One of the problems with the legal profession is the ingrained technophobia, and the inevitable result. To immerse us in the law practice experience, the first week’s reading for the GDLP course was provided in the form of a brick.

I have just finished the Law Practice unit of the Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice (a preadmission requirement to practice law in South Australia). To immerse us in the law practice experience, the first week’s reading was provided in the form of this brick:

One of the problems with the legal profession is the ingrained technophobia, and the inevitable result. A digital copy of the folder could have been provided for a fraction of the cost, at least to the students who would have preferred a portable, searchable alternative.

At least the voluntary donation for the customary casual Friday was for the benefit of Trees for Life, since the Law Society has a sense of humour.

Update: The folder for the second week, Criminal Litigation, has arrived:

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Sometimes you come across legislative drafting that is so bad that there’s no excuse for it: one 152-word sentence that scores 0.0 on the Flesch Reading Ease Test and has a Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level of 63.1.

Section 45 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) provides that corporations must not make arrangements that contain exclusionary provisions or that have the purpose or likely effect of substantially lessening competition.

Section 45A(1) then provides this gem:

Without limiting the generality of section 45, a provision of a contract, arrangement or understanding, or of a proposed contract, arrangement or understanding, shall be deemed for the purposes of that section to have the purpose, or to have or to be likely to have the effect, of substantially lessening competition if the provision has the purpose, or has or is likely to have the effect, as the case may be, of fixing, controlling or maintaining, or providing for the fixing, controlling or maintaining of, the price for, or a discount, allowance, rebate or credit in relation to, goods or services supplied or acquired or to be supplied or acquired by the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding or the proposed parties to the proposed contract, arrangement or understanding, or by any of them, or by any bodies corporate that are related to any of them, in competition with each other.

So what does it mean? Essentially, section 45A merely provides that arrangements between competitors to fix a price are deemed to substantially lessen competition for the purposes of section 45. So why doesn’t it just say that?

Of course, there are reasons why the section has to be so specific. Contracts, arrangements, and understandings aren’t the same thing. Proposed contracts are not contracts. Fixing, controlling, and maintaining are different concepts. But there is no reason to specify every one of those concepts in one sentence.

Word provides some helpful style advice, as well as some other interesting statistics on section 45A. It scores 0.0 on the Flesch Reading Ease Test and has a Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level of 63.1.

Thanks to Australia’s ageing population, at least 13% of Australians have lived long enough to understand it.

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Microsoft has redesigned the Taskbar in Windows 7 in such a way that it closely mimics the Mac OS X Dock, but in doing so Microsoft has ported some of the worst aspects of Mac OS X to Windows.

While the redesigned Taskbar in Windows 7 closely mimics the Mac OS X Dock, it expands on it with Jump Lists, Live Thumbnails, and some other features. Nevertheless, it imports some of the worst aspects of Mac OS X to Windows. In a detailed article, Paul Thurrott detailed some of the new Taskbar’s problems, such as the confusing mixture of shortcuts and running applications.

But I want to address one problem in particular. Whenever I’m working on my computer, I’m not working with applications, I’m working with documents. I don’t want Microsoft Word, I want my research paper. I don’t want Firefox, I want AustLII. With the default configuration on Windows 7, whenever I want to switch to what I want to do, I have an extra click. I have to click the Word icon and then select the document that I want:

The other problem is that there is no way to rearrange the documents. Microsoft finally implemented support for rearranging items on the Taskbar. (Why this wasn’t implemented earlier, leaving users to rely on third-party programs like Taskbar Shuffle and Taskix, is a mystery.) But Microsoft provided no way to rearrange individual documents, stranding my (blank) blog post between two (blank) legal documents.

There are applications for which the new interface makes sense. Windows Media Player is an obvious example:

You never have multiple WMP windows open, so there’s no issue. It’s also important that you can ungroup the documents:

But now you have the Vista Taskbar with large icons and shortcuts scattered all over the place. And there’s still no way to rearrange the documents. What’s the point? In fact, if you set the Taskbar to use small icons like this:

… you just get the Windows Vista Taskbar in Windows 7, so long as you get rid of any pinned applications.

Microsoft should, at least, implement support for rearranging individual documents on the Taskbar. In the default, grouped configuration, this requires nothing special: simply drag the live thumbnails to their desired location. In the ungrouped configuration, this can be done without any hotkeys: dragging any document moves it within its group first and, only when it’s at either end of its group, does the whole group move.

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Windows Media Player 12 has a massive memory leak when reading tags from MP3s, causing it to chew up all available system memory.

Probably the single biggest bug in the Windows 7 Beta was the MP3 corruption bug described in KB961367, which could cut a few seconds from the beginning of MP3 files that had sufficiently large tags. A patch for that bug was distributed via Windows Update to beta participants.

When adding my collection of MP3s to the WMP 12 library, I found that some files were not added correctly. They appeared in the library, but WMP displayed only the filename, instead of the title, artist, album, etc.

At first, I thought the MP3s had been corrupted by the earlier bug or otherwise. However, I found that adding just those files to the library worked fine. Windows Explorer also correctly read the tags. Looking into it further, I found that WMP 12 in the Windows 7 Beta has a massive memory leak when adding files to the library:

WMP appears to read the tags from the MP3s into memory, but never releases that memory after it’s done with the file. Since many of my MP3s have very large album art (several megabytes), WMP continues to chew up memory until it runs out. At that point, it continues to add the files to the library, but without reading out the tags.

Reproducing the Bug

If you don’t have enough MP3s with large album art and want to reproduce the bug, you can download this classic Leo Laporte podcast and add this 6.21 MB photo of Earth as album art. Then, copy the file 1000 or so times. You can use this PowerShell script to do so:

1..1000 | % {
    Copy-Item "TLR20060915.mp3" ("TLR20060915-" + $_ + ".mp3")
    Write-Output ("Copied TLR20060915-" + $_ + ".mp3")
}

Add the folder with those MP3s to your music library, start Windows Media Player, and watch the memory usage skyrocket.

Temporary Workaround

Fortunately, there is an easy fix you can use until Microsoft addresses the bug. When you start WMP for the first time, watch the memory usage in the Task Manager. If the memory usage gets too high, simply close WMP normally and start it again. WMP will resume scanning your library where it left off. You may have to repeat this multiple times, but WMP should add all the files without any problems this way.

If you tried to add your files before, you may need to delete the files in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player first.

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It appears Microsoft has been working on implementing OpenType ligatures in Word, and we may finally see support for them in Word 14.

While writing a long and interesting paper on Australia’s Telecommunications Access Regime in Part XIC of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth), I found that Microsoft Office Word 12 has half-baked support for OpenType ligatures:

The support is incomplete, however. OpenType ligatures appear only when running Word 12 on the Windows 7 Beta and when paragraph marks are enabled. Running on Vista or with paragraph marks disabled, the ligatures disappear:

The behaviour of the ligatures is also inconsistent. Create a new document and type ‘ffi’ and no ligatures appear. Type ‘test ffi’ and ligatures do appear. It’s clear from this buggy behaviour that the ligatures aren’t meant to appear at all, but they do provide evidence that Microsoft was working on implementing them.

Perhaps the feature was cut when Microsoft decided that Word 12 needs to run on both Windows XP and Vista after Vista was repeatedly delayed. It’s unbelievable that Notepad on Vista supports ligatures while Word still does not.

In any case, Microsoft has made further improvements to fonts in Windows 7, and the half-baked implementation of OpenType ligatures in Word 12 suggests that we may finally see support for them in Word 14.

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