Technology Tales

Why Adobe Digital Editions fails to satisfy

3^rd June 2007

Adobe Digital Editions

For now, I still have my eye on Photoshop CS3, and it was with interest that I noticed that Peachpit Press had published a book, entitled Adobe Photoshop CS3: Up to Speed, exploring the changes made from CS2. The plot thickened when I found that I could download as an e-book.

However, it was then that I discovered a major change made to Adobe Reader for its eighth version: it no longer reads what Adobe titles Digital Editions. For that, you need either the previous version or to download the beta version of Adobe Digital Editions (yes, it does rather appear that they couldn't tie up the final release dates), which appears to be a Flash front end to Reader.

As it happens, I am not so convinced by this development: the thing is in essence coloured black and the mouse pointer disappears a lot of the time. Having menus and navigational screen furniture constantly disappearing and reappearing doesn't do much to enhance the reputations of Adobe's user interface designers. While it wouldn't be too bad if you could customise the colours, you can't; a light grey has to be better than black. Its taking over the whole screen when maximised is another irritation, especially when it covers up your task bar and the Alt+Tab shortcut is needed to leave it without having to hit the minimise button.

Yes, it does do the job, but I still find myself hankering after an Adobe Reader style interface and I have no idea why this has been foisted upon us when the previous approach was a perfectly good one. All in all, I have only to say it seems a premature roll-out of the approach. Now, where's Reader 7 when I need it?

UNIX Process Management

1^st June 2007

Here are a few UNIX commands that I have recently encountered that help with process management and are particularly useful when jobs are running in the background. Here they are:

nohup

It's short for no hang up and stops termination of a job when a user logs off. Another result is that all console messages being directed to a file called nohup.out in the directory current to the job being run, or in the user's home directory, where write access to the current working directory is unavailable.

ps

This returns a list of processes, their ID's and their statuses. By default, this is for your own processes, but you can look beyond this with the myriad of options that can be passed. For instance, the -U switch allows you to look at a job for other users while the -f one shows more information than the standard call and this even includes the commands submitted to start the ongoing processes.

kill

The name says it all, and it's far quicker than the rigmarole that you have to endure with the Windows task manager; I wonder if there is a command line approach to process termination on Windows.

Using SAS FILENAME statement to extract directory file listings into SAS

30^th May 2007

The filename statement's pipe option allows you to direct the output of operating system commands into SAS for further processing. Usefully, the Windows dir command (with its /s switch) and the UNIX and Linux equivalent ls allow you to get a file listing into SAS. For example, here's how you extract the list of files in your UNIX or Linux home directory into SAS:

filename dirlist pipe 'ls ~';
data dirlist;
    length filename $200;
    infile dirlist length=reclen;
    input buffer $varying200. reclen;
run;

Using the ftp option on the filename statement allows you to get a list of the files in a directory on a remote server, even one with a different operating system to that used on the client (PC or server), very useful for cases where cross-platform systems are involved. Here's some example code:

filename dirlist ftp ' ' ls user='user' host='host' prompt;
data _null_;
    length filename $200;
    infile dirlist length=reclen;
    input buffer $varying200. reclen;
run;

The PROMPT option will cause SAS to ask you for a password, and the null string is where you would otherwise specify the name of a file.

Google Analytics

25^th May 2007

Furthering my excursions into things related to Google, I have been giving Google Analytics a whirl for my hillwalking and photo gallery website. Aside from the fact that it is updated once a day, it could have enabled me to eject WordPress plug-ins like Popularity Contest and FireStats getting the chop. As it happens, I also have a Google Analytics plugin installed, but a little editing of the blog template that I have developed would get rid of that too.

That’s enough about WordPress plug-ins; let’s return to Google Analytics. It has all the usual stuff: who’s visiting, from where are they coming, what are they using to see your site, etc. In addition, it captures if they are coming back, how long they are staying on the site and how deep they are going. Bounce rate is another term that features heavily: it is when a user only goes to one page and then leaves. With a blog, this unfortunately seems to come out as a high figure and that is ironic given that the blog was meant to promote the online photo gallery; it has very much taken on a life all of its own. There’s more to the information from Google Analytics, and it’s all useful stuff, of which I plan to make good use to improve how my site works.

Going overboard on blog plug-ins and widgets?

24^th May 2007

This whole Web 2.0 thing is producing an embarrassment of riches for those wanting to share their thoughts on the web without having to go to the effort of developing their own websites from scratch. A decade ago, Geocities was pioneering the idea of web communities but, without the infrastructure and tools that we enjoy today, it and its kind were ahead of their time.

In these blogging days, life is a lot simpler, which means that temptations exist. Temptations like those caused by garish animated GIF’s in the late nineties, a lame attempt to spice up otherwise dull websites. Returning to the present, it is plug-ins and widgets that could convey the excess.

With WordPress, the plug-ins are more “behind-the-scenes” sorts of affairs, but it is so easy to accumulate several for stopping comment spam and keeping an eye on web traffic, to name just two applications, and so on that you need to be careful that a bag of nails does not result. In fact, I am now considering the rationalisation of what I have got while the number remains in single figures.

WordPress 2.2 adds widgets to the list of temptations; while WordPress.com already has these, the number is small, and you can be sure that that will explode now that self-hosted WordPress blogs get the functionality. The trouble with these widgets is that you need to be adept with CSS so as not to end up with an eyesore akin to those seen a decade ago, though theme authors can help with this. I am not activating widgets on my hillwalking blog because I have many other (better?) things to be doing.

Another thought on widgets: the tag cloud widget previously held in captivity at WordPress.com surely must now find itself in the wild, a worrying prospect given how rubbish they can appear. However, Jakob Nielsen et al. shouldn’t get too concerned, as trends that go too far scar the memory and preclude their return. Just consider those animated GIF’s…

A case of cross-fertilisation

23^rd May 2007

Having two blogs allows me to stream my content; I doubt that many visitors to my hillwalking blog would appreciate seeing posts on, for example, the minutiae of UNIX shell scripting. However, as disparate as these worlds are, there is something shared between them, and it has started to cause some cross-fertilisation between them: blogging itself. Rather than being too self-referential on my hillwalking blog and preaching to the choir, I have taken the decision to muse about blogging and its progress right here. There is also some escape in the opposite direction too: technology does get used on the hill too. Examples include GPS receivers and digital mapping, and my hillwalking blog is definitely the place for them. It is all very much audience-driven; this consideration of content is the sort of thing on which a posting on The Blog Herald has been musing.

What are we like?

22^nd May 2007

Over the history of the internet, I have seen halcyon online dreams turn sour, with the world of Web 2.0 suffering the same lurch. It was only in the mid-nineties that the web was considered a levelling platform and a place for interaction and sharing. It also was a lot safer than it is today, an ironic observation given how e-commerce has taken off until you realise the financial gain from scams like phishing. Human nature does have a habit of spoiling things and the result is the number of patches that Windows has needed over the years, that and the expansion of security software from being all about antivirus packages to the inclusion of anti-spam, anti-spyware and firewall applications.

You would think that the above would have all but killed off the optimism that abounded in the late nineties, only for it to resurface again with the explosion of the blogosphere and, of course, there is Second Life. But there are signs of slippage even in this brave new world: comment spam has become a scourge for blogs, though the likes of Akismet and the WordPress Bad Behaviour plug-in see off most of it for me.

Then, there remains flaming on web forums. In fact, what has prompted this post is my observation of the transformation of a friendly forum thread into a hostile exchange. It started out as a communication regarding the welfare of someone who needed to retire from the annual Rab TGO Challenge with a high fever. Everything was going well until someone poked a hole in another poster's grammar, yet it was the mention of fitness that really turned things sour, especially when someone’s admission of a 20-a-day smoking habit drew the ire from a fitness fanatic. While it was all unnecessary, it shows how people can mess up with technology: to realise those optimistic dreams that I mentioned earlier, we have to change to make it happen. For now, I suppose that we’ll have to live in hope…

Do we surf the web less at the weekend?

21^st May 2007

Looking at the visitor statistics for both this blog and for my main website, I have noticed a definite dip in visitor numbers at the weekends, at least over the last few weeks. Time will tell whether this is a definite trend, yet it is an intriguing one: fewer people are reading blogs and such like when they might have more time to do so. It would also suggest that people are getting away from the web at the weekend, not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, I was away from the world of computers and out walking in the border country shared by Wales and England yesterday.

Speaking of walking, it does not surprise me that my hillwalking blog received less attention: many of my readers could have been in the outdoors anyway. And as for this blog, it does contain stuff that I find useful in my day job, and it appears that others are looking for the same stuff too if the blog statistics are to be believed. Couple that with the fact that technology news announcements peak during the week, making it appear that the weekday upsurge is real. I’ll continue to keep an eye on things to see if my theorising is right or mistaken…

Using Korn shell commands in scripts running under the bash shell

19^th May 2007

This is actually a fairly simple one: just prefix the relevant command with ksh like below (in the example below, bash won't know what to do with the print command otherwise):

ksh print "Hello, world!"

It's also useful for running Korn shell scripts under the bash shell as well.

Recalling previous commands in the Korn shell

18^th May 2007

The default shell on Solaris boxes seems to be Korn and the version that I have encountered doesn't appear to allow obvious access to the command history. In the bash shell, the up and down cursor keys scroll through your command history for you, but Korn doesn't seem to allow this. Thankfully, there is another way: you can set up the editor vi as the default method for gaining access to the command history by adding the following line to the .profile file in your home directory:

set -o vi

Then, you can use the Vi (it's pronounced vee-eye, apparently) commands ESC+h and ESC+j to move up and down the list of previous commands. That, or, assuming that you have access to it, just use the bash shell anyway...

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