5/19/07

gotta love the 'switch

Today, I decided to check my in-store voice mail... I got this:
Your mailbox is near maximum capacity. Please delete some messages. You have one saved message. To listen to messages, press 1 [...]
I bet someone here at the store hasn't been checking their messages and has filled up the general mail box. ~sigh.

5/13/07

Irony, is just so funny.

It's the little things in life that'll drive one crazy...

I've been working with Rosetta Stone for a while now, but I hate using it in Windows... As a matter of fact, I had to dual boot my MacBook, named "Akira" (アキラ) into Windows XP to even use the software, since all my other Windows computers are too old or are unavailable to run the software. Well, I had the Mac installer as well, so I thought, "Let's just install it to Mac OS, it'll work out just fine!" Granted, my ideal solution would be to run Rosetta Stone natively in SUSE Linux 9.3, but that isn't an option I'm likely to see any time soon.

So, I went ahead and installed the software in Mac OS X. I got this:
Director Player Error: Script Error Continue? [No] [Yes]"
Clicking yes will bring pass through that prompt and bring up another one, saying exactly the same thing. This holds true for each time I clicked yes.

So what happens when one clicks no? Rosetta Stone exits.

I've spent weeks trying to find a solution. I looked for updates available on the internet (I didn't find any), I searched forums - yet found nothing, I even went as far as downloading a torrent of the software to see if I could get that up and running... No dice. All were the same "Director Player Error: Script Error"

I was really getting peeved, when I finally went back to the internet looking for a solution on the forums. Someone had to have encountered my problem somewhere out there... Right? It must just be buried out there in cyber space.

I was totally right... Kind of. It seems Rosetta is made by a company called Plato (oohh, familiar name, Plato makes all sorts of edu software out there, including software that I had to use down at Support Services when I worked there) I always hated the Plato software... it was soo very annoying.

After some digging and this time throughly reading each post I came across, I found this one single forum post that came in handy (image here). As you can see, it talks about installing a French version of Rosetta Stone (Mac OS edition) to an English Macintosh. The installed worked successfully, however, when running the application, the system program would display "Director Player Error: Script Error" and cause serious issues for him to use the program... All because the program was looking for "Préférences" (French spelling) instead of "Preferences" (English spelling).



The only foreign text displayed on my Mac. I changed the name of my Mac's HD to "Akira HD" (no Japanese text) and then system took right off. Rosetta runs without any problems at all. Go figure, a program designed to help people learn foreign languages, including reading in those languages (Japanese included) doesn't understand those same foreign languages when actually utilized on the system.

I suppose it's understandable... Durring some of the installers, Rosetta's included, it listed the installation hard drive oddly:

Note the installation HD... I've seen this before, even when doing a dual boot with Windows, when when the boot loaded comes up, it lists Windows and those same random characters. So far, no applications have had any problems... However, Rosetta seems to be a little more sensitive than the others.

At least I can be happy that I have rectified the problem... Even if it did take me several weeks to do so.