Excel Bug

If you have signed a contract to work 850 hours at $77.10 per hour, you may want to send back the Lincoln Navigator.  An Excel 2007 calculation but was discovered this week.  Open Excel and enter the formula =77.1*850 in any cell.  The result will be displayed as 100000, rather than the correct answer 65535.  It turns out there are 12 known floating point numbers near 65,535 and 65,536 which are calculated incorrectly in this fashion.  "Of the 9.214*10^18 different floating point numbers that Excel 2007 can store, there are 6 floating point numbers (using binary representation) between 65534.99999999995 and 65535, and 6 between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 that cause this problem" (bink).  Microsoft is working on a patch and will release it as soon as possible to the normal update cycle.  Older versions of Excel do not display the bug.

The Ultimate Steal

The Ultimate Steal.  Microsoft is making an offer students can't refuse.  Students can now purchase Office 2007 Ultimate edition for a mere $59.95.  Who is eligible?: "...students who are actively enrolled at educational institutions and have a valid e-mail address from the institution" (Microsoft press release).  Youl know that Palomar email address that you thought was useless?  No longer!  The promotion is active not in the US, Canada and the UK, and will become effective in France, Italy and Spain beginning September 20.  It will run through next April.  "Office Ultimate 2007 includes the entire Microsoft Office toolset that students are accustomed to working with and more, including Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager, Microsoft Office Access™ 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007."  Click here for the Ultimate Steal web site.

Blogging with your iPhone

Typepad from Six Apart is the first blogging company to offer blogging tools for the iPhone and the new iPod Touch. "The TypePad iPhone application was designed from the ground up to be optimized for Apple's innovative multi-touch iPhone display. TypePad bloggers can easily create new posts, edit existing posts, manage comments from their community, and configure settings to send photos directly from their iPhone to their blog. The TypePad iPhone application will also work on the recently announced iPod touch" (TypePad press release). Within a day, Moveable Type (oops, I earlier said WordPad, sorry) also announced an iPhone plugin for their service.

Parental Cell Phone Control

AT&T this week announced a new service: "AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless," which permits parents to "stay in touch with their children while controlling the children's mobile phone use. AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless™ is a feature-rich service that allows a parent to set usage limits on a child's talk time, text messages, instant messages (IMs) and downloads, manage how and when a child can communicate, restrict access to mobile Web sites and allocate minutes among users of shared wireless plans."  If you are one who does not find multiple contradictions in the phrase "AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless" you may want to investigate the service.  Click here for the AT&T press release, here for more information on the service, which is priced at $4.99 per month per line.