Removing the Adobe Acrobat Toolbar from Outlook

Adobe products are reasonably obnoxious bits of software. I've removed all traces of Adobe Acrobat from my Macs, but I use Acrobat extensively on my XP boxes. So I need to live with Adobe's insanely broken updater there, but the stupid Adobe toolbars drive me batty. It appears in odd places in Outlook and IE, eating up precious vertical space.

You can't use the Add-In control to eliminate this sucker, and Adobe obnoxiously refuses to respect the "toolbar off" setting. (Could be Microsoft's flaw too -- MSFT can't do toolbars.)

Here's how to remove it:

Removing the Acrobat Toolbar from Outlook

Tip: you can use this method to remove other toolbars, such as the Avery toolbar (AveryAddIn.Connect).
When you install Adobe Acrobat, a toolbar is added to Word and Outlook. This toolbar can prevent you from rearranging the toolbars in Outlook (your arrangement won't stick between restarts) and for most people, serves no useful purpose. You have two ways to deal with this...

The Add/Remove modify install option is the standard, but the article describes regisry edits that may work for other obnoxious products.

Python has Apple Events support - from Apple

AppleScript: Scripting Bridge is an Apple product for sending Apple Events from Python.

I wonder how Python compares to AppleScript now as an OS X scripting language. I certainly prefer Python's syntax and scoping rules.

Also, Apple has at last updated their AppleScript documentation site. It was about 8-10 years out of date until recently. I'd assumed Apple was giving up on AppleScript, perhaps replacing it with an Apple version of Python. They've obviously decided to make another go of AppleScript, but it will be interesting to see how well Python and Scripting Bridge work.

Update: Be sure to check out the comments on the historic third party support for Python Apple Events and the associated links.

Geek prn: Annual iPod and iPhone buyers' guide

I like the pictures.

Download Now: Our 2008 iPod + iPhone Buyers’ Guide

Mugr: searching for a missing person?

Looking for someone who's seemingly vanished?

It happens to families more often than one might imagine. Often the missing person is dead, but sometimes they've decided to take a very long walk.

One day soon you'll fire up a product like Mugr and let it work for a while.

There are a lot of images on the net.

Good and bad, of course.

XP shortcuts display path in NTFS Extended Attribute Comments

NTFS supports metadata for files that are stored in NTFS extended attributes. This includes Title and Comments. Sharepoint 2007 may read this data and use it, but I primarily use it as a modern version of the Dirnotes.com utility PC Magazine created for PC/MS-DOS in the 1980s. [1]

To display title and comments in file view RMClick on the explorer column title bar and select the attributes you want to see. Then set all folders to the same view.

There are some problems with these EAs. WinZip, at least by default in the version I have, doesn't zip them up. Some backup software will ignore them. The workflow for creating and editing them is very awkward (right click, properties, click tab, edit).

Today I discovered a feature however. If you view Favorites with comment enabled, you see the path to the original. That's handy.

Now if only someone would create a drag and drop utility such that if I dropped a Favorite on it I'd see the original pop up. Hmm. I wonder if there's a way to do this using ancient DOS Batch files ...

[1] Update 5/21/09: This may have unexpected consequences esp. on Windows 2003 server -- due to a very dark and old Microsoft hack.

Access 2007: It's really bad

I'm very unimpressed with Office 2007, but there are some good things. Word 2007, if you use the new lock-in proprietary never-extract-your-data nobody-can-read-it XML file format has some fixes to its primeval style and formatting problems. Excel 2007 is still Excel. Outlook 2007 fixes some ancient bugs (if you sort a category view it no longer breaks the view) and is only somewhat more sluggish than Outlook 2003. It might even work better with Sharepoint 2007. PowerPoint 2007 is as frozen in time as every version of PowerPoint since 1997 or so. [1]

And then there's Microsoft Access 2007.

I've been using this software intensively for months now, and it's really bad. We're switching back to Office 2003 and Access 2003. (Shades of everyone's Vista to XP regression, but we weren't dumb enough to do Vista.)

The way I use Access makes very heavy use of complex queries and some embedded functions with large data sets. In this domain Access 2007 added nothing of value and has some serious regressions. Access 2003, for example, had some ability to fix-up queries when column labels or even table names were revised. Access 2007 more often breaks the links and destroys the query builder view.

All the problems with Access 2003, like the fragility of links to external data sources (no relative links for example), remain. The only minor advantages are better handling of Sharepoint (SQL Server) 2007 exotic data types.

It's probably a bit slower too.

I've seen some regressions in my day, but Access 2007 is the biggest regression I've run into since WordPerfect bombed its Windows transition (with a bit of help from Microsoft of course).

Don't use this turkey.

[1] How could they not fix the "custom slide show" UI? PowerPoint source code must be seeded with antimatter mines.

Problems with made in China had drives?

The events of the last six months make it easy to believe that "made in China" is bad news for hard drives.

Data recovery firm sounds Mac hard drive damage alert | Reg Hardware

... Clarke blamed the problem what he described as 'poor quality control in Chinese hard drive factories' - an issue he maintained affects other hard drive makers in addition to Seagate. He also warned all hard drive buyers to avoid HDDs manufactured in China...

I buy it. I'd much prefer Thailand, Singapore, etc.