Microsoft Excel 2003 has a bug which has frustrated me for a while. I’ve submitted it as a bug, but I’ve also described it here, with pictures, since the Microsoft Office site doesn’t let you embed pictures in bug requests.

Let’s take it one step at a time, and show the bug in action. Given a folder with two files called ‘Book1′ (not Book1.xls - there’s no extension on the filename) and ‘Book1.txt’, your explorer window looks like this (click images for larger versions):

Now, in the traditional Windows fashion, double-clicking on a file which Windows cannot associate with an application, for example if it has an unrecognised file extension, or if it doesn’t have one at all, Windows presents a dialog asking the user which application they’d like to open the file in:

When you select Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and press OK, Excel pops up, as expected. But look what happens - because the file isn’t a .xls (or other Excel-associated extension) file, it’s passed the file through the text import filter - but the wrong file has been opened!:

Amusing, yet frustrating that a product which otherwise is so solid has such a simple error of logic!

On 28th July 2006 at 10.55am, a cloud in heaven was reserved for a little angel. Bethany Ann Booker was 7lbs 14oz at birth.

Needless to say, I’m proud as punch!

TechCrunch is reporting that the Skype protocol has been cracked.

This could be a very good thing. Skype’s finance model is derived from people buying credit for items such as a live incoming phone number in a given country (SkypeIn) or make phone calls to existing real telephone numbers (SkypeOut).

Therefore, I can’t see why (assuming their protocol and servers are secure) Skype shouldn’t now open up the protocol and allow third-party developers to develop clients of their own, or integrate Skype into popular multi-network IM/voice clients like Trillian.

I really hate it when websites don’t give you any warning of links which will open in a new window. A lot of sites provide a little icon, or a small superscript comment, or even a tooltip. However, some don’t.

The one site that really annoyed me was Google’s GMail. I always like to keep the left-most tab in firefox on my Google Personalised Home. When a message arrives, I click the GMail header and am consequently presented with the GMail Inbox. Perfect.

In the top-left corner of the GMail homepage is a link back to Google Home (whether personalised or not - it ‘knows’) which opens in a new window. Which is very frustrating if you have lots of tabs open in the current window. After looking for an ‘Open in this tab’ extension and failing to find one, I decided to create my own.

Enter thisTab! - a Mozilla Firefox extension to override the behaviour for a link which uses the target=’_blank’ parameter to open a new window. Note that this won’t work with javascript popup links.

As this is my first foray into any kind of ‘plugin’ development, I’d love to know what people think.

The Sitening Blog led me to the Websites as graphics tool, created by Aharef. It’s a great little tool, which produced the following image:

This is a map of the jamesbooker.co.uk homepage with its associated tags mapped out. Here’s a legend (pulled from sitening.com - hope they don’t mind!)

• blue: for links (the A tag)
• red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
• green: for the DIV tag
• violet: for images (the IMG tag)
• yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
• orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
• black: the HTML tag, the root node
• gray: all other tags