Artifact Weblog

Currently there is a glut of free PDF creator/writer software on the internet.  At the other end of the spectrum lies Adobe Acrobat.  However, even the Standard version of Acrobat (Version X) now costs fairly hefty €422 inc. VAT and the Pro version costs a whopping €626.  Don’t get me wrong, Acrobat is a super product with great functionality (particularly in the area of change-tracking), but €422 is a lot if you’re someone who just wants to output the odd document as a PDF. I tried a load of different free PDF creators and guess what?  They were largely dreadful. However, Foxit PDF Creator is a simple, effective tool that doesn’t muck-up your formatting in the PDFs it outputs, embeds fonts nicely, and it only costs $29.99 (€21.66 at today’s conversion rate).  It doesn’t come with any editing functions – it just produces a PDF – but it has a decent number of output options and does a good job for a good price. Note: Since Office/Visio 2007 SP2 (or pre-SP2 ...

I must say I agree with most of this – not everything but most.  I’m tired of hearing about how Open Source is the answer.  It isn’t.  From my experience it’s nothing but hassle.  Sure it’s generally free to download but the support costs and the toll it takes on your nerves more than offsets this.  I’m tired of people expecting something for nothing.  In most areas of life you don’t get quality unless you pay for it… cars, hi-fi, clothing, you name it. Microsoft’s thoughts on OpenOffice.rg

Holy Moly!  I went to configure a simple port-forwarding rule on a customer’s SonicWALL TZ200 today and entered into a whole world of hurt! All I wanted to do was allow HTTP traffic into an internal web server – exceedingly straightforward on any device I’ve ever worked on before… not so under SonicOS Enhanced! After about an hour of bizarrely confusing options I realised that one needs to create an address object for the internal server, create a NAT policy to allow access, and then create a firewall access rule.  This doesn’t sound too bad except it wasn’t that simple in fact.  To add to the confusion, I managed to create a NAT loop which killed the network!  That was purely down to my own stupidity though! So how did I get it to work?  I gave in and used one of the wizards after looking at the following excellent post online: http://www.fuzeqna.com/sonicwallkb/consumer/kbdetail.asp?kbid=7027 Turns out the device needs THREE NAT policies (inbound, outb...