So your operating system is Windows Vista, you have one of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) packages and you’re browsing the Web.

You notice a message pop up above the task bar: Adobe Updater has updates to install. So you click on the message to see the updates, then click the install button.

But shortly after, Updater starts reporting installation problems. Trying to re-install the updates doesn’t work. Asking it to move on and install additional updates only causes more errors. Nothing gets patched and you just wind up irritated.

What went wrong? Several things, which are the faults of both Adobe and Microsoft. Fortunately, these problems are relatively easy to fix.

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Many people contact me directly with questions. I’m very flattered and very appreciative when that happens.

To ensure that I give you an answer you find useful, and everyone can share in that effort, I make the following requests.

Please post your question to Answers first, then e-mail me the question. That way, everyone can see the answer. Besides, I’m not the only person answering questions. If you post your question, you may well get a faster, or better, answer.

Once your question is posted, you’ll notice it has a little envelope icon right beneath your text. Simply click on that and follow the instructions to send the question to dhvrm@yahoo.com.

Please add your e-mail address in the Message field. Answers uses its own e-mail address to send questions, not yours; so I cannot contact you if you don’t put your e-mail address in the Message field.

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On his radio show today, Jim Rome interviewed former Green Bay Packers offensive lineman Jerry Kramer, whose “Gridiron Greats” initiative means to help retired NFL players who face financial and medical problems.

Kramer is a legend for a reason. He’s also a great interview and, from what I can tell, a very sincere, very charitable and very honest man. But his heart, and his facts, are totally misplaced in his criticisms of the NFL Players Association, as well as the NFL itself, for what he perceives as their inaction, indifference and, seemingly, enmity on the issue of helping out players who helped build the league.

I’m not going to get too specific on that in this post. Rather, I want to address Kramer’s main argument against the NFLPA in his interview: the notion that the current Collective Bargaining Agreement should have given something to the retired players.

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WebHost4Life, my former ASP.NET Web Service Provider, and their “promotional pricing,” has turned me from a loyal, happy customer to a totally dissatisfied ex-customer.

In short, Web Host 4 Life would rather lose a current customer than extend the same price to him they’re willing to charge to potential customers: A classic business mistake that speaks volumes about a company and its lack of respect for its patrons.

I had used WHFL to do my shared Windows hosting for 3+ years. For my needs — a low-traffic site I primarily use for e-mail and customer demos — their cost and features were great. I paid about $120 per year and I got good value in return.

Then I renewed my account over the weekend, and I noticed that, in spite of advertising a $9.95 per month rate for my plan and no setup fee (which wouldn’t apply to me anyway, since I was renewing my plan), I was being charged $153.40.

That was $34 more than the price they advertised all over the site, and the price I had been paying. It also marked a 33% increase in price — the kind of increase that usually only the government and insurance companies have the gonads to demand.

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Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:

Divide photo in 5,000 pieces with rollover text?
we are raising money and selling support tickets. To show our progress we are going to start with a black and white image split in 5,000 pieces then as each piece is sold we want to turn it into color.

When you roll over each piece the person who purchased that support ticket will have their name show up as well as a personal message.

any opinions on how this should be built? The admin section will all be managed manually, so we’ll just need a backend for the admin person to go in and make the changes manually.

This seemed an interesting challenge to me; not difficult, but with multiple steps that no beginner could hope to properly tackle on his own without some help.

This project calls on almost all the basic skills a competent Web developer should possess: Image editing; database design and simple queries; DOM manipulation; security and back-end systems, and therefore, it gives me my first real opportunity in quite some time to address a project in full scope.

As always, I’ll have a link to a working demo and code you can download at the end of this entry.

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