I’ve been using Microsoft Office 2007 for about four months now. I didn’t warm to it when I first started using it, but I positively loathe it now, especially Word 2007!

I’ve been having to write a fair amount of documentation of late so I’ve spent many hours hammering out line upon line of text in Word 2007.

Can anyone explain how the ribbon toolbar is UI improvement over previous versions of Word?

I find it baffling, where the hell has half of the stuff that used to be a couple of clicks away gone?

Amusing that there’s software out there to bring back the old Office 2003 look and feel!

I think this is in the Parallels FAQ’s somewhere but I thought it’d be worth blogging about.

I was trying to setup my USB printer to work from Windows under Parallels on my Mac. I installed the relevant drivers but couldn’t get Windows to recognise that my printer was connected via USB, even though it was configured fine in OS X.

The answer is to download and install Apple Bonjour for Windows. Once you have done this, open OS X System preferences and find your USB printer under the Printer & Fax section.

Then choose the Sharing tab and make sure your USB printer is selected for sharing. Then hop back to Windows and fire up the Bonjour printer wizard. Step through the wizard and you should be able to select your USB printer. Make sure you select the printer model as ‘Generic / Postscript’. Complete the configuration and you’ll be able to print via USB from Windows!

A small gotcha when I was testing out the native PHP SOAP libraries. No doubt this is documented somewhere and more seasoned PHP programmers will be aware of this…..

Whilst testing out a simple webservice that I had created, I had problems invoking the service methods that I had defined. The error message was suggesting that the SOAP response was not well formed XML. On investigating further, I noticed that a number of characters were missing off of the SOAP XML response. Specifically the closing ‘/>’ characters to close the XML document root node.

After much head scratching, I turned to Google where it took me a long time to track down the cause of the problem. In my web service class file, I had a number of blank lines after the closing ‘?>’ scriplet block. For every blank line, a character would be stripped off the SOAP response XML.

After I cleaning up the whitespace I started getting valid responses again.

Jim Priest has set up a Selenium area on his Wiki. Hopefully as more people start adopting Selenium there will be plenty more resources added to the list.

Blog entries from yours truly are mentioned, thanks Jim!

Check it out…

Selenium Wiki