Monthly archive: August, 2007

I have Acrobat Professional 8 installed on my work machine. Unfortunately, whenever I need to add an update from Adobe, it requires me to place the install CD in the machine.

Why? Because I foolishly thought it was fine to ignore the warning during install telling me about such an inevitable occurrence. Now, I have been a developer for a while. Not compiled code, but rather online apps. This requirement reminds me so much of M$’s incessant requirements. Why can’t you install the update without the disk? I can only think of one reason – protecting their investment.

That’s fine for them, but I have a machine with limited space. I can not afford to lose several hundred megs to a program that is not used all day long. If this were an IDE, I would not complain as much. Maybe.

So, I use a proprietary software from an educational vendor that shall remain nameless (not M$). But, the important point is that they use UniData from IBM for this product. Nice. Fine. Dandy. That is unless you want to:

1. Use a JOIN.
2. Like full text editing.
3. Prefer universal search/replace instead of line numbers.
4. Think that lookups should be kept to a minimum instead of the SOP.
5. Find the name of a field.

Just things like that. No, I’m not bitter/frustrated/can see the light/forest/trees/having an adult beverage.

This is just life in the corporate environment. Big iron, baby and all that jazz.

Me. I would prefer a terminal and command line any old day. I also like PHP/PostgreSQL/MySQL more and more each day.