The only thing I don’t like about newer Adobe products is the activation stuff. I don’t pirate software and I don’t appreciate things that are there to ensure that I don’t, thus taking valuable time and energy (both mine and my computer’s) for something that benefits me not one bit. Adobe’s form of this seems to be much less intrusive and inconvenient than most companies’ implementations that I have experienced.

Microsoft product upgrades are usually a mixed bag — some real benefits and some negative changes (the exceptions usually being 1.0 -> 2.0 and possibly 2.0 -> 3.0 where they figure out what the product really is and thus those upgrades are usually clearly worth it).

I wonder how much of this problem where upgrades aren’t really *upgrades* comes from areas where the products are basically “done” yet the company has built a significant source of revenue model from upgrades and thus needs to push out a release every x months no matter what. It may be that switching to a “monthly fee” for software that one uses might actually be preferable to an upgrade treadmill where the changes don’t improve things and companies are motivated to try and force upgrades.

Photo and video processing are still “new” enough that significant upgrades are still possible in both user interface streamlining and just new features (including more speed).

Of course, very few blogging tools make it easy to serve a redirect in place of the feed. Technical people still have no excuse.

It also makes me crazy when people just break all their old post references instead of serving a redirect to the new site.

It’s so much nicer when someone moving to a new site makes the effort to ensure no feed readers watching the old site get broken and nobody coming across links into the old site get disappointed by a 404.

The symptom is a crash when your cdb object is deallocated usually with a “double-free” memory corruption error message. Assuming a .cdb file named “foo.cdb”, the following script will repro the bug:

#!/usr/bin/python
import cdb
c = cdb.init(’foo.cdb’)
del c

with the following message:

fox@hercules:~$ python cdbrepro.py
*** glibc detected *** python: free(): invalid pointer: 0×00002b56c25bd750 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/libc.so.6[0×2b56c300ab0a]
/lib/libc.so.6(cfree+0×8c)[0×2b56c300e6fc]
python(PyDict_DelItem+0xfa)[0×44370a]
python(PyEval_EvalFrameEx+0×2e40)[0×485140]
python(PyEval_EvalCodeEx+0×830)[0×489d60]
python(PyEval_EvalCode+0×32)[0×489da2]
python(PyRun_FileExFlags+0×10e)[0×4ab4fe]
[…]
Aborted (core dumped)

Some other searching suggests that python-cdb’s use of PyMem_DEL is no longer recommended. I haven’t verified that this doesn’t cause other problems, but replacing cdbmodule.c’s use of PyMem_DEL with PyObject_Del (and the PyObject_NEW with _New, to use consistent naming).

As soon as Ubuntu’s bug tracker (launchpad) works again for me I’ll report the bug. Launchpad is timing out with an error message for me now.

Microsoft Photo Info enables easy editing of “metadata” for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer.

  Photo Info is not quite as snappy as PixVue used to be, but has the bonus of the company that created it still being in business. I can no longer find any download sites for PixVue that I trust.

Photo Info seems be to nice enough and gets the job done.

Flex uses ActionScript which bears a remarkable similarity to JavaScript. It’s not quite the same but it’s close enough that I haven’t stumbled too badly with it working from JavaScript knowledge.  As with any "new" language the learning curve isn’t the language but the environment and libraries.

The experience with Flex and also the Greasemonkey hacking I’ve been doing lately has made me rather fonder of JavaScript than I’ve been in the past.  JavaScript is particularly nice when used in an environment that is safe from worrying about cross-browser API woes — such as a Firefox-only Greasemonkey user script or an environment like Flex. It’s not ideal but it has a lot of what I like in a language, including garbage collection, closures, reasonable typing and widespread deployment.

So far Contribute seems to be nice enough.  I haven’t tried to use it to edit anything other than WordPress blog entries so I don’t know how well it works with websites via FTP, WebDAV, SFTP, or local filesystem.  I was pleased to note that it supported SFTP — seeing folks use FTP with cleartext passwords makes me unhappy.

I miss the real-time spellchecking I get in Firefox textareas (or in Word, but I use Firefox more than Word). Seeing the little red squiggle is a lot less intrusive than remembering to run a modal spell-checking UI. Right-clicking on red-squiggled words and picking “Ignore”, “Add”, or correcting the spelling is nicer than using the modal spell-checking UI. I’ve also noticed that the real-time feedback is more likely to make me remember the correct spelling of a word in the future.

Well, enough of this post now that I’ve thought of something to talk about which isn’t related to Contribute…

Hm, I can’t tell if the “Allow Comments” button is on or off by default.  I guess I’ll find out.

Update: Seeing if editing an entry works… That’s kind of random, editing the entry apparently made it disappear. I had to edit it again to make it come back. Also it’s kind of slow, but that may be Dreamhost’s hosting of my WordPress install rather than Contribute.

The new mouse is shaped a little differently than the old mouse and has a couple more buttons and one new wheel on the side. The new buttons are moderately useful but the key new feature over my old mouse is that the mouse wheel will spin like a flywheel if it’s pushed with enough force.

I hadn’t noticed how much I liked that for zooming around in a document until I had to use my wired, non-laser, flywheelless mouse at work.

Launchy

Free, open-source Windows app that indexes Program Files and any other directories you tell it to. Then alt-space pops up a command line box and it autocompletes as you type. I installed it a while ago and meant to mention it but it kind of faded into the background and I don’t think about using it anymore. It’s just there. No more do I need to concern myself with the program menu’s lengthy “organization” by vendor nor do I keep needing to add paths to my PATH. I used to do that so I could use Windows-Run to run things rather than rummaging in Program Files but Launchy is a much better solution. I’ve read that it resembles Quicksilver for the Mac.

SQLAlchemy

“SQLAlchemy is the Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper that gives application developers the full power and flexibility of SQL.” — mostly it handles some tedium without getting in the way. ORMs still make me nervous since they tend to have a lot of “magic” in them but SQLAlchemy makes it pretty easy to use the convenient parts and override the “magic” if/when it’s necessary for performance. Which probably won’t happen too much but knowing it’s easy makes it easier to rely on SQLAlchemy in the meantime. I don’t know if I’ll keep using it, because like every other time I use a library like this I find myself spending more time trying to figure out how SQLAlchemy expresses something and I already know how to use SQL.