Saintless

Pardon the geek out moment. I’ve been having problems with Internet Explorer 8 crashing a lot since I installed it last week. I finally put together that it was crashing repeatedly after I access a PDF that I’m testing from Visual Studio, in a web application. When I would launch in debugging mode, the crash would happen. Sometimes it actually closed IE8, but other times I just got a crash notification. Until I restart my laptop, the crash notification continues to happen. I would usually still be able to view the PDF that I was testing in IE8, and the rest of the crashes didn’t seem to fully coincide with the PDF opening.

I tried searching to find out if there was a known issue with IE8 and the .pdf format, but came up empty handed. So, I decided to see if there was an update at Adobe.com. Sure enough, I had Adobe Reader 8.1 (I think, it was 8.? anyway), and 9 is the current version. So, I downloaded the updated version, and began the install.

The downloader tool that Adobe uses told me that it had downloaded 98% of the file, but that it had unpacked 100% of it. The installer portion had begun, and it wanted to close the downloader tool. The downloader tool didn’t think it was done, so I had to allow it to save a file to my desktop, so I could close it and continue the installation.

Since that seemed odd to me, I started thinking, and remembered that the Google Updater was supposed to keep Adobe Reader up to date. I now remember seeing the symbol in my task tray indicating that Adobe was updating several times recently. I think Google was trying to update it, but couldn’t. Regardless, this is one more reason that I really despise PDFs. The software has always been unwieldy, and not very user friendly.

I am guessing that the problem here was that Adobe Reader 8.x isn’t IE8 compatible, and it needed that update. So far, everything is fine since getting Adobe Reader 9 to install. I don’t see a way to get Google to quit being responsible for updating Adobe, but I am also guessing that the problem Google had was the same as mine (that it couldn’t get past the downloader and on to the install), but just invisible to me. So, I’m going to leave Google Updater responsible for the installation, for now.

Tags: Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer

This one probably won’t interest anyone, except maybe a techie or two, but I have to vent!

I’m starting a new job tomorrow, and the contracting agency was going to supply me with a laptop, because the company I’ll be working for will take a couple of weeks to get me set up with one. I said I could use my laptop, and then realized I’d need XP, but I had Vista installed.

I’ve been meaning to “upgrade” to XP since I bought the laptop, but haven’t had the time. Since I took today off between the jobs, it was the perfect time!

First things first, before I began the install, I copied important files to the “restore” partition, and downloaded the wireless drivers. Everything went smoothly. Until I tried to find the video driver.

The video driver wasn’t listed on HP’s driver page. I went to nVidia’s site, where I tried several different drivers, as well as the “discovery” feature, and it kept telling me I didn’t have any hardware that worked with it. A couple hours searching through the web, and apparently, I’m the only one with this particular problem. However, someone had a similar problem with a Conexant audio driver, and they tried “updating” the driver, and telling it the location. So, I decided to give it a shot, and lo and behold: I’m finally viewing the “internets” without distortion or ugly page re-rendering! w00t!

Tags: HP, nVidia, Vista, XP

Thanks to Widgetbox and Open Congress, I now have an easy way to keep an eye on what my representatives are doing.

Widgetbox allows you to submit the URL of any blog and create what’s called a Blidget. Open Congress has a feed for all of the Senators and Representatives, so all I had to do was join Widgetbox, which I’d already done. Then click “Submit Blidget”, and paste the RSS feed link from the representative’s page on OpenCongress. Out came this:
Get great free widgets at Widgetbox!

I’ve made Blidgets for
Senator Bennett,
Senator Hatch, and
Representative Matheson, or you can create your own. You can see mine on the right side of this blog, if you scroll down a bit, and there’s a link by each of them if you’d like to add them to your own blog.

If anyone wants to make one and needs more help, just let me know.

Tags: Blidget, blog goodies, OpenCongress, Representative Jim Matheson, Senator Orrin Hatch, Senator Rob Bennett, Widgetbox