I hate Adobe Illustrator. I’ve always hated it. If the folks responsible for CorelDRAW! hadn’t turned it into crap by constantly shipping new major releases that didn’t fix crippling bugs that were in the previous version, I’d still be using it. On Windows, no less.

Oh, sure, they never really got on the typography bandwagon, severely limiting your ability to use features like ligatures, swash caps, true small caps, optical kerning, etc., but there were a lot of things I could do in Draw 4 that are still a complete pain in the ass in Illustrator 12. Some days, I still find myself writing PostScript by hand and importing the results, just to save time and energy.

And it keeps getting slower. Photoshop is still pretty snappy on my 1.25GHz G4 PowerBook with 2GB of RAM, but Illustrator gets sluggish well before I start trying to get fancy, and it doesn’t have Photoshop’s scriptability, so I can’t easily automate a complex task and walk away while it runs. There’s no real competition out there today, though, so I’m stuck with it.

Sigh. Done ranting for the day, off to cook and kill murlocs. (note that these are separate activities…)

Friend and co-worker Jeff was an unhappy typist, suffering under the tyranny of mushy keyboards. Soon after I started my new job, he complained about the pain (both spiritual and physical) that these devices cause him. He lamented the passing of the Apple Extended Keyboard, code-name Nimitz, which reminded me that I’d blogged about its return more than a year ago. Jeff ordered one five minutes later. Ten minutes after it arrived, I ordered two. There was another suspiciously keyboard-shaped box sitting in his office today…

Pay no attention to the Mac-themed advertising for the Tactile Pro keyboard; it works just fine with “those other operating systems”. Pay close attention to the mechanical keyswitches that make typing a joy, and that fill the air with a reassuring clatter. My PowerBook isn’t bad, especially compared to the dreck Dell ships with their desktop PCs, but I’m seriously considering picking up another one for travel, even if I have to buy a bigger laptop bag to hold it. It’s that good.

We’ve been buying them straight from the manufacturer, but it turns out that SmallDog has them at a better price.

Apparently the folks at Adobe haven’t learned anything about computer security since I looked at the first release of Version Cue. After I installed the CS2 suite last night, I was annoyed at what I found.

Listens on all network interfaces by default? Check. Exposes configuration information on its web-administration page? Check. Defaults to trivial password on the web-admin page? Check. Actually prints the trivial default password on the web-admin page? Check. Defaults to sharing your documents with anyone who can connect to your machine? Check. I could go on, but it’s too depressing.

The only nice thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t add a new rule to the built-in Mac OS X firewall to open up the ports it uses. As a result, most people will be protected from this default stupidity.

As of Friday morning, over 90% of my spam is either in German, about the T_rk_sh g_n_c_d_ of _rm_n__ns, or both. None of it is getting into my main mailbox, of course; what manages to escape my usual spam filters ends up in my Quarantine folder, due to the unknown senders. After the first few get through to there, the filters learn to recognize it.

[Note that I disemvoweled that phrase to keep it from getting into search engines. I know better than to invite traffic from the folks who can’t even see a recipe for Christmas {large bird} without being compelled to post multi-page screeds about that history. I’m already getting email spam about it, I don’t need to clean out my blog comments as well.]

…I don’t sit twenty feet away from my laptop, and the subject line gives it away as spam anyway:

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People familiar with Adobe PostScript will recognize the source of this label misprint.

Everywhere I’ve worked, people believe in them. They’re the ones who clear jams, change toner cartridges, reload the paper trays, and clean up the messy pile of abandoned printouts, and finally they’ve been captured on film. I give you…

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I have never been more annoyed at an application’s failure to fail.

We have this service daemon that performs various actions on incoming images. Recently, it’s been crashing at random intervals, leaving behind a core file that tells us precisely what function it segfaulted in, but includes nothing to tell us where the image came from. All we know is that somewhere out on the Internet, there are JPEG images that crash our copy of the IJG JPEG library in jpeg_idct_ifast().

Since this was affecting customer performance, we really wanted to know, so we cranked up the logging on one of the affected thirty-two servers, to capture the incoming request URLs. And it hasn’t crashed since.

Four days of crashes every hour or so, and now nothing. The good news is that our customers are less unhappy. The bad news is that our developers don’t have a test case to code a fix against.

So now I’m trolling the web, looking for corrupt JPEGs. I strongly suspect that the images that caused our problem were intended to exploit holes in a certain other OS, but I can’t be sure until I find some and feed them to our server. Sigh.