Monthly Archives: November 2010

Numbers in perspective

While it is very nice to read about Microsoft’s free cloud service for research:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/11/18/democratizing-research-with-the-cloud.aspx

I couldn’t help noticing that their perspective on numbers are a bit peculiar.

 

msft_and_numbers

 

The comparison image they use even fail to link to their sources, you need to type them yourself:

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.php

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/genbankstats.html

Link to original image in larger format:

http://blogs.technet.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-80-54/8132.NCBI_2D00_lg.bmp

While I don’t know much about DNA base pairs, I thought the number of people worldwide was a bit of… Now I know more about the number of base pairs – by verifying the source…

This reminds me of the essay by Edward Tufte on NASA’s use of PowerPoint:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1

How to: not do a cumulative update

Microsoft has once again discovered a critical issue in one of their updates. In this case it’s the (2010) October CU for SharePoint 2010.

more info: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/11/05/critical-information-about-the-sharepoint-server-2010-october-cumulative-update.aspx

Quote:

Microsoft has discovered a critical issue in the recently released October Cumulative Updates for SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010, and we have removed the files from download availability.  If you have already downloaded the CU, do not install it.  If you have installed the CU, please contact Microsoft Support for assistance.  We will be posting additional information about the issue here as soon as we have it, and will make the Cumulative Update available for download again as soon as the issue has been fully resolved.

Here is a follow up with more information, details and a workaround:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/11/06/details-and-workaround.aspx

Update: Updates now republished: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/12/01/october-2010-cumulative-updates-for-sharepoint-amp-project-server-2010-republished.aspx

Outlook fails to send mails with international/extended characters – Misslyckad klientåtgärd

After an unknown update to my main Windows environment, this error message appeared when I tried to send some emails:

image

Why, yes… its in Swedish. It mentions that an operation failed… And asks if the information was helpful.

Not really, some more details as to what failed and what to do about it would have been more helpful.

After scratching my head a bit I figured that it was because the name of the recipient had an extended or international character in their name.

So… my address-book is full of proper names, with é’s and åäö’s etc. in them.

Now Outlook can’t send emails to them and the only available workaround at the moment is to remove the offending characters from the name… welcome back to 1996 😐

Can anyone tell me what’s going on and how to get operations back to normal again?