The “Initial View” setting in Adobe Acrobat is the answer. Simply open Document Properties (Ctrl+D on Windows, or ⌘+D in OS X) and click onto the “Initial View” tab. Here, you can set the initial page display format, opening page, zoom levels, and even what the title of the window is.

When you’re done, just close the Document Properties window and save your file. Easy!

Not to mention the OEM copy of XP MCE sitting in a draw that I’d lost track of (I think the system is now using a regular XP Pro license) or the miscellaneous systems that have affixed OEM licenses but for which there is no (misplaced) physical media.

Accordingly, if I want to obey the OEM sticker directive, I’ve got to download a CD ISO from a torrent site (because I don’t fork out for MSDN). But MSDN is increasingly attractive; it effectively offers the desired outcome. Unlicensed, unactivated systems that work perfectly well on a subscription basis… sure, subs suck, but whenever they stop their XP activation servers we’re all going to be screwed, anyway, so it hardly matters.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here making a list (on paper, which I’ll store with the physical media) of all the licenses in use, and roughly where. Thanks to the unauthorised rebuilding of systems that I own and have built from scratch so often (resourcefulness in anyone else’s book, evil work of a pirate to the draconian OEM overlords) whatever descriptions are attached to aforementioned systems is likely to be rendered completely untrue in eighteen months time when I once again get around to the wholesale slaughter rebuilding of them all. Intermittent reinstalls will probably happen, too, unless I’m driven so insane by the inability to discern one license from another I end up, as I do now, simply taking out the lot and shooting them all a new install.

To Microsoft: whatthehelldoyouwantmetodo? I am so not forking out the at-least-$2000 you would have me pay for retail Vista licenses for this lot–it’s that much because Vista Business retail licenses come in at a delicious $500 each. Say it with me: hell no. I’ve heard from a reliable system builder source that you’ve been telling them that the new OEM rules work in their favour as it’ll bring them more business. Sure, but it’s pretty crappy business if I don’t say so myself. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a Microsoft certified system anything, simply because it’d mean dealing with your crap in a professional capacity, and I deal with it quite enough in a professional capacity trying to do other sorts of development as my job, thankyouverymuch. I’m not going to pay a Microsoft tax twice (first for certification, second for individual licenses) just because you claim that your crappy system builders do it better than DIY-ers.

Whenever the time comes around to upgrade to Vista, if I ever deem it worthwhile on the other home desktops here not for any commercial pursuits (still running Business in response to the crippling networking capabilities of all Home line products), I’ll be making a trip to my local store, who, for what it’s worth, don’t even offer retail Vista Business for sale on their website, but mention the OEM edition an awful lot, with the token “(only sold w/ new system or to a system builder)” tacked on to placate anyone from officialdom who comes looking. I haven’t had the pleasure of breaking OEM conditions-of-sale (that’s all they are… are such things even legally enforcable in this country?!) just yet, but have no doubts there will be ample places that want to take my money when and/or if I do.

I’m actually in the position of having one spare XP license (two if you count XP MCE) at this point, but am sorely tempted to install Linux on at least one of the three systems I’m taking care of tonight just to avoid having to deal with these mediocre attempts at extortion in the future. It’s not morally defensible to refuse to acknowledge system builders as “original equipment manufacturers” when they are, in fact, conducting exactly the same tasks as their so-called ‘certified’ builders. Clearly, it’s not being pursued for retail sale: the only retail products that belong in an operating system product mix are upgrades for people who enjoy having computers that don’t work (i.e. most of the population, anyway).

It’s an indictment upon the difficulty of upgrading/reinstalling Windows that so few people take this route: quite frankly, the products don’t work. Everyone who is unqualified (in the literal, capable-of sense, not some arbitrary didacourse, paidMSsomemoney sense) to build a computer, in my experience, is unqualified to successfully install Windows independently. Even if they succeed at booting from a CD, negotiating the installer prompts (admittedly better than they used to be), manually answering questions about daylight savings and other such things that should long since have been dealt with automagically (c’mon, we’ve had GeoIP products for what, ten years now? Longer?), or at least correct from the outset (two HP machines last week were insistent the default timezone should be Singapore. They shipped in Australia. Is it so bloody hard to pick a populous east-coast state zone as the default?), chances of users correctly installing things such as drivers in post-install stages are slim to none. Nearly all phone a tech-saavy friend (I know no-one who’s ever called the Microsoft support line for OS installs… more should, but few do).

The point stands: retail licenses are for newbies, OEM licenses should be accessible to everyone who doesn’t give a crap about shiny packaging, manuals, and shooting their wallet to bits.

Here endeth the rant.

By vendor, that constitutes 176 crashes/hangs/‘not-respondings’ of Microsoft software to 21 of Adobe software over the same period. Now, it feels like I’m cheating the numbers here by reporting Windows Problem Reporting itself, because probably 90% of its crashes occur when reporting on Internet Explorer, but hey — these are the numbers Microsoft’s software itself gave me, so who’s complaining?

In case you think this isn’t a fair comparison for reasons of time spent using various programmes, exclude Problem Reporting crashes (though you shouldn’t) and the Microsoft stat comes down to 124. That is, lots.

I can’t think of a day since owning this computer I wouldn’t have used at least one piece of Adobe software, most commonly more. To be fair, Adobe software is more likely to do weird things (like, ya know, refusing to save) causing me to restart the application rather than letting it ‘crash’ per se… but Microsoft’s junk is vastly less likely to give me any sort of warning before flaking out.

These crashes are reported over a three-month period spanning November 26 until January 25.

Vista SP1 continues to be eagerly awaited.

Took around a full minute for the folder to load, on an Athlon 64 3200+ clocked at 2.4GHz with 2GB of fairly quick memory.

Since when do apps alert in the tray about loading a view? If Outlook didn’t expend resources on a generally-useless tray icon (really, it doesn’t even change when you have new mail waiting), maybe it wouldn’t take so bloody long to do anything.

I’ve got a dual core 4200+ on the way, but really doubt it’ll make any difference when the fault is largely software that sucks. Not saying that it’s just Outlook at fault… I’m inclined to place a fair degree of blame on the well-known-to-be-sucky Windows Desktop Search. But it just integrates best… why does Microsoft have to produce products that suck?!

Speaking of which, my iPaq is working again with a brand new extended battery. Apart from the slow processor, it’s doing great… but I’m going to test-drive a Palm Z72 for a few days and see if it does any better. Basically, I don’t really need the GSM/GPRS functionality on the iPaq because it’s faster for me to connect via my Sony Ericsson via Bluetooth (as there’s no HSDPA on the iPaq). I’ll immediately miss the wireless, but have survived several months without it, and SDiO wifi cards are a possibility for the palm… I doubt they’re particularly common, though. Have been considering a Blackberry, but they’re pretty restricted in a whole heap of ways that PDAs aren’t. For example, ever tried getting an SSH client on a Blackberry? I haven’t. But have my doubts it could be done!

Anyway. Don’t use Outlook 2007 unless you have to.  It has nice multi-calendar/iCal support, but that’s about all it has going for it. Still no inbuilt SMS/MMS support, the renderer is a regression in the truest sense of the term (doesn’t even support background images — IE7 comes out, which is an awesome browser, and they decide it would be a good idea to force Word 2007 to be the renderer. Brilliant.), thoroughly mediocre RSS/feed-reading capabilities, and, to top it all off, it’s crap-slow (compared to earlier versions).

If it offers groupware advantages I don’t know of them (but doubt it could, it’s always been fairly comprehensive on that front), and chances are they won’t be particularly enabled until Server 2008 is released. Am guessing here, but not without some reasoning.

Avoid.

p.s. Yes, I’m probably overdue for a Windows reinstall.  Unfortunately a fairly major project cropped up just as I’d scheduled one, and I still haven’t got around to it. Will probably hunt down the right product key when the new CPU gets here early next week: that’s a large part of the problem, Microsoft apparently expect that home users either buy prebuilt systems with stupid crapware-filled restore disks, or are hardcore tech using pirates/MSDN users (same thing… the users rarely paid for the MSDN subs, mostly its their workplace). I have 5 XP Pro licenses of different varieties (not to mention previous versions of Windows), and of those a bunch are the same product type (upgrade)… which makes license management and compliance a bit of a challenge!

What I’d love MS to do is create a site-licensing product for SOHO users with flexible and transferable licensing at retail OEM pricing (that sounds dumb, but I mean still charging what us mortals pay for OEM licenses, not the volume prices that Dell, Lenovo, et al. get) — it’d be simple, web administered (not requiring a local server), and increasingly relevant in homes which are featuring more and more computers.

And people wonder why I refuse to buy music online.

There are other hardware projects I’ve got cooking, yes, but none so immediately useful or easily implemented. The great thing about this is the hard work (read:software) is essentially done already. At worst I’d need to hack some kind of interface driver, but, really, it’s pretty much functional as is. And, because it’s already been ported to Linux and BSD, it’s really trivial to build a barebones system upon which to base it all. Preserving keyboard + mouse input is a totally necessary design parameter anyway (for reasons of network stream integration, titling(!!), etc.) so hardware can be periodically switched on as it becomes available. I’m tempted to pull apart my languishing Athlon XP, but it feels too powerful for the task (not even kidding… this thing is lightning fast) and I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of the RAM in it. My biggest concern is tracking down capture hardware that’s Linux or BSD friendly. Ideally there’ll be a security capture card that does PAL at full frame rate and has 4 inputs, because essentially that means it’d be trivial to add a few extra cards and, all of a sudden, it’s quite foreseeable to have a 12 input vision mixer that will key and title away til the cows come home.

One concern I have is that the mixer component only takes two sources… which is much the same as on any hardware mixers I’ve used (two buses: select source on A + B bus, mix buses), but it feels really inflexible. I’d chain them together but think that might necessitate extra genlocking time and increase overall latency. I can’t actually think of a usage scenario for this one, though, so it’s not a big deal. Because keying exists independently of mixing it’s not a concern of 2 sources + keyed source, and that’d be the main situation in which such a thing would be at all necessary.

The other cool thing about this is you can mix digital and analogue sources with impunity. Need SDI? Sure, get an SDI capture card and add an input source. Firewire? Done deal. Same goes for output: because you can output via FFMPEG, your “vision mixer” potentially also encodes an IP-distributable stream simultaneously with realtime output to a monitor.

This is an inestimably cool piece of software, but the most brilliant thing is it isn’t really anything new. I discovered it because I was looking for EffecTV which I’d last used in a production context over 12 months ago… Gephex uses existing open-source filters and processing solutions and just provides an excellent means of chaining them together. You can create some excellent motion artwork with it, but the most exciting thing for me is that it enables use of cheap and disposable x86 hardware in place of hideously expensive and proprietary (read: more expensive, but also inextensible and not particularly flexible) solutions that the ‘pros’ use.

Increasingly I’m disinterested in ‘professionalism’ about this sort of thing, because that’s way out of my price league and, to be honest, the most common place I wish this technology were applied is in church and Christian event contexts, where (even if there is money) no-one is interested in effective communication through applied technology. So we continue to try and push forward with no money and a bunch of innovative and irreverent (to the pros) solutions.

Ultimately, it’s about achieving excellence in the quality and nature of the work done to share the gospel and build up the body of those who follow Jesus — but excellence can be attained without even a smattering of ‘professionalism’.

That said, I’d still love to own an MX-70.

I am at the point where if this continues to prove ineffective I will be abandoning either WLS, Outlook, or both.

But for now I’m waiting for a rebuild and using Kerio’s excellent webmail product to conduct searches near-instantaneously and vastly more comprehensively than Microsoft’s obviously deficient search does.

On the plus side, I got all system configuration stuff (esp. Samba, which can be a lot more difficult than perhaps it should be at times) worked out last week (i.e. the system was nearly perfect, but for being utterly unable to install even SRPM packages of a more recent Python version), and Michael went through installing everything with me at work… we had to battle Windows a little there, but even it relented. So close. Then I’ll spend heaps of time cutting layouts to markup and seeing them working, and non-Youthworks time taking Satchmo for a spin (which will hopefully lend itself to a certain application very nicely). The lovely thing about all this is I need Django to work for CYIADA, so I’m supported in getting it up and running, but then have enough ‘spare’ hours in the week that I can engage in freelance projects that ultimately mean I know what’s going on with CYIADA and am mildly more competent to make minor modifications as required accordingly.

Some of those projects might even feed back into the project, which would be a bonus — but even if they come to nothing, it’s worthwhile for skills development alone.

I haven’t had a great day with Firefox. Well… I spent 3–4 hours in meetings today, so I didn’t even have that much time with Firefox! Still managed to let me down twice, though.

Damn its indisposable development tools *sobs uncontrollably*

I think I’ll switch back to Opera for all non-development Internet-related activity for a while… unless anyone has any other browser recommendations? I’ve seriously thought about IE7, but its rendering is still just a little too patchy for me to be able to live with myself as an Internet user.

Bleh. Let it be observed: even high-profile open source does not always lead to a good product. Its memory management is nothing short of repulsive. It will regularly use more memory than Photoshop and Illustrator combined — admittedly, I use Photoshop mostly for web production and not high resolution print stuff (though that does happen a few times a week, and it won’t often go far beyond the 350MB that Firefox seems to manage fairly regularly)

I’m still using CS2, so there aren’t any magical CS3 memory management advances that make such a claim possible… Firefox just sucks :P

I’d blame Windows being in need of a reinstall (it’s been running since October… more than six months without death :P Plus I started out not being happy with it because it’d been installed from the guy I bought the computer off, I just hacked it to use my CD key instead of the one he’d used to test things… so it’s never been perfect), but really, it’s not that bad for any other application. I normally do a reboot once a week and things are fine… heavy duty graphics editing, occasional video editing, constant mail and occasional wordprocessing… and of all those things it is a web browser that can’t get it right. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so derisive about it seeing as I make a living off developing in this relatively simple world… but I am.

The flip side to all of that, of course, is that I’ve been trying to live (more) like a normal user the past few years. Essentially, recognising that it’s simpler to buy software than write it (WordPress, Flickr), using hackably-open technologies instead of truly open ones (WMA Lossless sans DRM), and a general abandonment of open source principles in favour of vastly improved productivity (Photoshop, Premiere, Office 2007, royalty-free stock).

It’s certainly paid off in terms of professional development and enhanced creative potential… but there’s something lost in not being able to hack visualisations hooked up to a webcam together on a command-line anymore. Admittedly, that sort of thing only comes around half a dozen times a year! But no matter, it’s all good fun. Given more friends who were into that sort of thing and some good music, I’d so live in the party house. I’ve not figured out how to do the same command-line video tricks using Windows just yet, so next time I’ll probably use Windows for visualisations (woo particle emitters!) and a separate Linux-powered laptop (maybe?) for webcam trickery. Then I’ll take webcam stuff straight out into Windows capture and skip my vis mixer altogether for once… I gotta learn to travel lighter anyway!

I’ve not used this much on anyone else’s system, but haven’t done anything particularly crazy with it and it still sucks… soooo… I blame Windows. I’m almost certain mainstream Linux distros can handle this better, but know nothing about how OS X deals with it… shrug.

The magical secret, it seems, is Bluesoleil’s free EDR Bluetooth manager software that allegedly has a 20MB data transfer limitation per session until it’s purchased, but I’ve just downloaded it and done over 50MB of audio data transfers in A2DP streams and it’s not complaining. Plus, Buy/Register under the Help menu are greyed out… so I don’t know quite how serious they are about selling this thing.

At any rate, it’s working great for me, though my crappy Bluetooth dongle slows EVERYTHING about this computer down… must try another one, it’s not A2DP’s fault because whenever I pair my mobile with it to sync the same thing happens — even when nothing’s paired, as soon as you plug the dongle in (USB) everything starts crawling.

All that said, BlueSoleil are great. Works well.

Anyway — OpenID is still around 10 months later (though the spec was last updated around the time I last wrote on the matter), WordPress.com have announced they are now an IdP for it, and it seems everyone wants to be a provider, not a consumer (in OID spec parlance, consumer means the website requesting verification of an Identity — “end user” is the term given to an actual human user).

In fact, Ma.gnolia.com is the only OpenID consuming site of consequence that I’ve encountered thus far in my travels. Which is, to say the least, slightly perplexing.

I’m aware the whole point of OpenID is that it’s a vastly decentralised spec that enables myriad providers to exist, but it seems somewhat redundant (in the sense in which that means “pointless, without purpose”, not failover-type redundancy) if there does not exist a single consumer of consequence!

And, let’s face it, why should being a consumer be attractive? You know less about your customers, they can bail on you more quickly, and… all of a sudden, advertising is the only way of monetising a website. JanRain operate “MyOpenID: Your first (and last) identity provider”, as well as a couple of services that use OpenID, and have (to my eyes, at least) no conceivable way of generating revenue at present.

Which is potentially fine, but completely stupid if that’s happening on a wider scale. As a concept, OpenID has much to offer — I just wouldn’t use it in CYIADA. I might consider it for smaller projects (commercial clients), but, really, I think it’d have a better chance if Myspace were an OpenID provider. And we all know what they’re like when it comes to web standards (and general usability issues)!

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of the popularity of up-stream providers if you want to verify against something other than OpenID (like, for example, someone’s Google account — which you can do quite easily using various API tools they provide). With anything youth targeted, there’s a special impetus that we don’t really see in other places. I read this absolutely hilarious comment on a great analysis of an article about Myspace:

It’s easy to imagine teenagers as a pack of wildebeests on a grassy plain, simply running with wild abandon.

Why yes, yes it is. They’re not (article has more on this), but the bottom line is if you’re using external verification services, you’re dependent on the existence and longevity of these services for the existence and longevity of your services, not the least in user profiling and building up meaningful market data so you can adjust your mix to a known audience.

OpenID feels like a wonderful technology in a chicken-egg situation. It’s still just too bloody geeky for your average LJ user to get on board with. And they’ve got it easy. For anyone else, it’s completely impossible.

Here in Sydney, we could probably get away setting up verification against Windows Live simply because that’s what people use here, as I have noted before (about halfway down the post linked). But developing different authorisation schemes as a matter of localisation is most definitely not in my book of best practices (if I were ever to write one :P) — so, instead, fragmented Internet identities persist.

That bugs me.

If you have any answers or thoughts… let me know. Blog about it and send a pingback/trackback. That’s one of the few open standards that’s worked well on the web, albeit with plenty of spam abuse, but there’s of course the problem that not enough people are socially blogging aside from software developers and design geeks and… whatever category I fit into (“web strategist” is still what I’m calling myself… we’ll see how much longer that sticks) — so, of course, there’s no instinct to reply in this manner.

In the same way, developer and business instinct is to build your own authentication and profiling platform. Is it worth resisting?

The new version of Word is a thing of beauty. It just works, and makes sense, and is generally a usability wonder. I’m sure someone will publish a study to the contrary in the next week, but I don’t care — it is perfectly intuitive to a non-Office literate user. Yes, that is myself–I’ve battled with OO.org for years, and am utterly convinced it sucks. I have occasionally fought with MS Office products in this time, and battled slightly less, but still it’s felt like I’m doing things the slow way. Every essay I’ve written over the last eighteen months is stored in LyX (LaTeX) format: I’ve basically not used a word processor for anything serious in at least that long. And I haven’t used a Microsoft word processor at home for three years (on a horrible laptop), and not on my primary desktop computer for four, or possibly five. Historical perspective: I started using Windows when I was 7, stopped when I was 15 or 16, and returned at 18 ½ — Microsoft have got good reason to be trying to bring me back into the family, because I’ve been away for a long time.

I am as upset as the next web developer about the Outlook team’s brain-dead decision to switch back to Word as the primary rich email rendering engine, but will wax lyrical about the new calendaring features in Outlook!! For they are greatly beautiful. Observe my three calendars (Organised into: Personal & Work; Uni; Church) layered together here:

Groove makes me shrug enormously, it does nothing useful for me. Unless it’s like Sharepoint only… good. But even then, I’ve never dug that whole Intranet collaborative thang. Really, if I were going to run bloat-inducing collaborative software, I should start with Adobe’s Version Cue. But I don’t use it because… too many apps in my tray annoys me, and Firefox eats all my memory as is (screeny from yesterday… it peaked at about 1GB but I couldn’t be bothered taking another):

The only reason I still use that bloody browser is its extensions support: Firebug has stolen my heart where Office 2007 hasn’t yet. Here’s its asset download graphy thingamijig:

It’s even better than Chris Pederick’s toolbar. But oh how I’d love to switch to Opera (or even, shock, IE) full time now. Firefox really isn’t doing it for me with its bloat these days.

Speaking of bloat, Office 2007 is one 500MB download. It doesn’t download a 500MB stub and then install the rest — no, that includes Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Publisher, … and all the other random crap I installed but will probably never use. Fantastic.

Everything is pretty fast (but it emphatically encourages you to install Windows Live Desktop, and seeing as I’m a beta tester for other Live stuff pretty willingly, I figured I may as well, and when you first install that indexing makes everything chug) which is excellent — but I’m still looking to buy a new dual core 939 sometime soon. Graphics are fine because I have no intention of upgrading to Vista (read: needing DirectX 10 and a $1000 graphics card) in the next 18 months at least, but… well, another 2GB of RAM would go down nicely. Shame it’s still relatively expensive, though.

Microsoft, I wasn’t going to pirate your software because it’s not that good, but thanks for the discount, anyway!

When they announced it a whole bunch of people were getting a little grumpy about how it didn’t work with Windows update — a few of the same were getting grumpy about how Microsoft didn’t release a version for Linux, but no further comment required on them… you’re all of an intelligent enough bunch to realise aforementioned people fall into the category of … well, you know.

Obviously, it’s no big deal — the whole point of that image it is that it hasn’t (and won’t) update, allowing you to keep testing on older platforms.

But then, this afternoon, I go and shut down the image (I know, suspending is faster, but I was trying something different) and all of a sudden it goes and says it’s installing 7 updates before it shuts down. In usual XP fashion.

So what gives?

I found myself yelling at it “you’re not even a real operating system! Don’t you get it? You’re going to be used and trashed in a couple of months anyway! Why do you care if you’re virus and spyware ridden by the end of it?” Possibly a strange response, but there we go.

Got me thinking about (human) clones, actually. Much musing to be had there. Maybe I’m just strange…