Sergei Mutovkin's Rumbling Mumbling

In my previous Twitter postings I’ve voiced my support for Steve Job and his open letter about Adobe (before Macromedia) Flash. I was mildly happy to see Microsoft joining the camp (though they have a hidden agenda of getting rid of Flash and pushing Silverlight). But today I have to start questioning another Adobe product – Acrobat Reader. Just a few days ago I’ve installed my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate on my PC and installed the most recent version of Adobe Acrobat reader (it was on Friday, I think). Today, on Monday, I see a balloon saying that an update is available. I happily click, agreeing to get up to speed with Adobe fixing holes in their cheesy software. It takes a few minutes to decompress (this is on Core 2 Quad 3.86Ghz) and it installs. What do I see next?

A prompt to reboot my computer!

WHAT? Just a small file viewer now requires me to reboot my computer? Starting that point on I’m beginning to question quality of Adobe software engineers and if they are capable of writing any remotely good piece of code. Just amazing how this company is still able to produce Photoshop and Illustrator. Time to find alternative to Acrobat Reader on Windows real soon: on my Linux I’m already happily using the great Okular and on my Mac I’m using Preview.

I was struggling to find an application that would be as simple as Flickr native Uploadr but would provide me with an option to change permissions before pictures are uploaded. Finally I’ve found Ross Burton‘s Postr – GNOME Flickr Uploader.

Ubuntu 8.04 already comes with package called “postr“, however it is a very outdated version 0.9 from more then a year ago and did not have the features I wanted. Current version is 12.2 and it has a much improved feature set. It definitely belongs to Ubuntu backports, but as always with Ubuntu you will have to wait until the next stable release Ubuntu 8.10 (codename Intrepid Ibex).

For now you will unfortunately have to install it manually from console

tar zxvf postr-0.12.2.tar.gz
cd postr-0.12.2/
sudo python setup.py install


A bonus is that this program is written in my favorite Python.