Adobe is failware

Recently, I bought my mother a nice Dell Inspiron 11z notebook/netbook. Today I took a couple of hours in order to install essentials, Microsoft Office, Skype, Firefox and finally, Adobe PDF Reader.

I fired up my browser and typed in “adobe.com”, expecting nothing more than a simple download, and running of an executable. Boy, was I in for a surprise. Adobe requested to install a Firefox plug-in, called Adobe DLM (Download Manager, as it appears). That, in its turn wanted to run another executable, which would finally do the favor of downloading that bloated piece of software at 38MB.

I actually went through the whole process, but when it finished, alas! Adobe PDF Reader was still nowhere to be found. I did have something else, though, called “Acrobat.com” on my desktop. Looking more carefully in the Control Panel, I saw that Adobe also took the liberty of installing Adobe AIR, which I have no idea what it is.

Looking up in the internet to understand what the hell all of this does all of this means, and I found a neat enough explanation here http://blog.sameerhalai.com/archives/adobe-the-next-hijacker/

I either had to go to the FTP site, ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/ and try to browse in there for version, language and my operating systems.

OR, I could simply install Foxit, an alternative product that weighs 5MB rather than 38. It installed in less than five minutes, including download, and from the looks of it, doesn’t fall short at all of Adobe Acrobat Reader. All that, without any of the headache, or the annoyances of continuous upgrade suggestions.

From now on, it’s GhostScript and (apparently) Foxit. You fail adobe. I moved on.

Rubik’s Cube from Alpha to Omega

Today, a friend who came back from Singapore gave me an awesome gift – a 2×2x2 rubik’s cube. That surely sounds weird at first, so I’ll elaborate.

The People Have Spoken – Spend!

A few months ago, I saw a billboard that read the following “Why is there no hospital in Ashdod? Because Olmert is the puppet of the Finance Ministry”, and it also had a sketch in that nature.

Put aside Ehud Olmert’s virtues as a prime minister, put aside the fact that the billboard was paid for by contractors who were supposed to build the Hospital, put aside even the discussion about the necessity of a Hospital in Ashdod. Let me emphasize – I’m not conveying an opinion regarding any parameters of this specific case. I’m talking about the easiness of “asking more” from the government.

Incredible Turkish Proverbs

If you know me, you probably know by now that I was born in Turkey and I speak Turkish (If you don’t, why are you here?). Of all the languages I speak (in any level), Turkish is probably the least appealing grammarwise. It has an immense number of irregularities, and it’s very hard for anyone non-native to pick up the language.

However, Turkish makes up for it five folds when it comes to vocabulary, and in particular – proverbs. Turkish proverbs are the best ones I know, and to me it’s amazing how it uses such vulgar words to describe daily things in a funny way.

Sudoku Solving for Dummies

About a month ago, when I saw couple of people I know (who shall remain nameless) solving sudoku, I thought to myself “I can probably code a sudoku solver before they can finish this”. I didn’t have a computer there and then, but I saw how long it took them (about an hour or so), and I when I came home, I took up the challenge.

Fresh Riddles!

I uploaded some of the riddles I’ve been meaning to upload for quite a while, and you can enjoy them in the riddles page. The new ones are:

• Cake Jealousy – How to cut a cake n-ways in a fair way?
• Sweet Like Chocolate – Splitting a chocolate bar
• Fair and Square – Multiple square dissection
• Ants – The famous riddle
• Jumping Pawns – Moving an infinite solitaire pawns to a point

For the last two I’d like to thank Yaniv Leviathan, whose page is a great source for cool new riddles.

Last Migration (and I Hate Computers)

So, no posts in the past six months. There are a few reasons for that:

• I’ve been pretty busy.
• The site was shabby, always getting nuked with spammers.
• A great part of the old site was redundant and it annoyed me to even enter there (let alone post).
• I was too lazy.

The flat-listing doesn’t do a great deal of justice, if I were to create a pie-chart of the percentage of effect of each cause it’d be something like 10-10-10-70, respectively. So in an attempt to get rid of 2, 3, and get rid of the annoying spam mails I’m receiving, I migrated my blog to WordPress.com.

Optimizing Contest

No post in the past four months, guess nothing particularly interesting (except Turkey pix maybe), and the fact that I’m finally properly enrolled in Graduate degree for Technion.

Today I was in Intel Software Seminar.

Istanbul (not Constantinopolis)

I will be visiting Istanbul between 2.8 and 14.8 (that’s starting from tomorrow). If you’re around, give me a shout. If you’re in deep need of Turkish Delight, let me know as well.

Entertaining

A few months ago, Jasmin (a friend of Maor’s), stayed with us for about a month.

Today, about six months later, I was pointed to her blog, where she wrote about all occupants of what she calls ‘the flop house’.