Clete’s Blog

Recently, I have experienced some strange problems with my programs that reside on my NTFS partition (Windows Vista is in ‘charge’ of this partition). It all started when I tried to install Vista SP1 Release Candidate a few months back. The installer would would say “!!! 0xcc2321 WINMAIL.EXE !!!” or something like that. I had no clue what this was referring to. Luckily, I had just created a full system backup a few hours prior to this error. I restored my full backup and I decided to wait for the final release of Service Pack 1. So, I chalked one up to Microsoft’s expert programming.

Well, when Vista SP1 was released, I installed it and received the exact same error (some months later). So, I searched high and low on the internet and finally I found an answer. It so happens that all of my problems stemmed from the fact that Winmail.exe was not properly indexed by the NTFS partition. It turns out that a lot of other people had this problem with various files that were corrupt or not properly indexed by the NTFS partition. Why couldn’t Microsoft program a simple check into the Service Pack 1 installer instead of hanging every system with a single corrupt file? They should know that their file system always breaks itself. At any rate, I ran a chkdsk off of my Vista install disc.

Oddly enough, I still received the error. Another 3 chkdsks later and chkdsk was still reporting that it was fixing the same files over and over again! What happened here? Is my hard drive going bad? I haven’t noticed any of the typical signs of hard drive failure… I eventually just deleted winmail.exe and a couple of other files that were corrupt (9 out of 11 were in that same folder and the other 2 belonged to Windows Media Player). It turns out that this solved all of my problems. Strange. Service Pack 1 just copied the files off of its stores of files and everything worked fine.

A few days after that, Microsoft Office started to crash a lot, especially when I closed it. It would crash after the main window has closed, so I would never lose any work and I didn’t have time to bother checking into it. I eventually received a dialog box from “Microsoft Office Diagnostics” telling me that Word and Powerpoint have crashed frequently (OneNote never crashes). It asked me to check for errors with my installation, so I did. Nothing turned up. I suppose I’ll have to eventually give in and reinstall Office.

Two days ago, I shut my computer down properly. I started it back up and I received a plethora of error messages coming from acrobat.exe. Then randomly, Adobe Acrobat installer would start, shoot out errors, then kill itself, and finally restart itself again. It went into a never-ending loop of trying to repair Acrobat. Ugh. Here we go again. So at the next opportunity I had, I grabbed my Vista install disc and ran a chkdsk. It turns out that 81, yes, eighty-one files in the Adobe Creative Suite 3 folder were corrupt. This time, chkdsk corrected all of my problems and things are running smoothly again.

Does NTFS hate my folders? I use Photoshop CS3 daily and I always shut it down correctly. In fact, it has never crashed on me. Not once. I had an odd problem once Photoshop was repaired, however. Photoshop was stuck on the hand tool… permanently. No matter what I did, Photoshop would simply not change to any tool but the hand tool. Finally, I found a blog through Google that told me to go to “Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Reset All Warning Dialogs.” Sounds like an odd thing to do to fix a problem that has nothing to do with dialogs, but it worked. Strange…

I wonder what’s going on…

After about a week of production, I have Clete Blackwell Photo up and running! I will be storing my work on there from now on. Go and check it out!

Comments and suggestions are highly appreciated! I am still learning new techniques, so please, any comment is a good comment!

For the past three hours, I have gone through a Photoshop learning experience. My fiance and I decided to make a “collage” of all of our friends, with a twist. We decided to make USA Game Lounge characters for all of them. Without further ado, here is the picture that we conjured up (Click to enlarge):

First, I had to use the roundabout way of getting a large image of the characters as described in my previous entry. Then, I made some minor/major adjustments within Photoshop, like removing the WeeMee logo. This was a pain in and of itself, because it would often mess up a person’s feet (it was overlapping). After that, I changed things like hair color and the like. After the entire thing was nearly complete, we realized that one of the characters was missing shoes, so I had to cut out a shoe from someone else and paste them in.

Then, we realized that the middle was a little bit bland, with nothing in the middle. So, we searched deviantART for a sun vector. We stumbled upon a very simplistic sun figure, but sadly, there was no print available and the picture had some flaws. It was too small to use to begin with. Additionally, we wanted to have 8 spikes instead of 12, since we had 8 friends in the pictures. So, I fired up Illustrator and did my best to imitate the picture (since I was going for a simplistic style). The sun turned out very nicely.

Next, I plan on cutting out all of the characters and making their backgrounds transparent. The problem is, this will take a long time to get perfect. So, I am just going to do that later. After that, I plan on drawing a sky in Illustrator with the help of a cloud tutorial (or just using a blue gradient).

So, here is the order of people, starting at 12 o’clock and working clockwise:

Nick, Steve, Jean-Anne, Clete (me!), Ashley (my fiance), Liz, Alex, and Melanie.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about, go to the USA Game Lounge. You can create your own avatar on the website (they are scalable vector graphics, so they look sharp). Sadly, they do not offer very good solutions for downloading your character (check below for a picture). The largest size that they offer is around 200 pixels tall (and it has a lot of white space in it). Well, I wanted mine larger. So, being the experimenter I am, I decided that I would try to enlarge the Flash SWF and take a screenshot and crop my character out. Turns out that it’s actually easier than that.

In order to obtain a picture of your character with a completely white background, follow these instructions:

1) Login to your account.

2) Click Edit Profile

3) Right-Click anywhere on the page and click on “View Page Source”

4) Press Ctrl+F (find) and type in “75.jpg”

5) Click Next (you want the second instance of 75.jpg)

Select the entire link from the text in the line of 75.jpg. It should look like this:

…/weemee/height/75.jpg

5) Now, change the link up a little bit. Note that 75 is the height of the image that you want. I found that, if you raise the number above 1075, it maxes out and will spit out blank pictures. So, try 750 or 1075:

…/weemee/height/1075.jpg

6) Go to the link! You now have a larger picture of your WeeMee. Photoshop away. The only downside to this is that you will not receive a picture with your character’s facial expression. The character is always smiling.

Yes, I know some people could not care less about this post, but I don’t think anyone else has tried this trick before, so I wanted it to get posted out there. The characters are cool looking, though.