being aware that I got email overnight is nice, … Read more