Windows 7 Ungodly Mode

Please. No need to drop me a line. I didn’t post anything here about God Mode in Windows 7 because it’s a great name for a very dull, very old capability.

If you’ve fallen for the “God Mode” hype, take a look at the Windows Club post called God Mode: Old wine in new bottle. There you’ll see that God Mode is really just an old Vista trick of dubious value that also performed, somewhat differently, in Windows XP.

Definitely a yawner…

Finally, details on the Custom XML modifications in Word 2007 effective January 10

Last week I posted a rather detailed discussion of the Custom XML modifications that Microsoft was implementing in Word 2007, to comply with a court order that found MS violated a patent by i4i.

Now, at looooooong last, we have technical details about what’s changing in Word 2007 (and therefore in Office 2007). Knowledge Base article 978951 addresses the issue:

Versions of Office Word 2007 that are distributed by Microsoft after January 10, 2010 no longer read the custom XML markup that may be contained within .docx, .docm, or .xml files. The new versions of Office Word 2007 can still open these files, but any custom XML markup is removed. Custom XML markup in Word documents is visible in the Office Word user interface as pink (the default color) tag names surrounding text in a document…

Office Word content controls are not affected by this update. Content controls are a common method of structuring document content and mapping content to the XML data that is stored in a document…

Custom XML markup that is stored within Word 97-2003 document (*.doc) files is not affected by this update.

Ribbon XML and Ribbon Extensibility are not affected by this update. The Word object model is not changed by this update. However some Word object model methods that deal with custom XML markup may return different results.

Sound confusing? Yeah, it is, particularly because MS isn’t changing content controls, but it is zapping manually defined custom XML – but only in Word 2007 docx, docm and XML files.

I have absolutely no idea how these changes map to the patent infringement judgment, and would welcome any enlightening words in the Comments to this post.

MS-DEFCON 4: Time to get patched

It looks like the December Black Tuesday patches have stabilized.

As usual, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth with the gigantic Internet Explorer patch update, known as MS09-072 or KB 976325, but you’re used to those by now, right? Besides, you use Firefox (or Chrome of Opera), and you realize that you have to apply the Internet Explorer patches to keep Windows safe, but you wouldn’t actually use IE, right?

There’s one lingering glitch in the patches: installing MS09-073 / KB 973904 can introduce weird bugs in the way Microsoft’s text converters work. (The patch only applies to Windows XP and 2000.) If you install the patch and suddenly get either of these messages while trying to open a file:

Word cannot start the converter mswrd632
Cannot load Word for Windows 6.0 files

you’ve fallen victim to the bug in the MS09-073 patch. See Knowledge Base article KB 973904 for a fix.

I think of that as an example of sloppy patching on Microsoft’s part. There doesn’t seem to be any rush to fix the patch, probably because it’s very uncommon – and, hey, it’s for Windows XP, which isn’t high on anybody’s priority list right now. Except, of course, those of you who run Windows XP.

Anyway, I’m moving us to MS-DEFCON 4: There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented here. Check this site to see if you’re affected and if things look OK, go ahead and patch. You should use Microsoft Update to get all outstanding MS patches applied.

Oh. I had a question from a reader about applying all of the patches. Yes, you should apply every Microsoft patch that’s offered to you by Windows Update, even if it’s a patch for a program that you don’t think you have installed. For example, if you’re offered a patch for Outlook, and you don’t think you have Outlook, go ahead and install the patch anyway. It probably won’t hurt anything, and it may be futzing with something behind the scenes.