January 23rd, 2010
A little bit of history (Word 5.1 1992)
With Microsoft Word 5 there was a small little option that allows you to tell Word to save every open document at a regular time interval (15 minutes for example). How this functionality was implemented was trivial. It only performed a regular “Save” or “Save As…” at the parameterized time interval. This worked nicely and everything was in order.
With such an implementation two goals where reached:
- If the Word crashed, you will have, in the worst case, lost 15 minutes of work
- If you made a mistake and forget to save your work, you will have, in the worst case, lost 15 minutes of work
Current time (Word 2008)
Somewhere in-between Word 5.1 and Word 2008 (I cannot say more precisely, because here, at home, we had such an upgrade path), this functionality didn’t disappear but the implementation changed. Now this functionality has been splited in two parts.
- The first one being fairly useless and called “Always create a backup copy” which as the name says only create a “Backup Copy of <your_document_name>” file for every document you created.
- The second one being “Save AutoRecovery info every:”. This option allows Microsoft Word to recover a file after a crash.
Everything seems to be in order, except that now we don’t have a protection against the user who quit Word without saving his whole day work (Yes it can happen, believe me).
Word Backup
Having recognized the problem and noticed that there is no “ready-to-use” solution, I decided to create a palliative solution. The provided piece of software reintroduces the old behavior of Word 5 with the newest version of it. An additional benefit of this script, when run on Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6, is that you not only have access to the latest backup version but also to the history of it thanks to Time Machine.
Download
WordBackup 1.0
WordBackup 1.1
[update]The new version provided, logs the saved documents’ name under /Library/Logs/WordBackup.log[/update]
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June 23rd, 2009
The software that I’ll definitively not recommend you. The question is why? Because:
- With version 3 and 4, I were not able to use it easily with my bootcamp partition (see here).
- The support was with version 3 non existant (an email posted on 8 july 2007 is still unanswered) and with version 4 still have no clue, after more than 6 months of availability, of basic problems.
- The company does not seems to improve its product but to add as much as possible features even if still in “beta” stage.
- The software engineers still don’t know to programm an application that is location independant.
- The software engineers aren’t able to write meaningfull error messages
What do you think that such a message can be meaning. Of course that the location of your currently installed application is not ok.
In any case I would recommend you to use VMWare that works a lot better (according to my test) or VirtualBox.
Virtual box is becoming definitively an interesting alternative. It’s free, it works without hitch with Windows 7 and Open Solaris. The only point is that you cannot move the application away from the /Application directory (yes it’s one reason because I dismissed Parallels, but VirtualBox is free and comes from Unix System).
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June 13th, 2009
Quelque photos du bol d’or 2009.
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May 3rd, 2009
- Genève
- Col de la Faucille
- La Cure
- Le Sentier
- Le Pont
- Vallorbe
- Pontarlier
- La Brévine
- Le Locle
- La Chaux-de-Fonds
- St-Imier
- Tavannes
- Moutier
- Balstahl
- Zofingen
- Sursee
- Beromünster
- Muri
- Affoltern am Albis
- Zürich
Total: 356 Km parcourus en l’espace de 9h environ avec une bonne heure de pause à midi.
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April 28th, 2009
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April 22nd, 2009
Tiré du magasine reflex, numéro 7, avril 2009, p37.
Si même les professeur de l’EPFZ se mettent à nous raconter des sornettes… En tout cas on sait pourquoi cette personne n’est pas allée enseigner dans un institut francophone, son sérieux aurait pu ête mis en doute.
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April 17th, 2009
Vue sur l’embouchure de la vallée du Rhône peu après la sortie du tunnel de Chexbres en direction de lausanne. Photo prise avec l’iPhone.
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April 5th, 2009
Soit c’est un peu kitsch et un peu cher, mais pour faire fureur lors d’une invitation il n’y a pas mieux.
Plus d’info ici.
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March 18th, 2009
As preamble it should be noted that Seagate had the last time huge problem with some of its hard drive firmwares (read more here or here).
Hopefully I have no Seagate hard drive in my MacPro, but I had a doubt wether the drive in my LaCie d2 Quadra is a Seagate or not. The only possibility I had was to open the case and see the label on the hard drive itself. I let you guess what I see on the label. Bingo you named it Seagate.
And this is were it become interesting. As I was aware of the problem I directly went to the Seagate support web site to check if my hard drive (with the product number and the serial number) was concerned. Both the serial and product number check told me that my hard drive was concerned. I then follow the pretty complex guide in order to upgrade the fimrware. After some amount of time the updater says that my firmware cannot be updated.
Of course I take contact with the customer support in order to determine if my drive was affected or not. Here’s their first answer after 4 days:
Dear Jerome Paschoud
Thank you for sending your Seagate E-mail inquiry.
I apologize for the late reply. I am going to refer your e-mail to one of our Team Leads for information on whether this specific drive can be updated or not. They should be in contact with you shortly. Thank you for your patience.
Regards
The short period was of course not so short and after 20 more days I send once againg an email asking for an answer to my problem. Here’s the answer:
Hello Jerome,
You will need to contact the original place of purchase for any support on your specific drive. If further assistance is needed please let us know.
Regards
Conclusion:
- It tooks nearly a month to Seagate support to tell me that they can do nothing for me.
- After nearly a month I still don’t know if my drive is affected or not (that is, I still don’t know if I can use/trust it)
- The promise that they will answer my question is not fulfilled
- I’ll never ever buy anymore a Seagate product.
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