20th century sofware
Today I want to share with you my recent weird software experiences. It’s not about bugs or crashes or anything. It is about things that should work and they just don’t.
Recently I downloaded the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader 7. It is beautiful, the speed is awesome, specially for the web (which was a pain in the ass before). So I went home and tried to do the same. As in installing the Acrobat Reader 7.
The download went fine. Instead of having a “AcrobatReader_setup.exe” I had a download manager. Weird. OK, they know better! I launched the “Download manager”. And then I had this dialog window, with a download progress bar and some buttons/options (minimize to tray, download only when idle etc).
So I say to myself: “Oh, yes, now I get it. They are kind to us and protecting us, and taking care of us”. Adobe will look out and don’t stand in your way. Cool.
After a couple of seconds (I have a 1 meg DSL line) nothing happened. OK, they know better, let’s put it in the tray, it’ll woke up soon. And I forgot about it for an half an hour or so. And then I clicked it to see the progression. Empty progress bar, the useless and silly buttons … Weird.
After a couple of hours digging the web to find the solution, a light came upon me and said to me: “try in Internet Explorer!” Maybe it was me using my beloved Firefox. So I opened the IE and typed the URL etc. And IE asks me: “Do you want to go online now?”. A thunder comes from nowhere and hits me right there! Quick: open IE menu, File, Offline, uncheck offline option, open Adobe Download manager … and relax … it starts downloading …
Man, I was almost crying … the Adobe Acrobat Reader Download Manager was waiting for IE to go online … wwwwwwwwrrrrraaaaaaggghhhhhhhhhh (= cry of anger).
I said to myself, what a pitty, a beautiful and usefull software hidden behind a useless manager.
And forgot about it.
And today, another example hits me: this time no harm done. It’s only silly.
I have setup in my Norton Antivirus to go check my system at a certain hour a certain day. Sunday we changed from summer time to winter time. And Norton it seems to use the Windows’ task scheduler. Which is fine. BUT NOT WHEN I TOLD IT TO OPEN AT LUNCH TIME AND IT OPENS AN HOUR SOONER! Because, you see, the system has updated it’s internal time, now 1pm = noon. But the scheduler application have not! So 1pm before the hour change has become noon in the scheduler too!
If I add a task at 1pm, why on Earth would I want it to be done at noon after the 1st November ???
PS Wow, I feel much better now, peaceful and relaxed.
