Category: Rant

Well, after I got home I tried Adobe Fucking Updater again. This time it popped up a dialog saying “no updates to be installed” so quickly I didn’t even notice how much RAM it was taking. Certainly a far cry from hours and gigabytes of memory that it took when I ran it at work.

Also, I did a Time Machine backup for the first time in a few days. I’d started it in the morning, but it was taking too long so I’d aborted it after about half an hour. I started it again when I got home, and expected it to take 5 or 10 minutes like it usually does, or maybe a bit longer because I’d just installed the Leopard 10.5.2 and Graphics updates. Instead it ground and ground and ground and finally finished 3.5 hours after it had started. I’m told this is because the disk was nearly full, and it had to re-arrange old backups to discard the appropriate old ones.

Adobe is not my favourite software company. I’ve ranted before about splash screens that cannot be moved or covered. Today I was browsing a PDF file in Safari, which was an excruciatingly slow activity for some reason. But then it got an order of magnitude slower, and I see the infamous “Adobe Updater” icon in the dock.

I try to pop up the Activity Monitor to see what’s up. It takes at least 5 minutes, and it shows Safari and Eclipse, the two main reasons for having this computer here at work, as “Not responding”. It also shows that Adobe Updater has an RSIZE of 1.4GB+, and a VSIZE of 3.0GB+, and both numbers are still growing. I kill the Adobe Updater, and Safari and Eclipse both take a while to finish swapping back in their active parts and start working again.

But 10 minutes or so later, the Adobe Fucking Updater starts again. This time I decided to humour it. I closed Eclipse and Safari and waited. And it didn’t take long for the AFU to take up all the memory I had, and then die. I think it got up to about 3.3Gb of VSIZE. And yet, doing a quick back of the envelope calculating, I’m pretty sure it could have sucked every Adobe software product I have on my disk into memory and still not used 3+Gb.

So what the hell is happening? Why is Adobe Fucking Updater so badly written? Why is it chewing memory like that?

I have a theory that it might have something to do with being behind the corporate web proxy (which also sucks mightily). Or it just might be that Adobe’s programmers are incompetent morons who should all be fired and told to never touch a computer again. Or more likely, both. When I get home tonight, I’ll try updating again and see if it really needs more memory than I’m willing to give it.

Our software is installed/upgraded from CD. As part of the build process, we create .iso files and automatically burn that ISO to a CD in the build machine’s burner. When I want to upgrade the test complex on my desk, I can never find the master CD, so I usually burn a copy myself. But I don’t have any blanks at my desk, so I thought I’d try just copying to a USB “thumb drive”, and then mounting the .iso on the test machine using “mount … -o loop”.

So I started copying it to the thumb drive on my Linux box (which only has USB 1), and went away and did something else for 10 or 15 minutes. And I came back and it was still copying. So I did something else for 10 or 15 minutes. And it’s *still* copying. At this point, I suddenly realized my laptop has a USB 2 port free. So I copied the file over the network to my laptop, copied it from there to a different USB thumb drive, and took that over to the test complex and upgraded it. And having done all that, the Linux box is *still* copying the original .iso to the first thumb drive.

Update I just tried it again with “time cp” with a different thumb drive, and it only took 12 minutes and 30 seconds. I’m positive it was taking longer than that before, so I’m redoing the test with the thumb drive that was taking so long before. Maybe it’s the thumb drive that’s slow, or maybe it’s because it’s formatted ext3 instead of FAT32. I’ll report back when that one finishes. If it ever does.

Second Update: After arriving back to work, I find that the copy to the ext3 formatted thumb drive took 2:19:05. Yes, that’s nearly 2.5 HOURS! Dude, that’s fucked up.

Well, after working with the two screen setup for a couple of days, I’ve started to get a terribly sore neck. A bit of self-evaluation shows that when I’m looking at the laptop screen, I’m craning forward and down, which is ruining all the good effort that my chiropractor and the stretching exercises he gave me over the last three weeks have done.

So I’m now running with the laptop screen closed, using the KVM to use the big screen for both laptop and desktop use.

Unfortunately when I came in this morning, my desktop was totally unresponsive. I couldn’t get it to wake up when I switched to it on the KVM, and I couldn’t ssh to it from my laptop. So I power cycled it. That required manually fsck’ing the disk, and then when it did come up for real, the mouse went nuts and started opening programs and moving stuff around on my screen like it was being driven by a demented ghost. It had also booted the wrong kernel (one that didn’t support MVFS). So I booted it with the proper kernel and it was ok. Except that as always, vmplayer complains that I haven’t run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl, so I ran it again. Don’t know why that never “sticks”.