Friday, February 06, 2009

Fireworks CS4 crashes on launch with "Fireworks Unexpectedly Quits" Message


Hello All! I have had Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks 8 for some time now and thought that it might be time for an upgrade since I am using it a lot for class. So I first bought and installed the new Dreamweaver CS4 edition, which is pretty nice. Anyhow, last night I installed (or tried!) to install Fireworks CS4. Everything installed without a problem; however, upon trying to load it, I immediately got a message stating that "Adobe has detected that the application Fireworks has unexpectedly quite". It then proceeded to ask me if I wanted to send a crash report, blah blah. So I started trying to figure it out. Nothing would work. And what is more, I searched Google and found that crashing Fireworks CS4 is a major issue, but everyone who had the problem was stating that it was getting to the splash screen and then crashing, citing some internal error. Turns out this was resolved in most cases by corrupted fonts, or fonts that were installed that Fireworks did not like, though this seemed to be limited to Mac OS.

For the life of me, I could not find anything related to my specific problem. Somewhere along the line I decided to create another new admin user account (I am using Vista SP1 by the way) and see if it would load from there. Lo and behold, it did! So now what? I was thinking a permissions issue, but it could not be I thought. I checked everything and after 4 stinking hours and right before I gave up. I FOUND the solution that worked for me! I wish I remembered the name of the person that I got the workaround from so I could give him or her credit, but unfortunately I have lost the page (I do know it was on an Adobe U2U forum though.Anyhow, this is what worked for me:



Apparently, to solve this issue, one must venture into Dreamweaver where a little unassuming site definition or two is offending Fireworks and it will not start. So:

1.) Open Dreamweaver and click on sites-->Manage Sites
2.) Export and save all your sites and then remove them from the site manager.
3.) Close Dreamweaver and try to relaunch Fireworks.
4.) If Fireworks does not open, then this is not your problem.
5.) However, if it does open, then we can now figure out which sites are causing the problem.
6.) Close Fireworks again.
7.) Open Dreamweaver and go to site manager and import ONE site. Save and close Dreamweaver and try to Open Fireworks.
8.) If Fireworks opens then this was not the offender and can remain in the site manager.
9.) If Fireworks does not open, then you will need to rebuild this site directly in Dreamweaver again.
10.) Keep this cycle up until all sites (that work) have been imported into Dreamweaver. (In my case I had 2 that were causing problems, which makes sense as one was duplicated originally from the other.

I really hope this helps (and that my blog gets listed towards the top of search engines on this topic since it took me forever to find something on it.

Good Luck!

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Motorcyclists and Spring Sand

In addition to this blog, I am also an administrator of a great motorcycle forum, motorcyclistsunited.com (I say great not because I am partial, but because I have had experience at other forums based on motorcycles and this one has far better people, experts in the interest, and much better content). Anyhow, we have an awesome contributor, Captain Crash, who always posts some very fine literature based on motorcycles, life, and the philosophy of the integration of both. He also makes some very good motorcycle safety and informational videos. Anyhow, I wanted to share one that he posted today. The topic is the spring sand effects of living in a snow and frozen weather area. Good stuff!



Monday, January 26, 2009

The Queuing Theory [LU]



This was a response to a classmates post regarding the queuing theory...

I am a very analytical person and any mathematical/analytical theory is interesting to me. The queuing theory is no exception. On top of that, I have worked in a couple of call center environments where this is of vital importance. You make a great point about understanding more than just the foundation of the theory. For instance, to make it an effective learning tool – one needs to know more than if customers have to wait for a certain amount of time they will hang up, which leads to reduction in productivity and sales, which leads to loss of business, which leads to ex-employees!

I was never a manager at either of these two jobs, so I am not sure how much the management really understood or utilized the theory. However, being an employee in those situations I know that 99% of the employees do not fully understand the why’s and how’s surrounding it. What I mean is that as an employee it was always drilled into our heads that we needed to provide great customer service but in a shorter amount of time. Most of the employees resented this part of their jobs. “How was this possible,” we thought. How are we supposed to provide excellent customer service, make a connection with the customer, and then have them off the phone within 1 minute and 15 seconds? While I was always fast on the phone this seemed an unattainable goal in most circumstances.

Continue Reading*

Monday, January 26, 2009

TELNET, SSH, FTP & SFTP [LU]



TELNET v. SSH

In an anecdotal way, the differences between Telnet and SSH (as well as SFTP and FTP) can be compared to the "changing of the times". I remember a time not too long ago when many people left their doors unlocked and the car keys in the ignition! Security was not really much of an issue because most people minded their own and did not infringe upon others' property and information. Certainly the times have changed and now we have complex security systems to protect our cars, homes, and even our computers now. There are lots of people out there who would love to get their hands on other people's information to exploit it for their personal gain. This same type of rationale can be applied to the differences between telnet and SSH.

According to RFC854 (Telnet Protocol Specification) TELNET protocol was created to provide general, bi-direction communications between networked devices. These connections were eight-bit byte oriented. "its primary goal is to allow a standard method of interfacing terminal devices and terminal oriented processes to each other (RFC854).

That being said, one of the biggest downfalls of TELNET is that it is not really transparent at all. It has long been considered a security risk because user names, passwords, and all subsequent commands are transmitted as easily-exploitable plain text (Brenner, 2007). However, TELNET is really a useful tool. So what to do? We need to be able to have the same essential functionality, but with some level of security.

Enter SSH...

According to RFC4251, Secure Shell(SSH) is a protocol for secure remote login and other secure network services over an insecure network. There are three major components:

  1. The Transport Layer Protocol [SSH-TRANS] (provides server authentication, confidentiality, and integrity)
  2. The User Authentication Protocol [SSH-USERAUTH] (authenticates the client-side user to the server and runs over the transport layer protocol.
  3. The Connection Protocol [SSH-CONNECT] (multiplexes the encrypted tunnel into several logical channels and runs over the user authentication protocol). (RFC4251).

So, as one can see, the service that SSH provides is essentially the same as one would use with TELNET; however, SSH offers a mode of communication that is much more secure. Meaning the bad guys cannot get your information as easily.

Continue Reading*

Monday, January 26, 2009

DNS Caching & IPv6 - [LU]



It is safe to assume that most internet users have no idea what DNS caching is or how it helps the flow of information on the WWW. That being said, I suppose for the average user, knowledge of DNS caching is not important; however, to anyone involved in the IT field it is an important concept to know.


DNS Caching

While it is probably hard to determine, it is safe to assume that there are probably millions, if not billions of DNS requests going on at any one point in time. If every time a DNS lookup is requested the request has to work itself all the way to the top of the DNS hierarchy, there would obviously be a large bottleneck that occurs within nanoseconds. This would cause the entire internet to effectively shutdown in short order. It would also make the responses incredibly slow.

Continue Reading*

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Span of Control (Lean Management) - [LU]


Definition

In “Essentials of Management: Core Principles, Concepts, & Strategies”, the author defines span of control as “the number of subordinates who report directly to a management.” Span of control also refers to the leanness of the organization, which depends on how many different layers of management a company in proportion to the total number of employees. That being said, an organization that has a smaller ratio of managers to subordinates (with many layers) is said to be fat; conversely, a company that has managers with large number of subordinates (in less layers) is considered lean.


Satterlee, A. (2006). Essentials of Management. Roanoke, VA: Synergistics Publishing.


Summary

Paul Glader is an experienced journalist who currently works for the Wall Street Journal. His specialties include General Electric Company, industrial companies, and management issues. In his article “It’s not easy being lean, “ Glader discusses how a small steel manufacturer, Nucor Corporation, ended up becoming the largest steel production plant based on shipments in the country simply by keeping their organization lean. The author also discusses how maintaining a lean organization is not always easy to do; in fact, as a company starts to grow it becomes near impossible. For the longest time, Nucor prided itself on its three management layers that separated the CEO from the hourly workers. However, they were soon forced to add an addition (fourth) layer to the mix with the placement of five new executive vice presidents. At Nucor, there was a bottleneck begging to develop for the CEO’s time. He constantly had people wanting to talk to him about mergers and acquisitions, development of new technology, and business machine sales people. This is just a small sample of the many vying for his time. When the attention demands from the plant managers were also added in, one can see that help was needed. This was an instance where too lean was causing missed opportunities, increased competition, and inefficiency simply based on limitations of one human being.


Continue Reading*

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Liberty University Distance Learning Program - A Brief Student Review


As it says in my profile, I am a FT student. I had attended college right after high school like most people do; however, I soon found that the program I was in (Emergency Health Sciences - Paramedic) was not for me. This, in addition to some extenuating circumstances at home, I stopped attending. A lot of things happened in my life over the next 7 years and I never returned to any other school to finish any degree. However, after I got married and settled down, I decided that I needed to go back then or never have the opportunity to do it again. I was 26 years old. I fell into the trap known as University of Phoenix, which was a horrible school to say the least. While it is a topic for another post altogether, I will say that this school (at least when I was there) was nothing but an EXTREMELY expensive diploma mill who had unqualified instructors. While I do not know for a fact, I can say that somewhere I imagine the instructors are informed to be very lenient with grading. Reason? - If students get bad grades or fail, they will not return, which = fewer profits. Let's just say I will post on this topic a bit more fully some other time.


About a year into my tenure at University of Phoenix, God told me that I was not in the right place. I was not being challenged at all and really was only learning APA formatting and spending thousands to do so. Upon my searching, the first Google search pulled up Liberty University. Obviously, to me, this was a sign! I did not even know that Liberty had a distance learning program. I was in search of a program that was not 100% online. Meaning, I was looking for a distance learning program that was an extension of an already well established institution. Turns out, not only was this the case, but Liberty was actually a pioneer of the Distance Learning format, starting way back with their VHS Bible classes.

Continue Reading*