Category: Tech

I recently read this humorous article about Adobe Acrobat 9 highlighting the bloat and slowness of the program.

I haven’t used Adobe in quite some time. Back in the way old days of Windows 95 Adobe didn’t run all that quick and I found some halfway decent open source alternatives. Then there was the whole Elcomsoft/Adobe/DMCA issue which prompted me to continue not using Reader and other popular Adobe products.

There is a way out. There are alternatives to the bloated, crapware infested, sluggish piece of um… software that Reader has become. I would encourage you to try out:

• Ghostscript – For the longest time I used this piece of GPL software. Not only can you read Postscript and PDF files but also author them.
• Foxit Reader – It’s not open source, and you may have to dig around on the website to find the free version. But it is quite lightweight and speedy.
• Sumatra PDF – Honestly I just heard of it. But I’ll be giving it a whirl shortly. This piece of software is also GPL and is the smallest of them all. It is a single stand-alone executable whose sole purpose is to view PDF files.

If you know of any other decent free alternatives feel free to let us know.

Sometimes a good intentioned security practice can go horribly wrong. The company my wife works had a training session on some new material in a new system. To start training everyone’s password was reset with an eleven character temporary password. Upon logging in users were met with a simple screen asking them to change their password to one of their liking.

It was your typical password change form. One box on the top for your old password and then two below for the new one. But as everyone tried to change their password they were meant with error after error.

My girlfriend was smart enough to count the stars in the password field. Whoever had come up with the magic eleven number had apparently forgotten that the change password form only takes ten characters. With no way to continue and nobody around to fix the problem she and all of her co-workers spent a good part of the day filling out various packets with ‘could not view training material.’

And now, as a result of these overbearing and poorly implemented security protocols, everyone’s password is stuck on the same temporary one until someone who can count can fix it.