I Love Dreamweaver, Except When It Acts Crappy

Macromedia... er... Adobe Dreamweaver is one program I use almost every single day. Aside from Firefox, it is my most-used application. I love it.

Except when it acts crappy.

In the many years I've used Dreamweaver, there have been some encounters with craposity. Usually, this occurs when I've upgrade to a new version -- which I do with religious fervor. Most recently, I upgraded to version CS3 and I ran into this bit of crap today:


The only thing more crappy than software misbehaving is misbehaving software that gives you utterly unhelpful error messages.

"An error occurred"? Oh, thank you so much for that news flash, Adobe Dreamweaver CS3! Could you possibly give me a clue as to why?

Dreamweaver threw this error when I tried to use its Web photo album (Javascript) command. Unfortunately, the photo album is something I use frequently and so I cannot just ignore the problem and hope it'll go away. So far I have found nothing useful through Google or the Adobe support site. The only suggestion that seems remotely helpful is to completely re-install DW and Fireworks (which DW uses to generate the photo album).

This is a royal pain the ass because the Adobe Creative Suite 3 installation -- of which DW and FW are components -- is painfully slow. I mean, it took something like 2 hours for me to install it initially. Plus, it forces you to close all Web browsers while you're installing it. So, your computer is essentially useless while it's churning along.

Man! What a piece of crap!

Update 8/30/07: In desperation, I tried the uninstall/reinstall method. Took about half an hour to uninstall DW and FW. I don't know for sure because I started it going in my office and then went home for the day. The next day, I began the reinstallation. Timed it. Clocked in at 45 minutes. Sheesh.

But, of course, the big question is, Did it fix the problem?

Answer: nope.

I guess it's time to give up on this function of Dreamweaver. Yesterday, I experimented with Photoshop's Web albums. They work just fine. I'll start using them instead of DW's.

This makes me suspicious. Is Adobe sabotaging a formerly Macromedia product? Are they making DW and FW buggy so that users will shift over to Photoshop? Do they just not care about fixing DW/FW issues?

Or am I just being paranoid?

Are Tankless Water Heaters Crap?

We recently had a Rinnai water heater installed at our home--at a cost of $2,600 (considerably more than a conventional water heater). It's a tankless heater, which means that instead of constantly keeping a tank of hot water at the ready, it virtually instantaneously heats water when a request for hot water is made.

The principle is a great one and Marysia is quite familiar with their use in Poland where, as in much of Europe, they are quite common. They conserve one's use of natural gas as the gas only runs on demand. It doesn't needless heat hot water when hot water is not being used. They're so green that they qualify for a $300 tax credit.

It all sounds great, right? So, what's the problem? Well sir, the reason these heaters are possibly crap is their minimum water-flow rate. As the Rinnai FAQ puts it:

20. What is the minimum water flow rate required to operate a Rinnai?

The Rinnai tankless water heater must be able to sense water flow in order to initiate operation. Most Rinnai models will operate with flow rates as low as 0.5 gallons per minute. [Our unit is officially rated for 0.6 gallons per minute.] This is the lowest minimum flow rate in the industry and is an important benefit.

In practice, however, the flow rate in my shower frequently runs below this minimum. Consequently, the heat turns off after about two minutes of showering--and that's with the hot water tap turned fully on. The problem is my low-flow shower head. By restricting the water flow, it takes me below the minimum the Rinnai requires.

In my wife's, Marysia's, bathroom, the shower head is more powerful and she doesn't run into this issue as often, but when she takes more extended showers she has lost heat.

We asked the plumbers (Hicks) who installed it and the dealer who sold it to us (Central Supply) about this issue, but they were unable to explain it to us. It was only after I read the manual and figured out how to use the heater's control pad to diagnose water flow that we learned of this flow issue. Using that diagnostic tool, we learned that my shower is drawing .6 GPM, the bare minimum to keep the unit heating. Evidently, it must drop below that minimum and cause the heating to stop. Marysia's shower runs at .7, which is usually good enough to keep the heat on.

What are we going to do about this? Removing the heater would be a huge expense and is not really an option. Just today, I took the flow restricter out of my shower head, which may help. We'll see tomorrow when I shower. Obviously, this is not a very earth-friendly solution.

It must say it burns my bacon that this expensive, high-tech, efficient heater does not function as well as the funky old wasteful system. I'm going to call Rinnai's tech support tomorrow to see if they can offer any other solutions.

P.S. The minimum flow-rate issue is well described here (scroll down to "Minimum Flow Rates"):

http://www.profitableplumbing.com/_wsn/page5.html

Update 9/9/2007:

After trying for weeks to get the Hicks plumbers to come out and check our unit (and withholding payment), we finally wrote them a letter saying we would ask a different plumber to inspect our heater and deduct their service charge from our bill. This finally prompted Hicks to come to our house and check it.

His diagnosis was that it was a flow issue, although he said it was quite unusual for there to be a flow problem with showers. He made some adjustments to the shower heads and said we should try them for awhile and that if the problem persisted he would swap out our unit for another to see if it was defective. However, from looking at it, he could not see any problems.

One irony is that right after sending that letter, my shower started working properly. The heat stopped cutting off. Mysterious. This was at about the same time as the weather here finally turned cooler -- after we in the South had suffered through the hottest August since weather record-taking began. For weeks, the "cold" water coming from the tap felt warm to the touch -- evidently it was over 98 degrees. Could it have been that mixing this "cold" water with the Rinnai-heated water was a problem? Could the warm "cold" water coming into the Rinnai unit have affected its heating process? Could the water pressure in our house have been reduced in some fashion due to the record-setting high temperatures and accompanying drought?

The plumber was unable to answer these questions. So the reason the unit started operating properly remains a mystery, which is frustrating; because we have no guarantee that this problem won't recur next summer.

The ambiguity of this situation leads me to believe that, at least in warm regions, the Rinnai water heater is not a wise investment.

I do plan to send an email to Rinnai explaining my experience. We'll see if they respond.

Update 10/30/2007:

The Rinnai continues to work. I can't help but suspect that the cooler weather has had something to do with it. Now that the temps aren't over 100 on a regular basis, the heater seems to have an easier time knowing when to come on.

So, we aren't dissatisfied enough to rip the system out, but I cannot say our experience with Rinnai water heaters has been a fully satisfactory one. Indeed, if I were given the opportunity to do it over again, I would not buy a Rinnai water heater.

Rinnai did respond to my email, but essentially they told me to talk to the plumber. They offered no further guidance.

Crappy Aspects of the iPhone

A couple of weeks ago, I reluctantly acquired an iPhone.

My wife and I were forced into a new phone purchase by AT&T (ah yes, the return of a monopoly!), which discontinued the TDMA service and killed off our old phone. We were perfectly happy with it and with the super-low $30 plan we were on, but AT&T (the former Cingular) required us to both buy a new phone and, if we were to stay with them, "upgrade" to a plan that cost more money and suited us less.

But that's a post for another Crappy Software day. What I want to chronicle today is the iPhone's shortcomings. Actually, for the most part, I'd say the iPhone is filled with longcomings or shortgoings, or whatever the opposite of shortcomings might be. I'm 75% pleased with it, but that remaining 25% is driving me a little crazy.

25% iPhone Crap:

The biggest iPhone failings are in the Department of The iPhone as a PDA Replacement:

1. On Windows, the iPhone calendar only syncs with Microsoft Outlook.
2. There is no task manager, and thus no task manager to sync with a desktop application.
3. There is no password manager.

I absolutely hate MS Outlook and I've managed to avoid using it for many years. I do not want to start now. So, I've tried to get around this by using Google Calendar, then syncing it with Outlook using Remote Calendars and then syncing Outlook with the iPhone. Outlook thus becomes a mere conduit between Google and the iPhone. I should've known such a bass-ackwards workaround was doomed, but instead I invested about five hours futilely trying to get this to work. I'm sure Remote Calendars is a very fine open-source project and it's probably Outlook's fault, but RC kept crashing and stalling out and giving me odd errors such as "startindex cannot be less than zero." Huh?

So I'm stuck. No suitable, acceptable desktop calendar app which which to sync my iPhone.

And Apple, how hard would it be to come up with a task manager? In this respect, I guess I'll have to go with a Web-based manager. Remember the Milk looks promising, but I'm not ready to fully commit to it.

I'm already sorely missing a password manager. I've seen some Web-based solutions proposed for this, but I don't feel comfortable trusting my most-secret passwords to some online service. It looks like I may have to keep using my Palm PDA solely for this purpose. I've got a great password manager on that: SplashID. Oh, if only it were ported to the iPhone!