Problems (and a Few Solutions) Installing Adobe CS3

So we got our media for Adobe Creative Suite 3 last week, and I’ve been fighting with the installs on various systems for the last few days. Some notes from the battlefield:

That popping sound you heard was sudden obsolescence

Adobe Premiere Pro and Soundbooth are only supported on multicore Intel Macs. So much for our “multimedia lab” of 2GHz Dual G5 PowerMacs.

You want how much RAM and disk space?

Be prepared to clean up your hard disks, especially on notebooks — CS3 Master want’s almost 20GB of disk space to install. Web Premium for Windows also complained on our XP systems, which have only 512MB of RAM. I can’t really fault them for that, though… XP alone takes that much RAM to function. ;)

Blank Popup Window on Mac Pro Install

I fought with installing Master Collection on my Mac Pro for a few days. The install would get to the end of disc 1 and pop up a blank alert box, mutely asking me to put in the second disc. There were no buttons to click on, and nothing I did could get the install to continue. I had to force-quite the Setup app and clean up my system.

I was eventually able to complete the install by copying the contents of all four discs to a single “payload” folder on my hard disk and running the install from there, as described here.

Turns out the culprit may have been the Safari 3 beta.

Web 2007 Conference Followup

I made it through another Penn State Web Conference! Each year I threaten to cut back on the number of presentations I’m involved in, but it never seems to happen… and in fact my total commitment increased this year by one Lightning Talk.

The main conference was bookended by two excellent keynotes: Jared Spool from UIE and Kimberly Blessing from PayPal and the Web Standards Project. They both hilighted aspects of the Read/Write Web from the podium — Jared by Photoblogging to Flickr and Kimberly by Podcasting. It’s nice to see people who get it.

I also had the pleasure of taking in an excellent presentation on Day 2 by Dan Frommelt on Universal Design. I’ve got some reading to do.

A day of software best practices

Dating back to my days as a consultant in the waning hours of the dotcom era, there were two truths I came to view as fundamental:

1) Once you get to a certain point in your development as a programmer, the actual functioning of software ceases to be a mystery. The only mystery that remains is what to do next. You can pretty much build anything you can imagine, but how do you choose *what* to build next?

2) You can only do so much as an individual developer. To create something really meaningful, you need to work with a team. The whole is *truly* greater than the some of its parts.

These two beliefs fuel my interest in the software development process – tools, methodologies, processes and practices – particularly those that deal with development teams and collaboration. I’m always on the lookout for ideas that will help me choose my next project, and help me go about building it through collaboration and teamwork with my colleagues.

To that end, when I heard about the Software Best Practices Conference, I was intrigued. The title is actually a bit misleading… it’s more of a roadshow, with different speakers scheduled to be at different cities on different days.

I went ahead and registered for the Pittsburgh conference, which takes place tomorrow. I’m going to try to summarize some of the more interesting ideas here throughout the day.

If the conference lives up to my imagination, I may see about attending some of the dates in other cities… several of the upcoming conference dates are in cities within a reasonable driving distance.

Apollo, we have liftoff!

At last! Adobe Apollo, the new cross-platform runtime for building rich internet applications is now available on Adobe Labs:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

I’ve been reading and hearing about Apollo for what seems like a year… I’ll have to take some of my off-week between classes to give this a test drive by converting some of my Flex 2 applications to Apollo applications.

Installing OS X Software Updates from the Terminal

I discovered today that one of our Mac servers had not correctly shifted to Daylight Savings Time on Sunday…. somewhere along the line this box dropped of our sysadmin’s watch list. Unfortunately, I was on the road so I couldn’t get to the console to run the update myself.

Now with my Redhat Enterprise Linux servers, I routinely patch them from the UNIX shell:

up2date -u --nox

This will run up2date without the X Windows GUI (–nox … get it?). Surely there is a way to do this with a Mac?

In fact there is! The shell command is softwareupdate.

If you want to check what the updates are before you actually install them so they don’t do something nasty (and who wouldn’t?) just use the list flag:

softwareupdate -l

When you’re ready to install the updates, just use the install and all flags:

softwareupdate -i -a

You may need to use sudo to do this if you’re logged in (and who wouldn’t be?) as a non-privileged user.

For more useful Terminal tricks for managing OS X servers, see http://www.bombich.com/mactips/commands.html

MAX ’07 in Second City!

Another excuse to visit one of my favorite cities – Chicago! The 2007 Adobe MAX conference will be held September 30 – October 3 in the Windy City!

This makes my decisions a little tougher. I’m trying to plan my conference agenda for 2007-08, and I was considering skipping MAX due to the expense, and going to Flexmaniacs and maybe cf.Objective. I really like the regional events (I was a speaker at CFNorth ’02 and MXNorth ’03), but MAX ’06 was so amazing it would be hard to pass up a return trip.

Holy Xeons!

Wow… ColdFusion MX on the MacPro is fastfastfast. It took a while to get it set up since it isn’t technically supported, but wow. WOW I say.

I skimped at least on one step: I didn’t recompile mod_jrun on this box. Since I’d gone through that process on the MacBook Pro, I just copied my existing Intel binary .so file to the new machine, and everything seems to be running just fine.

I had to mangle several lines in the config files I copied over from my G5, as the CF files now live in /Applications/JRun4 rather than /Applications/ColdFusionMX due to the recommended multi-server install.

The big drag again was adding our homebrew SSL CA certificate to the system keychain to let our development applications authenticate against Active Directory. I think we should just pony up the cash and get a verified certificate this year.