Day: January 12, 2006

How dare life get in the way of flying!

I’ve been waiting for months for good weather so I can go out and get re-acquainted with the sky.  It had gotten to the point where I was resolved to blow off work on the first sunny day.  But wouldn’t you know, today was a sunny day, but I had an important meeting at 10:00am, another one at 1:00pm, and a doctor’s appointment at 3:30pm.  Didn’t leave much of a gap for getting out to fly, especially considering the time it takes to get a plane ready before and put it away afterwards.  Even after the doctor’s appointment, there isn’t much time before the sun goes down, so I went to Best Buy to get my XM radio and iPod adaptor installed.

Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny as well, but there is supposed to be a strong windshear at 2,000 feet.  (I think that’s what Canadian weather briefers refer to that as a low level jet.)  That can mean difficult landings and lots of turbulence.  Not ideal conditions for a fun flight.  But we’ll see.

What crack is Adobe smoking?

Last night I wanted to install Acrobat Reader 7 on my laptop.  Normally installing a program in Mac OS X is just a matter of downloading a .dmg (Disk Image) file, opening it, and dragging the application out of there to the Applications folder.  Sometimes the .dmg has a package installer in it.  So I wasn’t too surprised when I found that the .dmg file I’d downloaded from Adobe had a package installer in it.  But when I ran the package installer, it didn’t just copy some files from within itself to places on the destination drive.  Oh no, that would be too normal.  Instead, the package installer fired up a Adobe download tool that downloaded another freaking .dmg file!  And that .dmg file had a package installer that actually installed the Acrobat Reader.

Can somebody please explain why they wouldn’t just let you download the Acrobat Reader installer package, instead of making you download an installer installer?

Rone, you want to comment?

Phew!

The problem described in Rants and Revelations : Oh, buggeration! has been fixed.  It was a simple matter of some bad DOM programming – the way I was turning on and off the divs to show various parts of the refresh screen, specifically to show the “You’re done” part, was incorrect.  It’s unfortunate that the way I was doing it before worked on Firefox and Safari, otherwise I wouldn’t have assumed it was correct.

In case anybody cares, I had

div.setAttribute(“style”, “display:none”);

where I should have had

div.style.display = “none”;

which of course makes a lot more sense and is a lot cleaner if I ever put a style sheet on these things.

Oh, buggeration!

In my entry Rants and Revelations : Baby’s first AJAX I crowed about my lovely new AJAX Javascript refresh thing.  It is a thing of beauty and I thought a joy forever.  Until I got an email today from a guy who was generating a database and it suddenly stopped refreshing.  He said it did work until he added another state to the ones he’d done before.  And he also revealed that he was using IE, and was unable to change to Firefox becaused the computer was provided by work.

So I checked it out, and did a really big database generate.  It refreshed a bunch of times, and then suddenly it stopped.  And when I hit shift-refresh, the count reset to 0 as if it didn’t make contact to the XML producer at all, or couldn’t parse it or something.  “View Source” wouldn’t even bring up a window.  But when I posted the same URL into Firefox, it showed the correct results.  I tried backing off the security settings to the loosest, to no avail.  Can’t see anything useful in the various settings pages.
I wish IE had a Javascript console.  I’d really like to know what’s going on.