The comment came in response to the post “Offline Writing“, I have gotten a comment or two from people I do not know, but this one looked a little too generic to be a real response. The response was

“Well, the post is actually the greatest on this worthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your upcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be adequate, for the exceptional clarity in your writing. I will directly grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Gratifying work and much success in your business endeavors!”

The e-mail was from Gmail, the author’s IP address was from France and the URL for their website is from Czech and about money transfers and advances. So I think it is spam, and marked it as such. The reason that is seems to be spam to me is, They commented in December saying they were looking forward to my upcoming updates, from a post in March that I have already made follow up comments on. That plus the fact that the last sentence does not apply to a personal website. The approach is unique and a new way to get the website links up. Just something to be aware of. for those of you out there.

After getting this spam, I decided it was time to update my purging of my Twitter spam followers. I then thought about it, do I want to have it still be public of should I make it private. The main concern is the privacy and security for the physical world by people knowing where and when I am, but then I shoot a big hole in it by having a website with a blog on it. I guess I could simply make my blog password protected, and only have invited people know about it. The thought spoils the aim I had in starting it in the first place, to share ideas, thoughts, events… etc. Then I thought about making it so that one has to register and then once registered the blog is open. I think anyone who has administered anything with a password knows that there will be an additional effort as people constantly lose them. The logic starts to wrap itself up pretty well in a circular form. What to do? I started thinking about perhaps having some blog posts protected, and others not. I wanted to look to see if WordPress can do that, however I am in a place with no internet access as I alluded to previously. (see, a little vague as to where I am; eh?)

I am still trying to figure an easy way to virtualize a LAMP server so I can travel with it and run it as a virtual machine under VMWare Fusion. I do this for the Windows OS I still use for a few applications that don’t work under Mac. I do not want to become an expert at installing and configuring a LAMP server, I want to be able to have a testing server that can travel with me. I do not want to simply turn on the server in the Mac, as there may be some idiosyncrasies between the Mac OS and the LAMP server. It has not been easy to find a simple solution for this one yet, but I have not given up yet. I am going to wander over to the VMWare forums and see if anyone has a solution.

I have both Parallels and Fusion to allow me to virtualize an OS for my Mac, and have found that the VMWare forums have better signal to noise most of the time, however I like the way that Parallels has decided to handle USB Human Interface Drivers a little better. I also do like that when I called Parallels about a work issue I was troubleshooting, Parallels connected me with a real program that worked through the use case process with me and called me back with answers and contact information if I hit the issue again. Then again, I have not had to call VMWare yet. So you may ask, which is better? I can’t tell you, I can tell you to try both and decide for yourself. Mine came down to the fact that VMWare ran a little faster and I knew more people who use it if I get stumped.

These type of questions come up very often and there is often no one answer that applies to everyone. An example I use is a question that came up a few days ago on the Digital Grin Forum, which is better for running Adobe Creative Suite; Mac or Windows? The answer is that of course it varies on your needs and other things to consider, but people often expect there to be a definitive answer. I wonder if people are looking for reassurance or an answer when they post some of these questions.

The Adobe Creative Suite issue is still causing me heartburn, as the speed at which they ran from supporting a product is disappointing. From a technical standpoint, I understand how they decided to not update previous versions of Creative Suite (anything before CS4) to support Mac OS X 10.6; a.k.a Snow Leopard. But the fact that when CS3 was the current version they had some challenges when one updated the Mac OS X to 10.5, a.k.a Leopard. I was patient and waited for them to fix the issue. I was disappointed but understand how it can happen. Under Snow Leopard, I cannot use Adobe Acrobat Distiller, basically the printer emulator, at all. (Acrobat was the package that had trouble under Leopard.) This coupled Couple this with the fact that the “Updater” that Adobe launches each time the application is launched, it is extremely frustrating. Luckily Mac OS X has the ability to create a PDF built in.

I did the searches to try and figure out how to turn off the “Updater” under Mac OS X; as there is not a simple preferences box to check or uncheck; one has to create a custom file and place it in the proper location. The directions are less than helpful. The directions are as follows:

1. Using a text editor or plist editor, create a new file named “com.adobe.AdobeUpdater.Admin.plist” in the folder /Library/Preferences
2. In this new .plist file, create a child at the root named “Disable.Update”
3. Set the Class of this new child to Boolean with a value of “Yes”

I was stumped, so I asked a programmer friend of mine, HanClinto, who is actually doing development of a gaming tool on his Mac. He was stumped as well. even once we got it figured out, it was to functioning, so I once again asked at DGrin and they suggested another location.

What truly irks me about this situation, is it is not an inexpensive software suite. I have been a customer with them since Aldus Pagemaker, Macromedia Freehand, and Adobe Type Manager – early 1990’s. I have tried to keep up when I can afford to. However I have not seen any real reason for going up to CS4 and a very steep upgrade price. Couple this with the fact that in my opinion Mac OS X going from 10.5 to 10.6 is not a major revision, that would be going from 10.5 to 11. This is akin  to a service pack in my mind. One should not expect this to be such a faster turn over rate nor so expensive. I believe that Adobe, as is many other software developers, to a subscription approach, keep updating the software to keep the revenue coming in. That is understandable; however the pricing structure is not. It is more expensive for me to upgrade my existing package (Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium) to the current version of it, than it is to purchase the Complete Package (Adobe Designer Premium) as a student.  So I am very much stuck. Being that I don’t use these tools professionally (I do use them at work under Windows XP SP 3 and a different license) I have a hard time paying as high a fee for an upgrade. The reason I got the suite is that I want to work in the same software environment at work as I do at home. It is advantageous in both directions, I hone my skills and can apply what I learn in my personal time at work. Our official graphics artists and I have even been trading tips and tricks, so it does work.

I will say that I do like how similar the environments are in both OS’s for Adobe’s products. Microsoft among others could learn a lot from them. I have stopped using Microsoft Office for Mac as it is so different from the Windows version. I am still disappointed with iWork under Mac, there are some features (pivot tables for example) that just aren’t there. I even tried to do the trial of the updated version iWork 09; however I could not see if it addressed just the basic thing of working with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows better as I am some what of a power user in there. However that even failed. It can open an Office 2007 format document, but it can not save into one – you have to export it. If I do the same thing in Microsoft  Office 2007 opening a 2004 document, it allows me to save it in the older format and tells me what the problems will be, it allows me to work with it just fine.It also does not support many features I use often. So I can’t really interchange my work easily with others from Mac and once again, a different environment. Good thing I got Appzapper, time to get rid of iWork ‘09.

It seems cranky, I know, but these are the things that have been kind of irksome over the last few weeks to me. Aren’t computers supposed to make things easier? I have no problem with people making a profit, I have a problem with people gouging. I have no problem with wanting things to be a little different and unique between application, but if you advertise that one can exchange files with other applications, do not have some many problems; make it transparent to the user.

So this week at work we did an update on the website using some new approaches for us. Not new technology, just new for our work flow. Today (Thursday August 20, 2009) I figured I should check the site on a Windows Vista machine. After I checked it on Vista using Internet Explorer 7, I then thought, I should check it on Internet Explorer 8 on the Vista machine. So I figured I would use the link (http://browserforthebetter.com/) I talked about when I mentioned Microsoft was doing something good; however when I tried to use it on the Vista machine it did not work. So I figured it was maybe a configuration issue since I use that machine mainly for software testing, so I tried my Windows XP Pro machine using Internet Explorer 7, it did not work either. So then just to check one final time, I tried Firefox 3.5 on my Windows XP machine; it worked perfectly. It took me a while to stop laughing; so of course I made a video of it.

(Click to start playing if it doesn’t auto start)

However I do not want any really advanced animation on most slides, just a simple appear animation. So that when I press the button, the next section of text appears. No fades, no wipes, no fly in, just simply appear. The options I have in Power Point 2007 under the animate drop down are:

• No Animation
• Fade
  • All At Once
  • By 1st Level Paragraph
• Wipe
  • All At Once
  • By 1st Level Paragraph
• Fly In
  • All At Once
  • By 1st Level Paragraph
• Custom

I looked in the help file to see how to define for reuse a custom animation. Nope not in there. Then I looked at how to record a Macro like one used to be able to do in Office 2003. Nope, that is not supported any more, I would have to write a Visual Basic script. So what I end up doing was the following, after exposing the Custom Animation panel:

1. Selected the content box
2. Selected Fade – By 1st Level Paragraph
3. Mouse over to the Custom Animation panel
4. Select all the lines of text in the panel
5. Click the Change Effect button and select Appear
6. If I wanted to remove the animation from the first item on the page (which I often did):
   • Select the first item
   • Click Remove

So as you can see, it was fairly manual and repetitive. I thought computers were supposed to make things easier and faster for just these type of tasks.

Don’t even get me started on trying to sequence 16 tables directly over one another and having to
individually set the entrance and exit animation for each one.

87 “Critical” Updates. Did I mention that I purchased the Install CD three weeks ago?

So now to see how it really works out. I am definitely going to be doing some exploring and tweaks. Some things have me stumped such as how to access a thumb drive through VMWare Fusion.

The final straw that broke the camel’s back was the frequency with which I was needing to rebuild the Thunderbird Mail client’s data files. It was about once a day on a bad batch but more typically a few times a week. Open Office became troublesome as the software was not very consistent with the key strokes and functionality of Microsoft Office. Since I spend hours using Microsoft Office everyday, it became important to me to only have to know one piece of software.

I am still using FireFox for my browser and FileZilla for my FTP client, but tonight I installed Office 2003 Pro. Is it the correct thing to do? I am not sure, but being that I am more familiar with the software and I just want it to work when I press the go button hopefully it will make my life easier.

The part that I was amazed by was that there was no Microsoft or Open Source tool to go back from Thunderbird to Outlook. I found lots of manual ways to do it, but with thousand of e-mails to migrate I could just not see myself doing that. So I broke down and purchased Aid4Mail. It worked as indicated as can be seen below…

Click for larger image

It only took about an hour and was definitely faster then me working through the process manually. What amazed me was how many unpurged e-mails there were still hanging out as I had already compacted my mailboxes before doing this import.

Oh yeah 71 Days until the Sunburst.

I think I am just going to go bed and save my rant about the Blackberry for later.