Error 643

I have the unfortunate luck of running into this issue after being told 30 minutes before the end of my day that this particular laptop needed to have a Norton Ghost image loaded onto it and then deployed.

My co-worker indicated that she was unable to figure out the problem.

It took me about five minutes on google... Mostly because the fist few posts went on and on about adjusting the pagefile size. That is until I ran into a fellow blogger's post, cloning a hard disk with Ghost 10 and a USB external disk from Mark Lund. He had several notes at the end of his post, including details about Error 643, where he indicated to get around the error he deleted the partitions on his hard drive and the loaded a new image onto the drive.

This is exactly what I did. Simply, I used the HP Drive Sanitizer that our new laptops come with (in BIOS). I quickly got rid of the partitions and then got Ghost up and running.

[Side Note]
I did have a much more detailed description of this issue written up on my corporate laptop... Which promptly crashed yesterday evening, losing my post. :(

I sense a disturbance in the Force...

...it's as if dozens of voices cried out in terror and were silenced.

Seems the Zune wasn't ready for leap-year 2008... 366 days in 2008 have caused the Zune to crash at boot.

May I say, Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha~~~aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Stupid Microsoft.

Also Reference:
Zune 30 Faq [Zune.net]
Zune Freeze Result of Leap Year [blog.wired.com]
Zune.net (forums) [forums.zune.net]
Microsoft Zune Committing Mass Suicide [it.slashdot.org]

Help - Help is not avaliable in this version of Windows!!!

Today at work, I was tinkering with a Vista computer (trying to pin down what can be done about it's excessive RAM utilization), and upon closing all of the open Windows on the computer, I found this notice behind everything.

I loved the wording of the message. "Windows Help Program is no longer included with Windows." - Strategically worded so they don't say "Help isn't included with Windows anymore... we gave up on "helping" with this version of Windows."

* * *
Why couldn't this be phased out anyway? I've even got help file viewers on Linux and Mac OS X computers, it seems a little odd that Microsoft would just stop including it with Windows. What I would have done is include the old help viewer, but start writing all the new help documentation in the new format. Maybe with the next version of Windows, include the old help viewer as an optional addition, but not have it installed by default.

At least Microsoft does include it as a download from their website [.link] - however, there is a total of 6 pages of documentation, over half of which is "known issues after installing WinHlp32.exe" - sigh.

Well, that's my two-cents anyway.

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.