Monthly Archives: June 2013

A Real Windows 8 Office: Coming Eventually

Windows 8.1 codename “blue”.

Tech

Officially, the big news from Microsoft’s BUILD conference in San Francisco is the release of a preview version of Windows 8. But I’m at least as interested in another nugget from the show: Microsoft is (briefly) showing off a version of PowerPoint which uses the new Windows 8 interface and saying it plans to have new-style Word, Excel and PowerPoint versions ready some time in 2014.

As ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley reports:

Delivering the Gemini Office applications months after Windows 8.1 is released seems to me more like something the old Microsoft rather than the new, more nimble Microsoft, would do. If Microsoft officials are not simply underpromising and actually planning to “overdeliver” by getting these apps into the Windows Store in 2013, the Office team won’t have these new apps ready in time for holiday 2013 — which may or may not matter in the grand, selling scheme.

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How to Be Nice to Tourists: A New Manual for Snooty Parisians

Travel,International

NewsFeed

Updated June 24, 12:24 p.m. EST

Are the French finally feeling the pinch of their struggling economy and embracing the concept that “it pays to be nice”? Tourism offices in Paris–a city notorious for being unwelcoming to foreigners–are hoping to avoid losing visitors to friendlier destinations by distributing a handbook on being more courteous, reports Reuters. 

(MORE: 10 Things to Do in Paris)

Titled, “Do you speak Touriste?”, the small pamphlet provides specialized advice for retailers, hotels, restaurants, and taxi drivers on how to be more welcoming to Paris’ visitors–half of whom are coming from outside of France. Friendly responses to common scenarios are demonstrated in eight languages, including Spanish, Italian and Chinese.

The guide also offers suggestions to help locals better understand how visitors from various countries prefer to be addressed. “The British like to be called by their first names,” the guide explains, while Italians should be shaken by…

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Reset tiles in the “Start menu” screen on Windows 8

If you ever want to wipe the slate clean of tiles, so to speak, try this:

  1. Start key
  2. Gesture from right to activate the charms menu. For non-touch devices (PCs), do an Alt+C and click Settings:image
  3. Tilesimage
  4. Under “Clear info from personal tiles” click the Clear buttonimage

Done!

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Figure 1

 

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Figure 2
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Figure 3
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Figure 4

Network analysis feature in Process Monitor

Process Monitor from Windows Sysinternals, part of Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, combines the best of familiar but now extinct tools. By extinct I mean deprecated or no longer supported. The warranty* expired.

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Windows 8 PC running Process Monitor
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Events with a highlight filter applied
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Time of Day and Process Name columns
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Right-click menu

The context-sensitive [right-click] menu allows you to highlight a specific number of rows (events displayed horizontally) with only a particular column match highlighted. The example above is right-clicking on the Operation column of a particular row.

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PID, Operation, and Result are columns in photo

But how Process Monitor combines all is just the start. They also allow you to filter. My favorite part of the toolbar in Process Monitor is the

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All five turned on except “profiling”, the default settings
To filter out just the network traffic, click on each highlighted box to deselect except this highlighted icon in the photo below:image
Show Network Activity icon

Then turn on the Autoscroll feature, off by default:

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Autoscroll (Ctrl+A)

Allowing you to get a real-time,scrolling, network [event] trace like this:

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Just remember to turn on the other three show buttons (file, registry, process). Don’t turn Profiling on, unless you want more data. Refer to the onboard [F1] Process Monitor help.

For more information on support lifecycle, and how to download Process Monitor, refer to the references section below:

References

URLs
*Microsoft Support lifecycle website
Windows Sysinternals