Science and Nature nix Office 2007

Rob Weir reports that Science magazine, one of the leading scientific journals, is not accepting files in Microsoft Office 2007 format due to incompatibility with previous versions of Office:

Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.

(emphasis in original)

It gets even worse: Microsoft apparently did not make the new Equation Editor backwards compatible:

Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations.

Nature, another journal similar in range and prestige to Science, has the same problem:

We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and typesetting programs.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia, never agree to a battle of wits in which iocane powder is a factor, and never write papers for publication in Microsoft Word.

(h/t commenter james at Brad DeLong's blog)

Automatic software updates: How and how not to do it

I have several software packages on my Mac which have auto-update features: Microsoft Office, Adobe CS2, and of course MacOSX.

There is a right way and a wrong way to handle auto-updates. The right way is to have some regular schedule (weekly for Apple, monthly for Microsoft). That way I can schedule the update for some time when it won't interrupt what I am doing (e.g., first thing Monday morning, for Apple), even if the update process needs an administrator password, as Apple's does.

The wrong way to do it is to go looking for updates when I start up the program, as Adobe does. The concept should be simple: If I start up a program, it's because I want to use that program, and I want to use it NOW, not 15 minutes later when the updates (which almost always require me to quit the program I'm trying to use) are complete. As Vince Flanders so eloquently put it: I don't care about your $#@!$#@ problems, I want you to solve my $#@!$#@ problems.

Why is software so #$%^&#% bad?

There is a tremendous amount of bad software out there, and it seems to be getting worse.

Take, for instance, the backup software that came with the hard drive I bought last week. The default behavior is to back up certain types of files that many people have, and only those files. If I want to back up other types of files (because I use other kinds of software, some of which is decidedly not rare) with this program, I have to manually add the other file types, and not miss a file type. This is exactly backwards.
The point of a backup is so that, if the worst case scenario occurs, I can restore my files to the state in which they were at the time of the most recent backup. Thus the default behavior should be to back up any and every file type. Optionally, it can let me choose to not back up certain file types or certain folders, but it certainly should not fail to back up a file type that I forgot to add to the list.

I've also been having trouble with my income tax software. I have been using TurboTax, because when I first started doing my taxes on the computer TurboTax was the only Mac tax package which would allow me to do New Hampshire income taxes.^* In past years TurboTax has worked reasonably well. This year, however, one of the forms I use sent the step-by-step interview into a loop that had to be broken by manually going to the next stage. Now, Intuit seems to be confused about whether my return has been accepted: I e-filed Monday evening and got an e-mail timestamped 04:14 EDT Tuesday saying the return was accepted, but the program thinks that Intuit doesn't know yet whether the return has been accepted. Not good quality control on Intuit's part here.

I haven't even gotten into Microsoft Office yet--I'll save that for another rant.

^*Yes, New Hampshire has an income tax. See RSA 77:1 and 77:3.

Mac hard drives don't speak Vietnamese

From the Help Desk column of Macworld, April 2007 dead tree edition, page 89:

Adobe's Vietnam Danger Do you use the $599 Adobe Photoshop CS2 ... or $499 Adobe Illustrator CS2 ...? Check the /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Legal.localized and /Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS2/Legal.localized folders for a file called Tiêng Viêt.html. If you find this file, delete it immediately. OS X can interpret the special characters as illegal file names, resulting in damage to your hard drive's directory that even Disk Utility's First Aid feature (/Applications/Utilities) can't fix.

The offending characters are ế and ệ, where the second accent indicates tone. Note also that if you navigate with the Finder the folder in question will be called "Legal".

I have both programs installed on my desktop and laptop. The desktop is OK. The laptop has some damage, and Disk Utility won't repair it. Unfortunately, the external hard drive to which I backed up yesterday (which took all afternoon) promptly went south and won't even mount.

UPDATE: The external drive mounted on my desktop Mac, but it's hosed beyond Disk Utility's ability to repair it. Time for a new backup drive.

LATER UPDATE: The Research Computing Center people were able to fix the laptop drive. As for the backup drive, I'm backing up the backup to my office machine (which has plenty of free space) so that I can erase the backup drive and, if all goes well, get that working and save myself a trip to Best Buy tonight.