Apathetic Thursday

I had a great problem solving experience last night which not only solved the problem I was facing but also did a great job of helping me to realize a real world example of some of the things I am learning in my “Theatrical Design” class.

I was working on my photo sorting program, known as DeChaos, and I was struggling with the issue of allowing users to move forward and backward along the list of sorted photos. I wanted it to work so that if someone knew they had multiple shots of the same photo they could jump ahead or skip over a photo if they wanted to see what was next. The issue that faced me was that if the user decided to sort that photo the program would then move onto the next photo and, should they attempt to go back to the last photo, the program would try to load the photo that had already been sorted (meaning it moved location) and would error out because the photo file wouldn’t exist.

I had in my head, multiple elaborate schemes of how to keep track of the photos that the user skipped and how to jump back to them, keeping them from going back too far, and the whole thing was a complete mess.

I was thinking this over while sitting on the steps outside the SuperBowl party that was going on in the other room when Anna came over to talk to me. I started to explain the problem to her so she had an idea of what I was working on, when mid-sentence the answer struck me like a lightning bolt of energy.

The problem I was working on in my mind was “How do I keep track of the pictures that a user skips,the pictures that the user sorts, without slowing up my program, making a lot of unnecessary lists and variables and keep it simple and reliable.”

But as I explained my problem I realized that the issue was really “How do I keep the user from sorting photos after they have skipped over the photos.” The answer was immediately obvious to me: Don’t give them the option.

If I don’t allow users to sort photos after they have skipped some, they are forced then to go back to the photo they were at when they first skipped ahead and resume sorting from there. It was an amazing solution, easy to implement, and it makes perfect sense.

What this really did for me though, was open my eyes and look at the big picture, which was really “what do I need to prevent?” rather than “how can I make this work?”

This is something that people often overlook, sometimes we are just so focused on the gears that we don’t see that they aren’t doing anything. Thats when we need to take a step back and look at the whole clock.

I was working in Photoshop a few days back and I tried to open a file, and I got a really odd error. I assumed I had a corrupt file, so I didn’t think much of it, but I was sad that I couldn’t open the file anymore. (Today I found that the file opens wonderfully in the GIMP, yay!)

But my problems didn’t end there. I opened a new document and clicked on the text tool. I then clicked on the document to add text and instead of getting a text insertion cursor to appear, I got a helpful little comandline box which looked like this:

But that wasn’t all. I looked at my menu bar, to discover that it looked entirely out of whack:

Clicking on the Blank area gave me a cute but useless box:

Clicking on Photoshop gave me an interesting view of what was happening:

I had never heard of SOIUX, so my first instinct was to find out what it was, choosing About SIOUX gave me this:

When attempting to quit Photoshop, I was presented with a quaint little dialogue box asking me if I wanted to save my error message:

After I quit, Photoshop gave me an “Unexpected Quit” message. I was rather expecting it to quit, but aparently my system wasn’t.

The oddest thing about this error, is that I have only found one other document case of this happening It’s found in the Adobe Forums and repeated in Google Groups.This question, though, is an unresolved issue from November of 2006.

Seeing as it came from a text issue error, and remembering a message about a font not being correct at one point in time, I decided to check out my fonts to see if there were any corrupt files. I found a corrupt font, and trashed it, but the problem still exists. What baffles me is that it happens to a blank document. The best I can tell is that it is some sort of C or C++ error resulting from either a corrupt file or bad preference of some sort.

I did a search for both “Berardino E. Baratta” and “Metrowerks Corporation” but I didn’t find anything helpful in the results. I also searched for Simple Input/Output User Exchange, and got virtually nothing from Google. Recently I have become very good at searching for things Google is not able to help me with.

I think my best bet is to try out a clean install of Photoshop. Or revert to a backed copy of my hard drive. I was able to boot from my clone today and use Photoshop for my needs almost perfectly.

Remember kids, always, ALWAYS, back up important files.

Panic has a new application out. It looks like it has some amazing potential. The two things keeping me from jumping on a copy are the $70 price tag and my current copies of TextMate and CSSEdit.