Adobe is annoying.

For the past few days, I've been working on an Adobe problem at work. We had to reinstall Windows on an end-user's computer, so we pulled her licensing logs and reinstalled all her software.

Except for Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. Her licensing code wouldn't work. After spending three hours on the phone with Adobe support, I finally got to someone who would "Re-serialize" the software... Under the contingency that I provide proof of purchase. After spending an hour pulling detailed records of her software install requests and then working with our Purchasing department to find all of our requests for Adobe software from just one of our software providers, I finally pinned down her PO, which allowed me to request the proof of purchase from our software vendor.

I cannot articulate how frustrating this has been. I'm in the process of waiting for our end user to become available for another round with Adobe support - hopefully this hasn't been a total waste of time and money.

How May I Ruin Your Day?

On 11/26, I sent an email to one of our vendors (who shall remain nameless).

Their response back on 11/28 was: Please provide your Financial Account and Billing Account numbers.

On 11/29 I provided such information.

On 12/4, I asked for a status update.

On 12/5, they asked for an order number.

On 12/5, I indicated that we didn't have an order number and I was getting more and more concerned that the order was never placed.

On 12/8, they informed me that I didn't have authorization to place the order, but my co-worker, who had requested that I have access to such ordering abilities and confirmed with her manager that I was authorized for such a level of access in October, could email them and place the order in my place.

Oh, and the order? It is for a small chip that our vendor ships for free. Apparently, I don't have that level of clearance.

If it aint broke, don't fix it...

Such simple words for such an important statement.

Managing the Firefox executable in Linux (my install of SuSE 9.3, I should say) is fairly simple. One just opens up File Manager as root, and then navigates to /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and copies lib for a backup (I leave the backup in the same directory, but name it with the Firefox software version at the end, such as lib2.0.0.16). This works fairly well. Step one done: a backup of the current version of Firefox has been made.

Next, take the new Firefox tar.gz file, decompress it. I keep mine in /home/user/daniel/My Downloads/*latest version of Firefox*/, so I went to /home/user/daniel/My Downloads/firefox-3.0.1/ (still in super-user mode in my file explorer) and opened up the one folder in there, "firefox" - so very simple and benign. Things were looking good.

Inside "firefox" is the core application of firefox and firefox-bin and all it's core "Firefox centric" files, like chrome and whatnot. Do a "select all" and then copy all the files.

Continuing on, (once again, still in super-user mode in my file explorer), and paste the contents of the folder firefox into /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and permit an over-write of the files in there. It'll over write of the files that need to be updated, while maintaining anything special that one already has in there.

Update of MozillaFirefox is now done.

Note: This is more complicated than the Windows version of this update, and far more difficult than the very simple Mac version of updating software. However, backing up ones installation of Firefox is much simpler in Linux than in Windows. It is about the same to backup ones programs in Mac OS though

Now, just click on your usual Firefox icon and the browser starts.
~or, at least that is the theory.

* * *
One may get: nothing at all.

I thought, "Perhaps I didn't click it..." - so I clicked it again. No dice.

~sigh, it must be some strange error. I fired up Konsole and navigated to /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ and executed firefox, which returned:
daniel@Suzi-lnx:/opt/MozillaFirefox/lib> ./firefox
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

All I could think was " f r e l l . " (see references in the American Sci-Fi show Farscape) I was looking down the long slope to dependency hell, which has been known to on many occasions to cause serious over-hauls of the system's software, and on some rare major cases, reinstallation of the OS itself. I wasn't about to go down that route unless I was really aware of what I was doing, that meant research time.

Since I didn't have an operational Firefox, I chose to use Opera to google up some results, I chose to use firefox 3 suse 9 error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file as my search "tearm" (if one can call such a long string like that a "term") and found some results. The first result was pretty spot on, ./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at the Firefox Support Forum. Page 2 [.link] is even more useful. This second page informed me that there was a work around for this issue on good 'ol mozillaZine (my most trusted site for Mozilla application troubleshooting). The article I was told to look up is Firefox 3 on CentOS 4?

The results were pretty poor however. Install Firefox 3 though a package manager. Upgrade your pango libraries by hand. Use wine and run the Windows version of Firefox instead. Upgrade your OS - maybe it'll have Firefox 3 preinstalled.

The worst line: "It's probably not recommended, but here's one way."

Even though the post moderator has the best intentions, I find it hard to go to such extremes.

I think for now, I'm going to let FF 3 in Windows and Mac OS, and I'll work on upgrading it after work-arounds for this pango issue become well documented.

For those of you who are in need of the link to the old Firefox software releases, see Mozilla Firefox 2: Download Firefox 2.

Help - Help is not avaliable in this version of Windows!!!

Today at work, I was tinkering with a Vista computer (trying to pin down what can be done about it's excessive RAM utilization), and upon closing all of the open Windows on the computer, I found this notice behind everything.

I loved the wording of the message. "Windows Help Program is no longer included with Windows." - Strategically worded so they don't say "Help isn't included with Windows anymore... we gave up on "helping" with this version of Windows."

* * *
Why couldn't this be phased out anyway? I've even got help file viewers on Linux and Mac OS X computers, it seems a little odd that Microsoft would just stop including it with Windows. What I would have done is include the old help viewer, but start writing all the new help documentation in the new format. Maybe with the next version of Windows, include the old help viewer as an optional addition, but not have it installed by default.

At least Microsoft does include it as a download from their website [.link] - however, there is a total of 6 pages of documentation, over half of which is "known issues after installing WinHlp32.exe" - sigh.

Well, that's my two-cents anyway.

Firefox 3.0.1 (Mac OS X version) Preliminary

This afternoon, I finally decided to start some testing of Firefox 3, I've been putting it off for ages now, and with the frequent notices by Firefox about how version 3.0.1 is available (as well as the fact that the Firefox people have made it to version 3.0.1 already) I decided to give it a shot.

The way I work with new releases like this, I start by using the Mac OS X version of the software, where backing up old programs and demoing new versions is so much easier than in Windows (and lets not even talk about how hard that is to do in Linux), but I found something interesting while using the browser in Mac OS X 10.4.11: the menu bar repeats itself. On Mac, you should see something that looks like this:

[click the image below to see a full-sized version]

But, what I'm seeing with Firefox 3.0.1 is a bit different than usual Apple interface standards:

[click the image below to see a full-sized version]

The items seem to "slide" -- sometimes, the "Firefox" item is the furthest to the left, other times, "Help" or "Window" or "File" will be furthest to the left.

Presently, closing and reopening the browser has not helped the software out. I'll keep tinkering with the software, perhaps Firefox 3.0.1 isn't quite ready for Mac OS X 10.4.11 yet. I'll keep running it for now, and maybe I'll find something out there on the MozillaZine that will help out.

[update]
Since restarting the MacBook, Firefox has worked just fine. It seems restarting the software several times was not the root cause of the issue... Something must have been running resident in memory that needed to be cleared out before the menu bar would work correctly.

Still a strange error, one that I've never encountered before in the many years that I've been running Mac OS (from System Software 7 to OS X 10.5).

control-freak

Yesterday, I spilled a limited amount of water on my wireless keyboard. The keyboard seemed fully functional after a quick "upside-down shake" to relive the keyboard of the water. However, over night, the board lost it's "control" keys. Yes, keys. Neither control key presently functions, nor does the "caps lock" key... Which doesn't make any sense!!

The water was only spilled on the right side of the keyboard, keys like B N M < >, H J K L : " Enter and Shift got hit with the water. However, for some unclear reason, the left and right control keys as well as the caps lock key are now not functional. It's quite confusing!!

Since I lost my CTRL key, I've started to notice how often I use it... CTRL + T for a new tab, CTRL + F for find. CTRL + A for select all, CTRL + F# (in linux) for the TTY sessions, CTRL + Backspace to delete entire words instead of individual characters, CTRL + PgUP/PgDWN for moving between the different tabs! I couldn't even lock my computer this morning (CTRL + L in linux) nor log into my Windows box (requires CTRL + ALT + DEL to access the log on prompt). ~sigh, a sad life it is for the IT pro who can't use the control key. I even thought about looking through linux to see if I could find a mapping program to make something like the Windows key map to the CTRL key, at least until I can get a new keyboard, but I'm holding off on doing that, just because of the trouble it can cause.

My wireless keyboard, a logitech itouch, is quite old, I purchased it back when I was still in high school, using it sparingly until I got well into college, around 2004 I believe. And now it's finally starting to kick the bucket it seems. I've found a decently cheap and decently workable keyboard/mouse combo at NewEgg/Walmart, so I'll be looking into that later this week. The problem is that it is only available online... No "in-store inventory" was found based on the info from either website. It seems that I'll have to purchase a new one online to drop by staples/walmart to see what they have laying around. ~sigh.

For now, I think I can deal with out a CTRL and Caps Lock key... At least for a few days. With wet electronics, it's quite possible the system will come back to me tomorrow! Besides, ensuring that a new keyboard and mouse will work correctly with linux (via wireless over a usb wireless receiver) can be quite a pain and all too frequently involves returns. ~sigh. According to several websites however, they are indicating the EX110 Logitech Cordless Desktop works just fine over USB in Linux.

gotta love the 'switch

Today, I decided to check my in-store voice mail... I got this:

Your mailbox is near maximum capacity. Please delete some messages. You have one saved message. To listen to messages, press 1 [...]

I bet someone here at the store hasn't been checking their messages and has filled up the general mail box. ~sigh.

Irony, is just so funny.

It's the little things in life that'll drive one crazy...

I've been working with Rosetta Stone for a while now, but I hate using it in Windows... As a matter of fact, I had to dual boot my MacBook, named "Akira" (アキラ) into Windows XP to even use the software, since all my other Windows computers are too old or are unavailable to run the software. Well, I had the Mac installer as well, so I thought, "Let's just install it to Mac OS, it'll work out just fine!" Granted, my ideal solution would be to run Rosetta Stone natively in SUSE Linux 9.3, but that isn't an option I'm likely to see any time soon.

So, I went ahead and installed the software in Mac OS X. I got this:
Director Player Error: Script Error Continue? [No] [Yes]"
Clicking yes will bring pass through that prompt and bring up another one, saying exactly the same thing. This holds true for each time I clicked yes.

So what happens when one clicks no? Rosetta Stone exits.

I've spent weeks trying to find a solution. I looked for updates available on the internet (I didn't find any), I searched forums - yet found nothing, I even went as far as downloading a torrent of the software to see if I could get that up and running... No dice. All were the same "Director Player Error: Script Error"

I was really getting peeved, when I finally went back to the internet looking for a solution on the forums. Someone had to have encountered my problem somewhere out there... Right? It must just be buried out there in cyber space.

I was totally right... Kind of. It seems Rosetta is made by a company called Plato (oohh, familiar name, Plato makes all sorts of edu software out there, including software that I had to use down at Support Services when I worked there) I always hated the Plato software... it was soo very annoying.

After some digging and this time throughly reading each post I came across, I found this one single forum post that came in handy (image here). As you can see, it talks about installing a French version of Rosetta Stone (Mac OS edition) to an English Macintosh. The installed worked successfully, however, when running the application, the system program would display "Director Player Error: Script Error" and cause serious issues for him to use the program... All because the program was looking for "Préférences" (French spelling) instead of "Preferences" (English spelling).



The only foreign text displayed on my Mac. I changed the name of my Mac's HD to "Akira HD" (no Japanese text) and then system took right off. Rosetta runs without any problems at all. Go figure, a program designed to help people learn foreign languages, including reading in those languages (Japanese included) doesn't understand those same foreign languages when actually utilized on the system.

I suppose it's understandable... Durring some of the installers, Rosetta's included, it listed the installation hard drive oddly:

Note the installation HD... I've seen this before, even when doing a dual boot with Windows, when when the boot loaded comes up, it lists Windows and those same random characters. So far, no applications have had any problems... However, Rosetta seems to be a little more sensitive than the others.

At least I can be happy that I have rectified the problem... Even if it did take me several weeks to do so.