Windows XP upgrading…

Irony is, the thing that didn’t work was some­thing that’d been paid for. Again. That’s twice this has hap­pened now.

Pop the disc in, over a per­fectly legit­i­mate install of Win­dows, to wipe and upgrade (from within the installer, so it can detect Win­dows first). Nat­u­rally, it doesn’t work. So I pull out a legit­i­mate Win­dows disc to flash at it. Of course, it doesn’t work. On one of the installs, it wasn’t even an OEM mod­i­fied disc (I’ve got a Win­dows ME disc here from Gate­way which it also choked on, later) — but alas, it would not work.

Ahar­rrr! Thar be pirates lurkin’!

Eye candy. Image of pirate ship with Windows logo.

A quick sail over to them thar dan­ger­ous peer-to-peer waters quickly patched up the prob­lem, espe­cially when I can down­load an OEM disc image (~400MB) faster than Win­dows XP actu­ally installs. Not that any­one ever would, of course. Yarrrrrr!

It’s now installing rather hap­pily, just for the record. And there are sep­a­rate licenses for each of the com­put­ers Win­dows XP is being installed on (or has been installed on), and the pirated copy of Win­dows 98 isn’t in use… but it sure sim­pli­fied the instal­la­tion process! Thank you, Gnutella!

# by Josh on March 26th, 2005 Tags: , , , ,
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Adobe turns evil

Okay, so I just tried to down­load Acro­bat Reader 7. I’ve got no rea­son to pay for the full prod­uct, as free alter­na­tives suf­fice for all my PDF cre­ation needs… maybe Abobe is get­ting upset and decid­ing to trash what was pre­vi­ously the best cross-platform doc­u­ment shar­ing for­mat ever.

Well, what­ever. I’m still using PDF doc­u­ments, and prob­a­bly will be for a while, but I’m going to rant about it any­way. So there’s an installer, right? Okay. Pre­ferred method of instal­la­tion: Evil Adobe Down­load man­ager. Option for nor­mal down­load? Yup. Why didn’t I use it? Call me stu­pid or some­thing… I’ll get to exactly why.

So last week some time I was at Steve’s office, and he said that Acro­bat Reader 7 is loads faster than 6. I’m not sure if I started danc­ing then and there, but it was good to hear. Today, I bother to do some­thing about it on this lap­top (which, inci­den­tally, has just had a long-overdue RAM upgrade, and still loads Acro­bat 6 like crap), which involved going to the Adobe web­site and fol­low­ing the links, then fill­ing out three drop­down menus to present me with more choices.

Lan­guage: Eng­lish.
Oper­at­ing Sys­tem: Win­dows ME
Con­nec­tion: Broadband

Won­der­ful, it’s offer­ing to let me down­load Adobe Reader 6. Again. I know I’m run­ning Win­dows ME and that’s a crime against human­ity. Right now, I’d argue that Adobe down­load soft­ware and inter­nal pol­icy is a crime against human­ity. Not only would it offer to let me down­load an old ver­sion of soft­ware, I also had my choice of spy­ware rid­den tool­bars and some crappy photo man­age­ment soft­ware which they’re pimp­ing like it’s actu­ally mak­ing them money. Scary, no? The first hit is always free… no, I’m not a cynic. Never.

Josh trots off to Download.com to try and grab the lat­est Reader “ille­gally”, just for the hell of it, to see if it’ll work on this com­puter. Download.com, searches, finds Acro­bat Reader, down­loads Acro­bat Reader, dis­cov­ers it’s actu­ally a crappy down­load stub (hey, I’m on snappy cable here, I don’t *do* check­ing file sizes!), which then pro­ceeds to down­load (unan­nounced) three dif­fer­ent pieces of soft­ware. “Ummmm.”

It fin­ishes down­load­ing these mys­te­ri­ous three com­po­nents. Installer one launches. Yahoo! Tool­bar? No thanks. Really, no thanks. No, really, take that tool­bar away from me before I do some­thing unto­ward with it. Crappy Adobe Photo man­age­ment dru… err… soft­ware? No thanks. Really, no thanks. If I cared that much for your crappy soft­ware, I’d ask for it. As it stands, I’m per­fectly happy with the most excel­lent Irfan­view on Win­dows, and mis­cel­la­neous web-based photo man­age­ment applications.

FINALLY. This is the part where I have the Acro­bat installer itself run. But no. “I don’t like your Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, you anti-consumerist pig. Go grov­el­ling to our bud­dies Microsoft and upgrade, quick smart. And buy some new hard­ware from some ven­dor that Microsoft approved so your new OS will run, okay? That’s right. In the mean­while, we’ll pun­ish you by mak­ing our reader soft­ware con­tinue to run just as slow on your crappy four-year-old OS.”

Rec­om­men­da­tion: Use plain text, or (if it’s absolutely nec­es­sary) valid (X)HTML, to send me doc­u­ments. I’ll receive them in a bet­ter mood. (This com­ment endures only until I move into the new house, get my Linux desk­top back, and can resume read­ing Adobe PDF files with­out even need­ing to see their prod­uct name. Ahh, Open Source.)

# by Josh on January 16th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The week in review

As pre­vi­ously men­tioned, there has been a relo­ca­tion of sorts occur­ring in these parts over the last sev­eral days, dur­ing which time I have lived a most unusual kind of life. Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh on November 27th, 2004 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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Newfound love

Hmm.  I’ve decided that P2P net­works can be a most use­ful device indeed.  Despite their poten­tial for abuse.

I lost the Gate­way Win­dows Me CD (I have absolutely NO idea how that was man­aged, see­ing that EVERY OTHER sys­tem disc is still in my folder for such things, but hey!) for the Cel­ery lap­top, and have just fin­ished down­load­ing a nice new full ISO of Win­dows Me (heh, I laughed when the ISO pre­parer was marked as Microsoft them­selves… yay for direct rip­ping!).  I was half expect­ing it not to work or some­thing, but hey, it does.  Very cool.

Yes, this evi­dently makes me an evil pirate, and the peer to peer net­works should be shut down, and users should never lose discs.  Well, that would be okay, if copy­right law in this esteemed coun­try made pro­vi­sion for “Fair Use”.  No mat­ter what I do, I’d be break­ing the law.  I can’t keep a copy locally, and I can’t down­load a copy remotely… what’s a geek to do?  Heh, hardly a geek, even — this thing is run­ning Mil­le­nium.  Ah well.  It works okay, despite all the bad press.  It was built by an OEM, and came with an OEM dist. of Mil­le­nium (which, of course, I have now lost and replaced with a stock image of, but hey), so it has to run acceptably.

Hmmmm.  Yes.  Now I can finally dub (well, not strictly dub, but meh:P) some of the accu­mu­lat­ing Plat­form 7 record­ings (on tape) to file… well, I could before, if I could be both­ered to move my desk­top into the lounge room.  But that’s just too far away, and would mean too much time spent away from email ;)

“Copy­ing files needed for Win­dows Setup…”  Hurry up and copy already!!!  Sigh.

In other inter­est­ing news, I’ve dis­cov­ered why Google isn’t index­ing this web­site prop­erly.  Appar­ently my URL’s are too com­plex… SE’s can deal with query strings to an extent, but appar­ently any more than two and a bit and they start to struggle/or at least ignore bits.

The solu­tion would basi­cally mean either using URI’s of the form http://baseaddress/?$style.$page.$extravariable1.$extravariable2 etc., or using mod_rewrite to make even more friendly URL’s.

I’m not sure exactly what would be the most scal­able way to do this, and haven’t got time imme­di­ately avail­able to deter­mine this… I may look at it next week­end, or later next week depend­ing on other work­load and the progress of exist­ing web projects.

And that con­cludes my pro­cras­ti­na­tion for this half hour…  back to the Exten­sion sem­i­nar prepa­ra­tion and things like that!

# by Josh on August 14th, 2004 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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