Tag Archives: rant

June 19, 2006 · 11:12 pm

I hate Windows, part 94

It’s mid-afternoon, and I’m merrily typing away in XP when it suddenly turns into treacle, and then a huge, blue, fierce BSOD bars my way. I haven’t seen one of those in a long time. I don’t really register the alleged reason – I’m thinking about what I was doing, and feeling happy that I was in VNC and consequently nothing’s lost – before XP reboots.

And then it gets unhappier, muttering about “disk boot failure” and instructing me to insert a system disk.

Oh dear.

Um. I’m sure I had a boot disk somewhere, is that what I want? On a floppy? I can’t find it anyway. If I could find it I’m not entirely sure what incantation I would need to invoke. I’m not a Windows weenie.

Luckily, and unlike normal people who at this point would be up the proverbial without the proverbial, I’ve got a network and a Mac and I can google for information.

Meanwhile I try some percussive maintenance: give it a well-deserved thump and reboot. Ooh, it does something different; it doesn’t boot, but I get some other differently useless message. And again, something different still. A temperature/fan thing? A cable thing? I hate intermittent failures. I hate Windows.

Recovery Console. That seems to be a common thread on the net. Simply find your original XP CD… aha! Avaragado Packrat to the rescue.

Meanwhile, the PC magically boots! All the way into Windows, back to normality! For a couple of minutes anyway, and then it BSODs again. Hmm. What have I changed on the PC recently? I installed Google’s Browser Sync extension for a testdrive, and installed all the very latest Windows updates. Ah. How very suspicious.

Anyway, problem not yet solved. Boot the XP CD, choose to Recover, choose a Windows installation to log in to, type the Administrator’s password. The whatnow? I try the usual suspects. Three strikes and you reboot. I keep trying until I run out of ideas, yea even unto old Tarantella administrator passwords. I webscover that XP helpfully hides the Administrator account unless you boot into Safe Mode. The PC plays nicely and lets me do that. As expected (and already tried in the Recovery Console), there’s no passsword. I set one, reboot into Recovery Console, and it promptly rejects it.

This makes no sense whatsoever. I soon discover a site that tells me that, yes, this can happen, mad isn’t it, and points to a Microsoft download to fix the problem. A download that no longer exists: great.

I find a KB article describing the problem, in which Microsoft confesses its sins. The grandly named resolutions: create some new, bugfixed Setup disks, assuming you still live enough in the stone age to have six usable floppy disks (and a working PC that can write to them, which for me is somewhat in doubt); or install the Recovery Console on your hard disk (blah working computer blah) and then install this magic hotfix, that you have to ring up Microsoft and beg permission to download.

Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.

And that’s where I am now. The intermittent nature of the problem worries me. I might try rolling back the Windows updates tomorrow, assuming I can get it to boot, but I don’t think that will solve it. My money’s on a dodgy disk right now.

Unless the lazyweb has any better ideas…

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May 3, 2006 · 9:03 pm

Wherein Avaragado relearns just how dumb Adobe can be

I’ve got about 6000 photos squirrelled away — previously in Adobe Photoshop Album 1.0, now in Photoshop Elements 4.0 (well, the trial version anyhow).

My problem: I want to be able to do a simple thing. I want a subset of the gazillion tags I’ve added to those 6000 photos to appear automatically when I upload to Flickr. Please god, don’t make me re-tag.

The solution: well, there’s yer EXIF/IPTC/XMP nonsense, isn’t there. Flickr speaks some or all of those. So All I Need To Do™ is to ensure that the tags I want Flickring are all IPTC’d in the photos I upload.

Simple.

Elements has a “Write Tags to File” command. Which is a true description: any tags on the image at that time are written to the file in both IPTC and XMP formats. But Adobe in its infinite wisdom made the oh-so-brain-dead decision to leave existing tags in the file alone, “just in case”.

What does that mean? It means that if I add a tag, write the tags to the file, then remove the tag, and write the tags to the file again, then the tag I clearly don’t want in the file appears in the file. It is not possible to remove that tag from the file in Elements. See how ranty I am by the inclusion of both bold and italic!

OK, I think. I can work around this. Never use that menu option, clearly, as it clobbers the file for all eternity. Instead there’s an Export option that makes a copy of the file and writes the tags in the copy, not the original. Great, I’ll use that. Slightly more pain, but it’ll do.

Except… at certain not-very-well-understood-by-me times, Elements decides to write the tags to the file anyway. This seems to be when you do something outrageous like, you know, edit the image in Elements itself.

So woe betide you if you edit an image post-tagging, as you’re lumbered with those tags (or a superset) until the sun goes pop or, less likely, Adobe discovers a clue.

Where does this leave me? I downloaded a free tool called PixVue that adds some Windows shell extensions to allow you to add/edit/remove the whole EXIF/IPTC/XMP smorgasbord, on one file or many at once. I can at the very least now strip unwanted tags from the files that Elements has clobbered, assuming I can find them.

I suspect I’ll continue to use Elements, as most of the time it works pretty well. But, sigh, I’ll prop it up using PixVue. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

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