So it turns out I have been pronouncing Hoegaarden incorrectly for a very long time. Just wanted to throw up a post to make my small contribution to letting everyone know.
The pronunciation was actually on the 6-pack packaging, and the wikipedia page pronunciation backs it up. In short the “Hoe” portion is pronounced as “Who”.
Sometimes the ability of Adobe to anger me blows my mind. I’ve never appreciated any of the Macromedia side of things (feel free to review early posts on this blog for specific, tangible opinions on Flex). Everything they make is overpriced and riddled with bugs. I believe the company is 70% management, 25% compensated evangelists, and 5% developers. My impression as an end user is they have a handful of hardcore, excellent engineers trying to support the bloated weight present in the rest of the company.
Photoshop at least was useful, and though just as expensive as the rest was at least feature-rich and relatively stable (compared with the total garbage price-to-feature ratio present in Flex Builder or Dreamweaver).
I just tried to install Photoshop on my new macbook pro running Leopard with a case-sensitive formatted hard drive. Case-insensitive volumes are stupid and I was delighted to have Leopard offer this option during installation.
However, it appears making their creative suite compatible with a case-sensitive format is beyond the capabilities of Adobe so they aren’t even going to try according to this blog. The particularly telling portion follows in this comment. The square-bracketed portion is Adobe’s response.
I was all set to purchase a copy of Photoshop CS3 today once I'd got the trial installed, but now I won't be buying because it won't work on case sensitive filesystems. What makes it particularly annoying is:
* It's a very silly restriction - OS X is UNIX, and UNIX filesystems are almost universally case sensitive
* It would be trivial to fix for a company with Adobe's resources
* Adobe could at least have the decency to include mention of it in the system requirements!
[If it were trivial, we would have addressed this limitation already. Everything is a trade-off. After Apple introduced this feature/capability/whathaveyou, we had a choice: should we put resources into building/testing for both case-sensitive & case-insensitive environments, or should we put that effort elsewhere? So far, lacking a case for the user benefit provided by case sensitivity, we've chosen to invest elsewhere. --J.]
So basically making an application case-sensitive is beyond the capabilities of Adobe. I find this hard to believe given that there are posts like this one easily findable with google where people have made it run on just such a volume. I am also a little bit angry about my macbook at this point as well. I guess I assumed with all of the developer evangelism for the mac platform that their file system had always been case-sensitive.
I personally am not up to jumping through the hoop, my macbook is now Adobe free aside from the Firefox flashplayer which I admit there is no viable alternative for. I realize this may not be an option for Designers who depend on the creative suite but for my admittedly non-power-user purposes Seashore is fine. That open source, free project somehow managed to conquer the sheer difficulty of executing a program on a case-sensitive volume.
Despite my recent move to OSX for work environment I am a big fan of Dell. Their servers, especially the latest lines, are solid, well-constructed machines that perform very very well for their price. The desktop and laptop business lines are also good machines (I especially like the no-tools-required construction of the Optiplex line) and they have never failed to satisfy the terms of the purchased warranty on any piece of hardware. I paid for 4hr onsite hardware replacement on our first couple servers due to the sales rep lumping it in at virtually no added cost and when a CPU failed in one of those servers they were on site replacing the CPU in less than 3 hours. Also as a small business customer you get to talk to Americans living in Texas when you call for support.
In any case, the one thing I hate about Dell is every damn time you use support they follow up a week or so later with a phone call and email both asking you to complete different surveys. I don’t want to get a call every time a hard drive fails and needs replaced or every time a server power supply fails. These are relatively common, harmless events. Just ship or bring me the part depending on the warranty terms and leave it at that. The phone version of the survey is at least an english-speaking, generally pleasant person but they use that call-ahead garbage where you have to wait for them to take the call after they have called you and if you ignore them or hang up they will call back every day. My responses are rapidly growing more venomous.
As a quick follow-up to the parallels-related post I made the other day, wanted to mention Parallels Tools and also a workaround for a mouse issue I was having while using it.
Parallels Tools is an excellent helper application that can be installed into the OS of your virtual machine to enable extra features and make things easier. I’ve only tried it with Vista and XP and this was with build 5162 of Parallels 3.0. Among other things, it provides:
It is also very easy to install. Fire up your virtual machine, login if not already, ctrl-alt out of the VM, then select “Actions -> Install Parallels Tools” from the OSX menu of Parallels. The installer will magically run inside your virtual machine and after a reboot you will be set.
Now I had one big problem after the installation of Parallels Tools - my mouse quit working in Windows XP. I could seem to move it vertically along the left side of the monitor (but the cursor was out of view) and I could hit the start button and some of the left-most icons on the desktop but otherwise it was useless.
The fix, believe it or not, was to use windows to update the mouse driver. Not sure if this messes anything up, but my virtual machine works great now and none of the features (copy and paste from OSX to VM) appear to be negatively affected.
Using the keyboard, I did the following:
I couldn’t find a solution to this issue on google so hopefully this will be helpful for people hitting the same problem after me.
I posted recently about tentatively moving to a macbook pro after using Windows and/or Linux for many years. At this point in time I don’t see myself ever switching back. I’ve rearranged my work environment to eliminate the Linux desktop, my old Dell laptop is collecting dust, and now I just have my macbook with a 2nd monitor attached.
In any case, I needed a way to test stuff I am working on in both IE6 and IE7. My macbook came with Parallels and Vista so IE7 was no problem but for whatever weird reason there is no way (that I have found) to run IE6 in Vista. I tried following the directions all over about running Virtual PC 2007 but my plans of running a virtual machine inside of a virtual machine didn’t pan out. It gave me some error about the CPU architecture being invalid or some such.
The solution is actually pretty straight forward, and if you don’t have the benefit of Vista and IE7 already accessible it can be used to get that as well. The only downside is it does require Parallels (which costs some small chunk of money) and the whole process of needing virtual machines to test does feel a bit heavy - though I suppose far less heavy than having another machine to test on.
The easiest way to go would be to buy Parallels, buy a copy of XP, and then create 2 virtual machines from it with one remaining at IE6 and the other being upgraded to IE7.
The potentially cheaper alternative follows:
I realize that second to last step makes this a bit of a bummer, but still in an environment where an XP cd is available it works just fine. For a company this can make a lot of sense because XP activations don’t get used up for these free images so you can provide IE6 and IE7 to any employees running on OSX without having to purchase windows licenses.