Life is grand

Boy am I glad I didn’t jump on the 30D which was really a warmed over 20D; the Canon EOS 40D is out in September and looks like a worthwhile upgrade. My *cough* birthday *hint* in *cough* October…

It took 6 hours spread out over one day to install Adobe CS3 Design Premium on Mac OS X. 6 highly frustrating hours.

I downloaded the 2.7GB file in less time than it took to install the software.

To cut a long story short; uninstall every scrap of Adobe software you have on your system before attempting to install CS3. And that includes Macromedia software and most importantly (thanks to Jamie Good for this tip) the Flash plugins for your browsers. That last bit was the key for me. The install failed everytime until in desperation I nuked Flash from Firefox and Safari. The install worked after that. How utterly daft!

I wish Adobe didn’t create their own installers for their products on Mac OS X. This isn’t Windows, you don’t need an installer. Just let me drag Photoshop into Applications, please. That works for almost every other single piece of software for Mac OS X.

I am not in complete agreement with Khoi Vihn on the subject of magazines. While I find many magazines to be, as he points out, boring and outdated there are two that pull me back everytime; National Geographic and CAR.

I am also trying out a few sailing magazines which, while full of interesting info for someone just getting into sailing, have poor writing standards. It sounds strange to say it but CAR magazine has fantastic writing.

For me magazines are good for topics I don’t know an awful lot about. Computer magazines are awful in my opinion; I am a programmer. Photography magazines are just terrible; I am a middling photographer. Car magazines are great; I own a Ford Fiesta.

One thing I love about CAR magazine is the mix of photography and words, all layed out in a format that very few websites come close to matching.

Occasionally I pop my head out of the blogosphere and wander over to a mainstream news site. This morning’s CNN.com homepage was a rather disturbing mix of doom and gloom:

# Passenger jet hijacked in Turkey
# Grim search for quake survivors
# Strong hurricane eyes Caribbean
# Taiwan power outages from typhoon
# Rains trap 172 Chinese miners
# White House spokesman quitting
# ‘Dozens missing’ as ferry sinks
# Fatal suicide blast in Afghanistan

Back to the blogosphere Batman!

Apparently Netflix have ditched email support and reverted to phone support. The studies show X and the new manager thinks Y and so D is done. It makes for good news, bucking the trend, people can give big quotes and everyone is happy.

Except people like me. I’ve got tinitus. I wake up some mornings with such a ringing in my ears that I can barely hear my girlfriend talking to me. Phones are completely out, all I hear is a hissing and ringing. It lasts most of the day and if there is anything urgent to be done by phone I have to either postpone the call or do business via email.

Netflix isn’t a critical part of life so I can live without them having email support. But there are services I’d be seriously inconvenienced by if they reverted to phone only.

A good, friendly, responsive support center should handle issues anyway their customer wants. Phone, email, fax or IM. Please don’t limit our choices.

Good luck to all the deaf or hard of hearing people who use Netflix and need support.

I am not one to complain about the weather. I hardly even bother checking weather forecasts unless I am going out sailing. All those weather widgets you can get? Don’t see the point. Look out a window folks.

However, when I saw today’s Calvin & Hobbes I did feel a pang for summer. Being from South Africa means I have grown up with fantastic summers. My first year in Ireland, 2006, was a pretty good summer and all the hype about Irish weather seemed unfounded.

Then 2007 came and boy, has this been a horrid summer. A nice, lazy summers day would be a real bonus around now.

The Adobe Worldwide Licensing website is not the only offender of this heinous UI process crime but it is the latest in a long string and has tipped me into writing about it.

The problem here is that it took three submits for me to get the password right. The first time I entered the page it asked for a password and password confirmation. I did not notice the password help text below the inputs and so just went ahead and entered a password. It then displayed the first part of the screenshot telling me the password had to be 8 characters, contain aliens and basically be as hard to type as the Bible in Aramaic on a US keyboard.

I modified my password accordingly but through sheer luck did so by putting ! at the begining. It then gave me the second error.

First of all, why can’t I start my password with “!”? That seems pretty hard to decipher to me.

The second thing is that for a system like this what is the point of prescribing a password format? This isn’t a bank and if someone guessed my, possibly easy, password and logged in the worst they could do was download Adobe software. Believe me, nobody wanting to pirate Adobe software is going to do it by trying to hack the Adobe licensing site.

For all but sensitive systems the password format should be flexible and simple. And if you are going to Nazify my password then make the rules clear and unavoidable.

Web 2.0 defined by Tim O’Reilly:

the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

In a nutshell that is Web 2.0 for me too. It isn’t Ajax powered UIs and Flash video on YouTube. Those are important enablers for Web 2.0, they get people to use systems which harness the network effect and make the system better.

The book, Programming Collective Intelligence, that started the Radar post looks good too.

I have been looking into trading my ‘05 Ford Fiesta in for a ‘03 Toyota RAV4. The Toyota dealership has been very helpful but I did get a bit of a fright this morning when they contacted me and gave me quite detailed information on my AIB car finance. They knew how much I was paying per month, how much I still owed, the total interest and a lot of other financial details. I hadn’t told AIB I was considering the RAV4 and all I had told the dealership was my mobile phone number, my name and the registration of the Ford Fiesta. With just those three bits of information they managed to call up AIB and find out everything.

I’m not angry. The dealership was just trying to be helpful and to be honest I appreciate them doing all the leg work for me. But I am surprised AIB would give out this kind of information without first asking my permission. I realise the dealership has to cover itself and make sure any car they are considering is fully paid for and not stolen. But I do think this kind of information should only be available to them after I’ve spoken to AIB. If I refuse the dealership access then obviously something is up and they should walk away from the deal.

The problem is it seems as though anyone could get my car registration, phone up AIB and find out how much I owe.

Check out the Oakland Crimespotting website for what I think is a slick and usable interface.

(via O’Reilly Radar.)