Software Updates

I formally protest against Adobe Acrobat Reader for the reasons of code-bloat and instability. If you actually try to install this tool, you find that you will have a working version of the Reader, but in addition to that you have this weird Adobe AIR installation, and one other program that I have no idea why we might need to use it for. Not to mention the fairly large download [of 33MiB], but since most of us are no longer using dial-up, I think that it is okay.

Personally, I love using Evince (you can download it here), kpdf, or even xpdf for my PDF needs. In view of the fact that pretty text output these days are mostly rendered in PDF form for portability, these tools are more of a necessity than anything else. Any of these tools are awesome to use except for one reason—they don't run on the Windows platform.

Searching around on the Internet revealed this tool: Foxit Reader for Windows. While this is not as open as evince, kpdf or xpdf, it does have the advantage that the reader is freely available, and that it runs on windows. The download of the file was roughly 2.3MiB, and it had similar functionality as the Reader [by the creator's claims]. From these two rather disparate numbers, one might wonder what Adobe has been putting into their Reader download bundle.

For the PDF files that I have thus far, Foxit Reader seems to do a decent job, even incorporating multi-tabbed viewing to reduce the clutter of the workspace when alt-tabbing between windows. I only resorted to doing this because I had to read a particular series of PDFs for revision for a midterm, and the Reader decided to ditch me and hang for some unknown reason.

It is things like that that slowly push me away from the Windows platform and moving ever more closely to that of the GNU/Linux platform.

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On a semi-related note, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out. I'm not sure how much better it is from 2.0, or how it handles the inconsistent rendering behaviour on MSWord files. Once I've tried it sufficiently, I will talk more about it.

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Python 2.6 is released. Python is a really cute language, and 2.6 is "one heartbeat away" from the next-generation version of Python 3k or Python 3.0. Code compatibility should not be a big issue when transitting between Python 2.5.2 to 2.6/3.0, unless one has been doing all sorts of really exotic operations based on exotic library functions/keywords that has been deprecated.

I managed to get Python 2.6 to compile on AFS, and have finally rid myself of the aging Python 2.4 that exists in that system.

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GIMP 2.6 is also out, with a slightly modified interface, and with better management of stuff. I'm not sure of the whole impact, but I've updated my versions with it just to be sure.