Archives For technology

Why I hate Symantec products

4/20/2008 — 3 Comments

I’m a fairly content AT&T DSL subscriber. I’ve also been a loyal AVG Antivirus user since my last nightmare with Norton Antivirus 2004.  It turned out to be a chipset incompatibility with my model of Dell Dimension 4100 that caused the never-ending cycle of BSODs.

Old news.

I came downstairs to the computer the other morning to find an AVG ad on my screen.  Grrrr.  Any program installed on my machine that throws ads up on the screen is gonna to get uninstalled.

My co-workers kept raving about the Symantec AV that comes free with AT&T DSL.  I don’t know what I was thinking, but I thought I would give it a spin.

Stupid move.

I should have stopped when it required that I use IE instead of Firefox.  I had to set IE to my default browser.  The agony.

An hour and a half later, I’m beating my head against the brick wall of crap software that is Symantec Antivirus.  Here’s the lovely error message:

Problem is: There wasn’t a previous install or uninstall to be completed.  I did everything they told me.  I clicked here to resolve.  It didn’t.  I uninstalled AVG, Windows Defender, disabled my Windows Firewall, manually deleted my Temp files, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.  Four restarts later, I’m ranting right here.

Check out these moves:

Check, check, check and check.  Uninstall.  Yes, I’m sure.

Downloading the Norton Removal Tool.  Check.

Running…

Ahhhh…Freedom.

In peeves, technology
permalink

WordPress v2.5: Nice

4/8/2008 — Leave a comment


Updated to WordPress v2.5 during halftime of the KU vs Memphis game last night.

My first reaction: Impressive interface refresh.

Since I use the K2 theme, I had to upgrade to the most recent nightly and recreate my K2 sidebar with the stock WordPress sidebar to make it work.

Image uploading is way different than before.  Haven’t tried the new add video and audio features yet.

In technology
permalink

Apple violates user trust by including Safari in iTunes update

3/24/2008 — Leave a comment

People are rightly outraged that Apple has included Safari — clearly a second-rate browser download — along with the iTunes updater.

I’m OK with iTunes, because it’s a stellar product. Safari isn’t. It can’t stack up to to Firefox.  Apple certainly has a monopoly in the music delivery and player market, but even the evil Microsoft doesn’t do this kind of thing.

Here’s the CEO of Mozilla on the subject.

In commentary, technology
permalink

Early impressions of Firefox 3 beta 3

2/16/2008 — 2 Comments

[firefox 3b3 robot]

I’ve had Firefox 3 installed since Beta 1, but just recently started running both Firefox versions (2.0.0.12 and 3b3) using the steps found in this nice (as always) Lifehacker article.

Some early thoughts:

  • The Nightly Tester Tools add-on is a must to make your add-ons work (for now).  That’ll change when the full version comes out.  The other add-ons I’m running: Adblock Plus and Greasemonkey.
  • I don’t like it that they went all IE7-ish and moved the Home button to the Bookmarks toolbar.
  • The icons set is better, IMO, in FF2 — except for the new forward and back buttons.  I like those.
  • There are some issues in Gmail, specifically in the new contact manager.  The names of the contacts don’t show in the middle pane.
  • This version is definitely faster than it’s predecessors.  I appreciate that.
  • The Smart bookmarks and the stars are nice.  I don’t tend to use bookmarks at all, really, so I’m not sure I can give them a fair shake.
  • The new download manager was supposed to be one of the new cool things, but honestly, I don’t see why.  There’s no buttons.  All of the actions for downloads are in the right-click context menu, which is not very intuitive.  I want the download manager in a tab and I use Download Manager Tweak extension in FF2
  • I really like the new “save the tabs” feature when you close down.  That’s pretty cool and a nice new thing.
  • One real subtle thing I’ve noticed: there’s a small white blank square that displays on the screen when you stop moving the mouse and hover.  Yeah, it bugs me.

UPDATE 2/16

  • There’s also some issues in Gmail when attaching files.  You can make it work, but it’s pretty annoying.

You tried it?  Thoughts?

In technology
permalink

Google Maps Street View van comes to Kansas City

2/12/2008 — 1 Comment

The Google Maps Street View van has now made the rounds in Kansas City. Pretty cool. Check it out here.

h/t Scott

In technology
permalink

Spriglet #12 – Merging PDFs in Windows

2/12/2008 — Leave a comment

[pdfsam]

OK, so I have PDFs of several receipts that I need to fax into my health insurance company for flexible spending reimbursement.  The Windows Fax “printer” doesn’t allow me to string together multiple files, so I’m in a pickle.

I don’t have Adobe Acrobat, so I start Googling with “(combine|merge) (pdf|pdfs) -mac -apple -purchase -demo -trial -shareware -acrobat”

I find pdfsam, download & install it, add my PDFs, set the output file, click Run and, bam, a merged PDF.  Sweet.

I tried another option as well — pdftk.  If you’d rather go the commandline route, this’ll work just as good.

In spriglets, technology
permalink