Where I Have Been

Google MyMaps view of the places I have lived, worked and studied.

Photoshop CS3 and hating on beta users

[Post exists because I can't find much information about this anywhere outside of Adobe]

"Adobe Photoshop CS3 cannot be installed because it conflicts with: Adobe Photoshop CS3"

It turns out that if you had the Photoshop CS3 Beta installed, the release version doesn't play nice. Various knowledgebase articles just say "uninstall the beta first", which makes sense and is easily done. However, further down the page, it's "you must deactivate the beta before you uninstall it". By the time you've gotten this far, you've already uninstalled it, and your system is now in this hideous state where CS3 can't be installed. There's a KB article listing out the directories and zillion registry entries you can manually remove to make it work, but unfortunately, after an afternoon of digging around trying to find keys like ' HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\38E97B37B094D0640B6DC2B737893052', it still doesn't actually work. Adobe says they'll have a cleanup script for Windows available 'soon', though I've heard that the warez community has already released one, which has to hurt given that this problem was caused by the copy protection system.

Nothing like spending $650 on a company's flagship product only to be told that it will work 'soon' all because of some pain-in-the-butt activation system; even Vista was better than this. I feel sorry for the engineer or team whose fault this was, and it's easily imaginable that their QA processes could've missed this. I guess this is the punishment for forgetting what 'Beta' really means.

On the other hand, the direct-download purchase from Adobe.com was super easy, and didn't require local installation of some 'Adobe download manager', so bonus points for that (though having to pay extra for a PDF manual seems a bit off).

[Update: the CS3Clean for Windows is now available. Let's hope it works]

[Update2: Nope. @!#!@$!%@!@!#@!]

[Update3, May 1]: After spending a week getting no useful answers from Adobe support, I ended up reformatting and reinstalling Vista. What a great experience.

ActionButton

When I used to review games, it wasn't uncommon for my "50% is average!" scores to get bumped up by the editors, especially if the game in question was a heavily-hyped popular production with a large existing fanbase. This filled me with a smattering of almond-flavoured cynicism regarding game reviews, which is why it's so nice to find ActionButton, a site best described as "game reviews for gaming snobs". While they still seem to be finding their voice, their reviews of Twilight Princess, God of War 2, GTA:LCS, and DEFCON all deliciously run contrary to popular opinion, and are the reviews that I most agree with.

They're not curmudgeonly trolls, either - they have glowing reviews of Gears of War, Balloon Fight and Mount and Blade.

Excanvas in the wild

Though it has gone too long without the update love it needs, excanvas turns out to be actually useful. Here's a small sample of the more interesting uses:

• Yahoo! Pipes
• PlotKit
• Emprise JS Charts
• Doodlesketch
• GeoWeb

Gapminder

I generally don't like anything, but this was a great video, interesting from the start - the Gapminder Talk at TED.

"See" how the world is changing.

Visual imagery can tell stories and truths which would be very hard to capture and communicate otherwise

Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden since 1998, uses beautiful animated charts and minimalistic diagrams to explain the world we live in. Poverty, money and health can be seen at once shaping or being shaped by world events, technology and the passing of time.

Or if you prefer, there's an hour-long one from when they did a tech talk at Google. Not as snappy, though.

And once you're done, use the tool yourself.