Rants

Adobe Acrobat Reader Updates – how to save them locally for repeated use, a step by step guide

Liam Westley — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:57:49 GMT

As a developer I have several machines, some of which are virtual machines which may be isolated from the general internet. I used to get annoyed with Adobe not providing direct downloads for updates which means you have to download updates for each machine separately.

I realise there may be good reasons for this, differentiating between different versions of operating system. However, I do like to have the ability to rebuild a system to a known state from scratch without relying on online updates.

For this reason I quite often avoided downloading Acrobat updates, until I found out how to perform the update on one machine, capture the update files and then use these to roll out updates the various systems on which I have Acrobat Reader installed.

Step 1 – Help menu, check for Updates

Step2 – Adobe Updater progress bar should appear

Step 3 – If updates are found, you have the option to click on a Preferences link

Step 4 - In the preferences dialog you will find a setting called File Location, this is where updates will be downloaded

Step 5 – Highlight the path, right click and copy the folder location

Step 6 – Run Windows Explorer, paste in the folder location you just copied

Step 7 – Back in the Adobe Updater select the option to download and install updates, a new folder appears in Windows Explorer

Step 8 – It is quite possible that the update will download additional patches to the main installation (and these are the patches you can never normally download directly from Adobe)

Step 9 – You will need to copy the files from Windows Explorer once the download is complete, in Windows 7 the UAC confirmation (the small shield) halts the updater and gives you plenty of time to copy the files. If the Adobe Updater runs automatically you need to be very quick as all the updates files are deleted once the update is complete.

Windows Mobile – sync issues (again) and how to avoid ‘Align Screen’ on a hard reset

Liam Westley — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:49:41 GMT

Fixing synchronisation

Yesterday, I realised that my HTC TyTN II phone had stopped synchronising with Outlook, with the Windows Mobile Device Center (under Vista) reporting the completely useless error code, 0×8503001c. Without synchronisation a Windows Mobile phone becomes fairly unproductive as you scurry around trying to duplicate Outlook items onto the phone, never getting it quite correct.

The only recommended Microsoft solution is to break the device partnership between phone and operating system and synchronise from scratch. This means deleting ALL your data – that is ALL 800+ contacts and all my upcoming diary items. Never mind, if I have to. Except it still would NOT synchronise - so now I had a blank Windows Mobile phone which had no phone numbers in it anymore. Arrrrghhh!

At this point I tried synchronising via a Windows XP machine running ActiveSync 4.5, hopefully avoiding any WMDC issues. No. Still no synchronisation. I even deleted the PIM database file on the device, but no joy. Then I found this post,

http://www.metalvortex.com/blog/2008/01/26/50.html

So, I uninstalled WMDC 6.1, and installed the older WMDC 6.0. It worked.

Avoiding Align Screen

During all this I was contemplating the idea of having to perform a hard reset (which I have had to do previously with a HTC Wizard to solve synchronisation issues). The issue I have with performing a hard reset is that I cracked my LCD screen some time ago, and have been quite happily living with a keyboard only device for nearly six months. When you hard reset one of the startup steps is the Align Screen wizard to calibrate the touch screen. So I thought a hard reset would result in a device which I could no longer use as I wouldn't be able to get through the Align Screen wizard.

While waiting for failed synchronisation attempts I had Googled an amazing fact. If you perform a hard reset, but want to skip the Align Screen step, you can create a new zero byte file called ‘welcome.net’ in the root of a storage card (a 2Gb microSD for me) and ensure that storage card is inserted during the startup steps.

One of the other oddities of my phone is that at some point in the past month it had decided that ringing for an incoming phone call was a frippery which I no longer required. Whatever settings I used it would only vibrate. It took some time to notice and explained why I had been missing quite a few phone calls.

So with the knowledge that I could get synchronisation working and armed with a microSD card containing a zero byte file called ‘welcome.not’ in the root folder, I performed a hard reset, still with some trepidation. Wooooo – I now have a ringing phone again. It synchronises properly and it appears to have recovered quite a bit of storage space by being hard reset (internet cache I reckon).

Conclusion

Windows Mobile is still a strange world for a standard consumer, with random synchronisation problems with zero help from Microsoft on how to solve them, and some of the most arcane, random configuration options (a storage card with a zero byte file!!!).

Still love my HTC TyTN II though.

PDF and eBooks - I know it's a marginal cost but are Manning take it to extremes?

Liam Westley — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:01:41 GMT

Manning Publications has a program called MEAP. MEAP stands for Manning Early Access Program - basically buying a book as a PDF before the paper version is published, in fact, before it is even finished. Good for new technologies like ASP.NET MVC of Silverlight.

Now I know that electronic versions have a marginal cost compared to paper versions, but Manning are taking this to extreme levels;

In April, I bought the MEAP title, The Art of Unit Testing, $24.99

By August, the completion of The Art Of Unit Testing is being delayed so I received a $15 coupon off any other purchases, so I bought another MEAP title, NHibernate In Action, $29.99 - $15 = $14.99

Today (October) I get an e-mail saying that as a purchaser of NHibernate In Action I have another $15 coupon to spend, so I bought a PDF title, .NET Multithreading, $17.50 - $15 = $2.50.

That is some ripple effect on a late publishing date for The Art of Unit Testing. Many thanks to Roy Osherove for being very busy with everything else in his life.

Also, in the past few weeks I also bought Silverlight In Action, as when Microsoft released Silverlight 2 RC0 they gave 35% off another MEAP title, Silverlight In Action, $27.50 - $9.63 = $17.87.

Looking at this random pricing I am really, really glad I'm not an author who expects royalities. I realise that authoring a technical book is generally a zero income activity, but surely pricing like this ensures that this will be the case.

SqlBits podcast

Liam Westley — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:50:10 GMT

Craig Murphy was wily enough to record an interview with both myself and fellow developer Matt Barrett after the SqlBits conference. Enhanced by the 80's music of Reading Bowl you can now experience the effect that several (free) pints of Guinness has on my diction;

http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=743

Thanks to Craig for the tidy editing (he must have done some, believe me).

What punishment fits the crime - SELECT with no ordering

Liam Westley — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 01:40:00 GMT

I'm busy maintaining a system which I didn't write, and keep hitting stored procedures which produce lists from drop down selections where it is a simple SELECT of two or three columns, with NO ORDER BY clause (or default sort in the database) to sort the list appropriately. I don't want to count the number of tickets in Trac I've dealt with on this one.

So what punishment do you think is justified for this heinous crime? Probably not the death penalty. In the UK maybe sitting through ten episodes of the sitcom 'My Family'; in the US sitting through ten minutes of a speech by John Kerry*?

* liam declines to reveal his political leanings, this is not political bias, just an indication of the level of boredom induced by Mr Kerry