How not to make trial versions
A few months ago, I wanted to try out Adobe Dreamweaver
However, it failed to install, and when I tried to get help from Adobe, they told me I had to purchase the full version to get any form of support apart from using the web forum.
Given that the installer didn’t get very far, I concluded that it was probably incompatible with Vista in some way, and I obviously didn’t buy the full version.
Recently I needed temporary access to Adobe InDesign
This time it actually installed correctly, but when I tried to run it, it came up with a license key error.
I searched for the error message on Adobe’s support forum, and it said that the error was caused by some wrong values in the license key registry (typically caused by another Adobe program being installed wrongly), and that the only solution was to have Adobe’s tech support guide me through changing some values manually – reinstalling it wouldn’t make any difference.
But again, Adobe’s tech support is not available to me, as I’ve only downloaded the trial version, so I can’t try out InDesign on my machine.
Adobe wrote to another user on their forum that if he’d just purchase the program, they were certain they’d be able to get it to work on his computer, but that kind of defeats the whole idea behind trial versions, doesn’t it?
Why don’t Adobe understand that they’re losing lots of potential sales by not providing installation support for trials?
How to make business cards in LaTeX
When we set up our company, we needed some business cards.
VistaPrint will make business cards from a PDF file made according to the following specifications: “Full Bleed Size: 90mm x 52mm; Document Trim Size: 87mm x 49mm”.
I prefer doing typography in LaTeX, so I just needed to set this up properly.
I had a few problems with the margins, but with some help from DK-TUG’s mailing list, I came up with the following:
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{memoir}
\setstocksize{52mm}{90mm}
\setpagecc{49mm}{87mm}{*}
\settypeblocksize{43mm}{81mm}{*}
\setulmargins{3mm}{*}{*}
\setlrmargins{3mm}{*}{*}
\setheadfoot{0.1pt}{0.1pt}
\setheaderspaces{1pt}{*}{*}
\checkandfixthelayout[fixed]
\pagestyle{empty}
\usepackage{color}
\begin{document}
\pagecolor[cmyk]{...}
...
\end{document}
The “[fixed]” option is very important here, but it is only available in the newest versions of memoir, so you might need to upgrade this package if you have problems getting it to work.
After designing the actual business card, I ran it through pdflatex and uploaded the resulting file to VistaPrint, and it worked beautifully, as can be seen on the photo.
Electronic cheques
Sometimes there are technologies that you know have been invented but that for some reason never make it although you think they would be very popular.
One such example is electronic cheques.
Using standard cryptographic software, it should be easy enough to create a system that would allow Alice to create an electronic cheque and email it to Bob, who would then forward it to his bank which would use the information contained in it to initiate an electronic money transfer from Alice’s bank account to Bob’s account.
I even believe a Danish company wrote some software that did exactly this ten years ago, but I’ve never seen it used in real life.
Perhaps the reader would argue that electronic bank transfers are easy, so there is no need, but it means that Alice needs to request Bob’s account details, which is a hassle and a potential security hazard.
With electronic cheques, Alice wouldn’t need to know this. She might need Bob’s public key, but that could be in a public location without any risk to Bob, and Bob could choose himself which of his bank accounts the money should be paid to.
It looks like a no-brainer to me. Am I missing something?
More about metric time
I’ve blogged about metric time in the past, but it’s nice to see that I’m not alone.
There are many more details about metric time in this guide than I managed to squeeze into my old blog posting, so it’s well worth a read.
Be aware, though, that he’s only advocating metric units to replace hours, minutes and seconds, while I’m in favour of replacing weeks, months and years as well.
Best of all, he has a page with JavaScript clocks that you are allowed to adapt for your own purposes, so I’ve modified one to show the complete day and time decimally – have a look at the top of the right-hand sidebar.
It feels so much more tangible when you can see the metric seconds ticking away, doesn’t it?
Tax on Linux
I (or more precisely, Complexli) registered as an employer last week.
As a consequence, HMRC sent me a CD-ROM with some programs to help me calculate our employees’ tax and national insurance.
I was just about to shut down Linux and start up Windows, assuming that it would be a Windows-only program, when I read the accompanying notes and was pleasantly surprised to see that the disk contained versions for Windows, Mac and Linux!
I had a few problems installing the Linux version because my laptop is 64-bit (to be specific, I had to install the 32-bit version of libsqlite3 manually beforehand), but now it works beautifully!
It’s great to realise that a tiny bit of my tax money has been spent developing Linux software!
Server move
I got this from Prime Hosting (the company that is hosting this blog) today:
This Thursday, 26th February 2009, we are moving our servers from London to Manchester. Since December 2008 our parent company has been building their own data centre based in Stretford, Manchester, the building is now ready for live servers.All servers (web hosting, dedicated servers, co-location etc) will be taken offline from 10.30PM Thursday. We anticipate the physical move will last between 6-7 hours from turn off in London to turn on in Manchester. We have hired a van in order to move the servers in one drive, the drive from London to Manchester, traffic and road works pending, will take no longer than four hours.
Our windows services will be moved at a different time yet to be decided so are unaffected on Thursday and will remain online.
For detailed information on the data centre, including build progress pictures, please visit www.manchesterdc.com.
Summary points:
- Funded with the companies own cash and angel investor – No debt
- 20G redundant connectivity back to London
- Capable of holding 145 racks, initial phase is 29 racks
- On site offices available for rent on the first floor
- 24/7 on site security and support staff
- Cold-aisle containment ensures the building is very efficient and uses less power for air conditioning than traditionally built data centres
- Newly built detached office building
- Professionally designed and fitted out by data centre builders inssudlows.co.uk
The construction of our own facility is a watershed moment for all those involved in the company. It provides us with a very secure facility to house our existing clients and huge expansion space for new services. The inclusion of on site staff will also enhance our support capabilities.
Ubuntu for two
Marcel seems to think that computers are for downloading random programs from the Internet, preferably without an up-to-date anti-virus program.
So of course his computer (running Windows XP) got very, very ill. I managed to clean it, but unfortunately this left many programs broken.
Our only set of XP CDs didn’t work on his 64-bit computer, so in an act of desperation I wiped his harddisk clean and installed Ubuntu Linux on it instead.
Surprisingly, he rather seems to like it, and I have had no requests so far to reinstall Windows XP. Is he a new convert to Linux, I wonder?
Having burned an installation CD for this purpose, I decided to reinstall Ubuntu on my laptop, which had been left somewhat useless after the auto-upgrade from version 7 to 8 failed.
It worked beautifully, except that the wireless connection didn’t work.
However, after rebooting three times with a wired connection, it managed to locate and install a proprietary driver on its own, and suddenly the wireless card kicked into action without any action from my part.
Perfect!
Two annoying blogs
As I hinted to in this blog posting, I’ve had problems with two RSS feeds that I process in the What Others Are Saying box on the right.
I had fixed them once, but I then upgraded to a new version a bit too quickly and lost my modifications. 
So now I’ll post my changes here, so that they’re saved for posterity.
First of all, my beloved Phyllis insists on writing her titles in all-caps, which looks crap when mixed with other postings. This code takes care of this:
if (stristr($url, 'phylsblog'))
$title = ucwords(strtolower($title));
Secondly, John Wells’s blog stores the date in the title field in a non-standard format, and the title in the description field:
if (stristr($url, 'phon.ucl.ac.uk')):
$day = substr($title, 0, strpos($title, ' '));
if (strlen($day) < 2)
$day = '0' . $day;
$month = substr($title, strpos($title, ' ')+1, 3);
$month = $months[$month];
$year = substr($title, strpos($title, ' ', 4)+1, 4);
$issued = $year."-".$month."-".$day." 00:30:00";
$title = $item['description'];
endif;
What others are saying
You might have noticed that I’ve added a new feature in the top right corner of my blog: What others are saying.
It’s using the homonymous WordPress extension, but I had to make a couple of modifications.
First of all, I wanted the most recent postings, whatever their source, not just one per blog, so I needed to comment out a break, but this was easy as it was already explained in the source code (but I think it should have been an option so that you wouldn’t have to mess around with the source code).
Secondly, for some bizarre reason it would at first only read the feeds for Phyllis and Dougie’s blogs, not for any other sites. I spent several hours last night trying to find the bug, but to no avail.
Today I found a solution: It turns out the RSS reader module included with WordPress is out of date, but one can get an updated version out of the FeedWordPress extension.
Thirdly, I needed to add some code to downcase Phyllis’s feed to make it match the rest.
Now I just need to convince John Wells to fix his feed. 
Mean-tested computers
Gordon Brown’s idea to hand out computer vouchers annoys me. Just to summarise:
The prime minister announced that parents are to be offered vouchers worth up to £700 to connect the 1.4 million children growing up in homes without a computer.“To ensure that we are prepared for the times to come, the government will fund one million more households to get online, enabling parents to link with the teachers at their children’s school and helping young people with their homework and coursework,” he said.
I can see several problems in this.
First of all, there is the usual problem with mean-testing, namely that people who are just a tiny bit too rich to qualify end up poorer than if they had been slightly poorer in the first instance. If there are too many of such measures, it reduces the incentive to try and work one’s way out of poverty.
Second, although I totally agree it would be great if all kids had access to computers at home, how can one make sure that vouchers actually end up as useful computers for the kids? Isn’t it likely that some of them will be swapped for booze or drugs? And if they are used as intended, what happens when the computers break down?
I think a better solution would be to lend or let cheap computers, so that they can’t be converted to cash, and so that there is an incentive to save up money for some better equipment.