It appears there is a bug in Mail.app in Yosemite, which affects pasting text copied from Microsoft Word (and only Word). Chunks of text are omitted at random, which can be quite annoying.

I don’t use Word that much (BBEdit forever) so didn’t notice this, but was able to replicate the issue. My default message format in Mail.app is Plain Text, as used by all civilised people. My guess is that there is an issue in whatever code Mail uses to convert the RTF (Rich Text Format) copied from Word into plain text. On a hunch I switched to Rich Text in Mail (Format/Make Rich Text) and that seemed to work OK. However I did not perform extensive testing so it may well be this is not a 100% reliable workaround.

Other solutions mooted online involve pasting from Word into another application (like TextEdit, Pages, or TextWrangler) and then pasting from there into Mail.app. Hopefully Apple will address this issue in an update to Mail.

People being people, and academics being academics, there is often a lot of complaining about IT support – no matter where you are. But this example is one of the worst I’ve ever heard about. The US Ambassador to Kenya “ordered a commercial Internet connection installed in his embassy office bathroom so he could work there on a laptop not connected to the Department email system”

Apparently the US State Department is currently in the middle of rolling out a new, ‘modern’, desktop suite, based on Microsoft Office 2010…

The jokes just write themselves, but in the interests of taste, I’ll stop here!

I don’t like Java very much. Desktop programs written in it tend to have horrid user interfaces, and the history of browser-based exploits mean I refuse to use any website which wants to run a Java applet. Java is one part of my ‘unholy trinity’ of programs – Flash, Java, Adobe Reader – to try to avoid installing on your computer.

The most recent update to Java on the Mac brings ‘feature parity’ with the Windows release in a most unfortunate manner – the installer now offers to install the ask.com browser toolbar, and reset your browser homepage. Stay classy, Oracle.

Thankfully most Mac science software (e.g. ImageJ or TopCAT) which requires Java does not require the Oracle package, but instead asks for Apple’s Java 6 package, which can be installed automatically the first time you run a program which asks for it, and does not include a browser plugin.

In summary, if you have a problem which you think can be solved by installing Java on your computer, you’re wrong – you’re just adding one more problem to the pile!

Queen’s recently established a printing policy which is aiming to replace desktop printers with shared Xerox multi-function devices (printer/copiers) in central areas. While we’re not making use of their printing facilities at the moment, in the medium-term, once all our building moves are sorted out, we will be.

If you’re using a computer which is on the Queen’s Active Directory then the new campus-wide print queues show up automatically – otherwise a little effort is required. I have a set of notes on how to print to these queues from OS X (10.8 & later), Windows 7, and Linux, though the latter case is ‘difficult’.

Mac users who are part of the Munki-managed service will be able to install these print queues with a single click from Managed Software.