Boyko Iaramov's blog

ADOBE CS3 and Vista pleasures - Part Deux

Boyko Iaramov — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

As in my previous blog "Adobe CS3 and Vista pleasures"� I had to carry out another install on the CS3.

This time around, however, the greeting jscript.dll error had a particular flavor to it.

Last time around I forgot to mention that the reason this DLL results in error is that it was unregistered by the users in order to run their iTunes 7.1 Installation on their Vistas and have their iPods successfully synchronize.

On this particular box, re-registering the DLL with "regsvr32 jscript.dll" resulted in a "Catastrophic failure" with nothing but an OK button. Without loosing my cool, I tried to run the installation again and despite the error, the installation went through.

The next ambiguity was that setup detected insufficient space on the partition the software was installed to. Requiring to free up some space (around some 500 additional MB), I cleaned up some unnecessary stuff and retried the setup (without exiting, but simply trying "NEXT >" again) and the setup continued. On the 90% progress, however, the setup once again alerted of the insufficient space (the above mentioned 500 MB) and refused to continue. I checked the space again - there were around 4 Gb free. No matter what I tried, the setup refused to continue and I had to roll back all the work from the last hour or so of installation.

Running the installation again, right away, resulted in the same 90% halt and the same alert for insufficient space. I guess that some temporary installation files / logs remain unless you reboot the box. After a reboot was performed, the installation completed without further problems.

So, as a summary:

1. regsvr32 jscript.dll
2. Check for sufficient space before install (around 5 gigs should suffice)
3. If you half half-way in the installation - do not attempt to restart again after cleaning up space
4. Reboot
5. Try the install again.
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6. If the install does not work again - check back here again. Maybe I have added a Third section to this blog :)

Adobe CS3 and Vista pleasures

Boyko Iaramov — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:50:00 GMT

After the daunting experience of waiting for a reseller of Adobe products to get back to us with an upgrade price quote and meanwhile Adobe pleasantly surprising us with their Eastern European online store, we finally had the upgrade kit in our hands (drives).

Time to pleasantly surprise the Creative and User Experience teams - those lucky few that warrior with Vista on a daily basis. My heart raced as fast as I staired down toward the team's chapter and moused quickly to the install folder. After an aggrivative (Not responding) semi-transperant window was given it's time to decompress the huge 1.6 Gb file, we had the setup unpacked and ready for kicks.

Kick this - "Internal Error 2739. Contact Customer Support." the Installer said.

Google replied: ".thou shalt go to the command prompt and regsvr32 the jscript.dll"

Thou went and typed " regsvr32 jscript.dll" at the command prompt and at the next run had the installer whizzed through the 15 min upgrade process.

I am so lucky to be an administrator :)

Comparing and Merging Millions of Records

Boyko Iaramov — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:27:00 GMT

I recently bumped into a situation when I had to compare a scattered backup (read that as multiple incremental backups, with corrupt archives and missing volumes) into a working directory and compare all the contents to a functional backup, inserting any missing files across multiple subdirectories in the right destination.

I just had hard time explaining what I was supposed to do, so I need not elaborate how much hard time I had deciding what road I should go down in the search of the correct tool.

After some serious drilling, I came to a wonderful tool which would be perfect for my purpose - Araxis Merge. I was pleasantly surprised that the tool offered a fully functional download for 30 days. That was more than enough to get me started on my test.

The installation is a breeze. However, once you open the softy you might get the chills from the multiple options it offers. But, slow down your beating hearts, cause it actually boiled down to three or so options I ended up using.

First I narrowed the functionality to FOLDER COMPARISON. This workspace offers a different set of options, compared to say - file comparison (which is great for tracking file content changes, not only from two, but from three sources). However, this was out of the scope of my test, so I did not venture further.

I chose the target and destination folders on top of the vertically separated screen and decided to keep the original folder structure to the right and the corrupted one to the left. I stress on this, since the program offers the option to have it either way and after doing several comparisons, you might end up forgetting what you should copy and which direction that should go.

I was interested in two certain file types and narrowed the filter rule from the options to those files in multiple directories. That is done by setting the "Include Folder" option to "*" and "Include Files" to "*.eml" as my case was. This filtering yielded much faster comparison times, since it skipped all irrelevant file types. I was using a Xeon box, 8Gb RAM, SAS disks in RAID 5, but still the results were quite slow if no filter was applied (I actually crashed the box once).

Once the comparison was over I was presented with options of (multiple) selecting "changed" or "inserted" files. Since I was looking only for missing files across multiple directories and needed to copy them in the same location on the right side (my destination pane), I chose the "Select Inserted" option and had a scroll to see what was actually selected. If you need to ditch a whole folder, you do not need to Ctrl + click all files, but rather collapse the "-" from the treeview which will exclude all selected files in this folder and its sub folders.

Having done this - copy the content from right to left (as in my case), was easy and depending on the amount of selected content, took a significant amount of time - especially for the re-scan. Mind you that once the coping box disappears, and the re-scan is initiated, you can stop the rescan and save yourself some time. However, if some files failed to be copied correctly you (supposedly) will not be informed. I dare to disagree, since the coping process alerts for any file coping problems like existing file names, etc.

All in all, it was a great experience killing a few sleepless nights (due to hardware limitations), but resulted in a perfect file/folder comparison for a large folder and file structure.

I am sure that a lot of other similar tools are around the block, but wanted to share my experience on this particular one.