Dave Page

I bought an old computer from Steve, dual core, better that I have now. Anyway, I am reinstalling a retail Windows XP onto it, and want to install SP2 fresh, not SP1 and upgrade. Creates a lot of junk. So we slipstream, merge SP2 into SP1 install CD. Can do it with lots of steps. How about easy?

Enter nLite. Pick a folder, with two dvd drives creates a bootable iso. Burn and go. Easy.

Used it many times. Recommended

UPDATE: now, I can try SP3 without upgrading SP2 first. I have heard bad things — this might avoid some of them.

nLiteOS

Karin from work and I attended a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information, by Edward Tufte at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.

I had read some of his stuff a year or two earlier, tried to go to the Chicago course, and our crack clerical staff missed the deadline and it was full. So here we go! Long walk from Metra station to E Wacker Drive. But nice. Good weather. Nice walk.

Showed up, found our way thru the rabbit warren, and registered. We were issued a heavy cardboard box of 4 of ET’s books, and a homework assignment for reading before the class started. I grabbed a Starbucks from the lobby, and off we went.

Big room, lots of people, and not a lot of personal space — typical seminar. We plopped down and read. ET held “office hours” for autograph seekers and questions before, at lunchtime, and afterwards. When does the guy go potty?

The course itself was interesting. The guy is a great speaker, engaging and interesting. The time flew by. He showed 16th century books as examples of books and graphics as timeless art. Neat.

We did the fast 15-minute lunch at Houlihan’s next door. In and out quick, I had a nice chicken wrap, but by the time you walk there, eat, and return it was time to get going again. And the Starbuck’s went away in the PM.

Most of the items listed on the list of items to be covered were indeed covered. The final items were design of information displays in public spaces and design of computer interfaces and manuals. These were the items we were interested in. We got some of the kiosk discussion, but I don’t think we got much of the design of interfaces and manuals. NOTE: I found a review of Visual Explanations with references to Web development, but upon review, it is good stuff, but not a cookbook, more a philosophy.

Tufte manages to get everything important about Web design onto pages 146 through 149 of this book: let the information become the interface, use text rather than icons, don’t let the Web site mimic the bureaucratic structure of the publisher. The most remarkable thing is that he wasn’t even writing about the Web!

On the way home, got some combo cheese-and-caramel corn from the Garrett’s popcorn kiosk in the Metra station. Made a nice snack for us later.

Summary: Good course. Neat to see the 16th century books. If you read and have the books, probably a waste of time and money. If you don’t do technical presentations with lots of tables trying to prove things, (like us) perhaps limited use. But hearing “KISS” once more can be a good thing. And bashing PowerPoint is always fun.

• One-day course, 380 USD per person.
• Includes:
• Visual Explanations
• Envisioning Information
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Beautiful Evidence

OK so they warned me. They moved to a new Linux platform, and Subversion stopped working.

I used my own instructions to rebuild. No good. Errors.

After some Googling I found an article by Nick Sergeant and he basically had the same routine. But he dumped 1&1. I can’t afford to now.

So I tried the latest subversion 1.4.6. Looks like it built. Will it update WordPress and Gallery?

WordPress: yes. Gallery: probably. Looks like we are in business.

Why can’t 1&1 at least provide a subversion client?

I wrote a utility called clip many years ago — you pipe output from a DOS program into it and it puts it on the clipboard. Then you can paste it somewhere.

e.g. dir > clip

I found a link to Copy Command Line Output to Windows Clipboard Directly. Turns out Microsoft had the same idea and put a clip.exe into Windows 2003 and Vista. He links to a site, but not trusting them, I checked out a local Windows 2003 install, and yes, there it was!

The MD5 is B265B924104C248FB94C3B6D7E8D4050, CRC (zip) is 0C7584A7 — just as shipped from the great god Microsoft. I would use a local copy, if you have one, but it looks safe enough.

SO I got a chunk of CVS and the server has been moved. See this for the Unix version.

I am on windows, with no Cygwin (in this machine).


use strict;
use Cwd;
use File::Find;
use File::Copy;
use File::Basename;

}
}


Run this in the root folder for the checked out code. Seems to work…

MAKE SURE YOU ONLY HAVE ONE ROOT LINE PER CVS/Root file! The other solution replaces them all. Mine doesn’t.

I just upgraded to Corel PSP X2, and when I start it up got a bunch of dialogs complaining about duplicate image names related to the default brush, tube, and other files installed with the product. After some Googling and analysis, I found the filenames were stored with two cases for the drive letter, like “C:\Program Files” and “c:\Program Files” and PSP was being case sensitive in its dupe checking.

I decided to ignore the messages.

Today I was trying to create a custom brush from a selection and got the same messages. I happened to click on the File Locations button in the brush selection box, and there was under the Brush File FOlders list, two paths to the same location “C:\Program Files\Corel\Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2\Corel_01″ and “c:\Program Files\Corel\Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2\Corel_01″. So the program loaded all the files from these locations, and did case-sensitive compare — and found duplicates! No way!

Remove the path. No more problems. Also work your way down the list and look for more duplicates.