Spinor Info

Many years ago, I once bought a CD changer: a standard form factor internal CD-ROM drive that could “swallow” four CDs at a time, which then all appeared under different drive letters.

One of the most infuriating things about Windows (NT 4.0 at the time) was that every once in a while, when a program enumerated all drives, it caused the drive to needlessly cycle through the four CDs: clickety-click, zoom, zoom, clickety-click, zoom, zoom, clickety-click, zoom, zoom, clickety-click, zoom, zoom, taking its sweet time.

I no longer use that CD changer, but I do have several external hard drives permanently hooked up to my computer. They are Western Digital MyBook drives, which spin down after some minutes of inactivity. And… you guessed it, every once in a while, say when I am running an installer, stupid Windows spins them all up, sequentially of course, to consume as much time as possible.

I wonder if Microsoft will ever acknowledge this as an issue and fix it. Based on past experience, I am not holding my breath.

Looks like Facebook is having trouble grabbing my blog entries. It stopped a while ago… when I reset the blog settings on Facebook, it downloaded the latest, but then it stopped again.

I’ll try to reset it one more time but if it doesn’t work… hey, blogs were meant to be write-only anyway. I am yelling at the world, I don’t necessarily expect the world (or even my close circle of friends) to yell back.

Still, one would think that Facebook, with its fancy, shiny new data center and all that, would be a little more robust.

Adobe Corporation recently introduced the latest version of their PDF reader application, Adobe Reader X.

So I promptly downgraded my Adobe Reader 9 installation to Adobe Reader 8.

I use PDF documents very often. Apparently, the good folks at Adobe do not. Why else would they remove one of the most important productivity features, namely the ability to view several PDF files in the same application window?

Yes, I get it: for new users, it makes sense to move away from the “applications open documents” paradigm towards the “documents appear in windows” paradigm. In an ideal world, the application would be invisible; each document would exist in its own window; and we wouldn’t even care that some documents are Word files, others are PDFs, etc.

But we don’t live in an ideal world, and there are reasons to suspect that this ideal world may never come to pass. Perhaps it will. But it’s not here at present, and the fact that every PDF opens in a new window is a huge annoyance.

An annoyance that was first introduced in version 9, and is apparently being kept alive in version X. However, my patience ran out. It’s back to version 8 for me.

Oh, and I also have a license of Acrobat Pro, to produce and edit PDF files. But, it’s a license for version 6. Why? Because version 6 was the last version without DRM/Activation.

If folks from Adobe read this, well, please let me know when you have a version of Acrobat that is DRM-free and can do MDI. Then, I’ll buy. Until then, I’ll just stick to my obsolete versions.

I once built my own not-so-micro processor as a hobby project of sorts. It was loads of fun.

There is another way of having loads of fun: how about visually simulating an old 8-bit microprocessor as it executes instructions? What can I say… it’s neat. Brings back lots of memories from the days when I was earning a living writing code for the Commodore-64.

In recent years, one of the most welcome feature in Web browsers was tabbed browsing. Implementing in effect what Microsoft calls MDI (Multiple Document Interface), it helped reduce screen clutter while viewing multiple Web pages.

Meanwhile, Microsoft made a (valid) observation that MDI is application-centric, and for new users, not intuitive; the idea is that each document should live in its own window, regardless of which application is used to render or edit it.

Fortunately, even Microsoft were wise enough to recognize that for many (especially professional) users, who keep multiple documents open, SDI (Single Document Interface) is not always the best choice. On the contrary, MDI allows one to work significantly more efficiently when keeping a large number of documents open. Therefore, Office 2010 continues to support MDI mode (thankfully), although not near as elegantly as a Web browser, with visible tabs.

Enter Adobe. They also chose to follow in Microsoft’s footsteps. Unfortunately, in their infinite wisdom they also chose to take a step further: they not only made SDI mode the preferred mode, they removed MDI mode altogether. They offered the lamest excuses: 1. that’s not how it’s done on the Mac, 2. MDI mode was already considered deprecated in version 8, 3. Microsoft told us to do it, 4. it’s more work, and 5. it’s more costly to test.

Thankfully, Acrobat’s product manager came to his senses after receiving overwhelmingly negative feedback. He closed the discussion by referring to the proverbial dead horse.

Except that news of the horse’s death might have been slightly exaggerated. The discussion in question took place in October 2008. I cannot help but notice that my calendar says July 2010, yet Acrobat 9 is still the latest version, still sorely missing an MDI mode.