Go have a read

As far as I am aware, Gary Cosimini and Mike Zahorik are still employed by Adobe.

Whereas I am no longer an employee (shareholder, yes)

Strange honour to be in the credits. If anyone from Microsoft management is looking: no, I am not moonlighting for Adobe.

This might just get me enthralled to do some real-world stuff with scripting and InDesign.

To Adobe InDesign team: thanks.

Wow. August 1998 I began work at Adobe. One of the things that was talked about was “K2” — a product that eventually became InDesign.

Don’t know how I feel about Quark changing tack. It is interesting how the world turns.

Thanks for the link, Andrew.

Adobe, in Illustrator 11, 12 and 13 (aka CS, CS2 and CS3) have dramatically simplified the process of warping text:

Firstly, you have some text in a Text Frame:

Whilst the frame is selected, there is a new button on the Toolbar:

If you select “with warp”, a new dialog box appears:

By clicking the “Preview” button, off you go!

The above is the sunset-view from my room. To the left is the hinterland, and to the right is the beach itself.

On Location, at the Gold Coast preparing for a busy, educational week at Microsoft TechEd. Being my first TechEd, anything could and probably will happen. I do know I will leave more educated than I arrive.

Whilst I watched the SBS TV series on the making of the Crowded House album, Woodface, there were much revels going on around me. It seemed to be a beer bash-come-stag party. So I turned up the TV with Neil Finn hopefully calming the din. Neil gets the impact of his music. The mercurial Finn brothers.

Up at 9am this morning thanks to a fire alarm. I could smell the smoke, but thought it was someone smoking on a non-smoking floor.  By the time I got my important items (pair of pants on, room key, wallet, camera, phone — in that order) ready to stroll out — the firemen were looking around for the smoking culprit. No one seemed ultra alarmed, so stayed put.

Today, it’s about planning. To quote Uncle Mike: “Piss Poor Planning Precedes Poor Performance”. Checking the camera equipment comes first.

Having installed the new Adobe Production Premium Suite, I tried out OnLocation. And this piece of technology Adobe purchased rocks. It essentially turns your Firewire/Laptop into a hard disk recorder and monitoring station. No more capturing slowly in post-production. Straight into Premiere, encode and you’re outta there.

Tomorrow it starts: danah boyd in Brisbane.

Some months ago, I installed a beta of Adobe Soundbooth CS3. And a beta of Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. In retrospect, probably this was the root cause of my headache.

Having installed my new Production Premium on my Vista laptop; Setup.exe brings up a notice that SoundBooth CS3 could not be installed as I had previously used a Beta. OK, using the Adobe supplied WinCS3Clean script (written in Python, BTW), I de-installed everything and attempted to install a fresh.

No go. None of the applications that make up the Suite would install. “Components Failed to Install“

Reading the installer help support files suggests using msconfig.exe to restart without startup applications; no go. Restart in safe mode (F8 at startup) and install. No go. Move the installer DVDs (4x) onto the hard drive and install from this image. No go.

This time, it is my usual practise has been to “blame the OS” (note: even the install notes for Creative Suite CS3 on MacOS X runs to 23 individual points!) . Launch the Setup.exe as Administrator. No go. Run WinCS3Clean as Administrator, and use the Windows Install Clean Up. No go. Log into the Microsoft network just in case there is some weird Group Policy thing on my account. No go. 

Finally, I stumble across this on the Adobe support site: “License has Expired” . Right; my serial number has already been recorded and the apps cannot be installed again. Whilst not the exact error I was seeing, it seemed to be where I was ultimately at as the next step.

It worked.

What the? I notice that there are a couple of steps prior to removing this file. Re-installing onto another PC “as a test” and most probably re-installing your whole OS . If I hadn’t removed this cache file, I may have resorted to a complete OS re-install step.

The problem ultimately was Adobe’s draconian and flawed install process. Not the OS. I want my 24 hours of lost productivity back, please.

If I had reinstalled the OS, yes the problem would have been fixed. But it’s like opening an almond nut with a H2 Hummer going at 100. It will surely solve the problem; but lesser force and better information earlier can open the nut, too. And save lots of time and a barrell or two of oil.

Oh, and as a part of my near scorch the earth clean up, I de-installed Acrobat 8 Professional. Having not used Professional for anything apart from reading PDFs in the last 6 months, I am not going to re-install it.  Using the .xps format printing out stuff I need to keep is great.

How does someone who doesn’t have a day to install software navigate this? How does someone who hasn’t been installing Windows and Adobe applications for 10+ years get through this?

Using Powershell, .Net, OpenXML and some code that I barely understand because it’s not Python; he’s been able to generate 60 to 70 documents per second.

Linking it here as it intersects the Adobe / Microsoft world.

Watch the video here of Frank Arrigo and Monique Eagles here. Yes, you will need to install Silverlight.

This is my first experiment with Silverlight and the Microsoft Expression set of tools. Using the inbuilt players in Media Encoder saved many days/hours of hand coding; yet I am sure there is more in there that will tickle out over coming weeks.

NOTE: Silverlight 1.1 is alpha-release!

Workflow (all on Vista Ultimate):

• Edited footage in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0
• Export Sequence from Premiere Pro using Adobe Media Encoder 960x720 WMV9/WMA9, very light compression.
• Import into Microsoft Expression Media Encoder (May preview)
• Export footage as VC-1 Web Server High Speed (using a normal web server). This setting is 640x480. Obviously, I could compress this more.
• Edit the Default.html to correctly reference EmePlayer.js (note: this got me for an hour. Linux web servers are case-sensitive, and the Default.html points to emeplayer.js. 404! Bug reported)
• FTP files to directory onto nickhodge.com (could have used Expression Web, but I was debugging the problem with upper/lower case file naming above)

Thoughts? Comments?  I only have Silverlight 1.1 alpha installed. I’ve tested in Windows IE/FireFox and MacOS X 10.4 Safari/Firefox. The Mac’s audio might be out-of-sync. Again, this is reported.

InDesign CS3 has a pretty neat Easter Egg: a good friend and InDesign Evangelist, Tim Cole, details the inner details of this easter egg.

The allusion to InDesign 1.0 through CS2 “Butterfly” motif, and the mountains to InDesign’s previous code names themes (K2, Annapurna, Caribiner).

The alien is related to QuarkXpress’ alien that appeared when a certain key combination is used to delete items on the page.

Thanks Adobe InDesign engineers for teaching us that humour is OK in the workplace; and reminding us being funny is subversive.

366 days ago today, my body reminded me of who is in control. I’ve told close friends. family and employers of what occurred; but I think its time to “go large”.

Slurred Speech

On the 25th April 2006 I woke up, and my face felt funny. Droopy, and numb. Having had a sinus infection for the previous few days, I thought it was just a side effect. The 25th of April is a holiday in Australia (ANZAC day) so resting was easy.

Technically, I was on sick leave from Adobe for a few days at the end of a 2 week holiday. There was something inside that said I really didn’t want to go back to work.

By the mid-afternoon, I was slurring my speech, and my left hand side of my face ached like nothing else, whilst also being numb. I couldn’t taste on the left side of my tongue, and there was a loud ringing in my left ear. Oh, and I was drooling from the left side of my mouth.

Avril saw me in the afternoon and was not happy. The first thought, especially with slurred speech is “stroke”. For some reason, I was in a haze of pain and had not really thought through what was going on.

A quick “home stroke test” showed that whatever it was, I hadn’t popped a brain vein. Yet. We went off to our local Doctor’s clinic, seeing the locum who was working on the public holiday. All I remember of that visit was “thanks for coming, you’ve made my day as Bell’s Palsy isn’t all that common.”

A quick course of Cortisone tablets on the 25th were administered to “shock” the body into recovery. Cortisone causes the adrenaline gland to go into overdrive. A nasty side effect is that it doesn’t cure the pain, just makes you stay awake to feel it. From memory, I slept for 4–6 hours in total over a 4–5 day period. sidenote: JFK was reported to have multiple cortisone injections per day, as he had Addison’s disease. How he got through daily, I do not know. This drug’s side effects are not good!

Further investigations with the Doctor on the 26th with a CAT scan showed that (a) I do have a brain and (b) no blood vein damage/clots could be found. So, no stroke.

The diagnosis is by a process of elimination. The pain on the side of my face indicated Bell’s Palsy.

Picture: taken 26th April 2006 by Liam. This is me attempting to smile normally, you will notice that your right (my left) is not moving up normally.

Bell’s Palsy

Bell’s Palsy is an infection of the Seventh nerve of the face. This nerve runs from the top of your cranium into your ear and across your cheek bone ending in your eyelids, nose, lips, tongue and chin.

Side effects from Bell’s Palsy are numerous: ringing in the ears, soreness/aching of the face, loss of sense of taste, loss of sense of feeling on the face, watery eye (cannot fully close the eye), inability to control the effected side of your mouth (you drool over yourself)

To others, the most visible side effect is the droopiness and “unbalancedness” of the face: your face drops on one side as the muscles no longer get instructions from that 7th nerve.

Now having suffered this, I look at faces much closer and can see the difference left-to-right of people’s face. Bell’s is more common in older people. A famous sufferer was George Clooney. Repeated questioning of medical professionals indicated I would not look like George after Bell’s. Bummer.

Bell’s Palsy and a bit of history is at the link. Well worth reading

Bell’s Palsy is the effect of a weakening on the VII (7th) Cranial Nerve. The most common to least common: viral infection of the nerve, and in my case it was a simple infection that “appeared” sooner with the pain at the top of my skull: which was thought to be a simple sinus infection.

It looks like there is going to be residual pain for some time: which is manageable.

Getting Better.

The best cure for Bell’s is complete rest. No stress, no work. And that’s what I did. It took 3 weeks for the physical visible side effects to go away — that is, my face muscles moved normally; my eye could shut and I could talk without slurring my speech.

However, the long term effects of Bell’s are still with me today: aching left-hand cheek and ringing in the left-hand ear. Over the past 12 months, these side effects have lessened to a point where I can live and work with them comfortably — and know the best way to manage the reduced energy levels that accompany the pain. The muscles on the left hand side of my face are wired differently. It takes a different “control” to smile normally, so I just smirk from the right side as it takes less effort. You cannot explain to people how its changed, it just has.

I returned to work in early June, having not been at work for April and May 2006. By mid-May, Avril and I had decided that to fully recover, decompress and not have further valves go “bang” in my body — it would be best to make a mid-life course correction.

Taking the Bell’s as an indicator of inner body health has probably added multiple years to the end of my life. Stress, a much used work, shows itself in funny ways. Essentially, I was a work-aholic in a job that I hated. Double bad.

The Work Thing

Not sleeping much during this episode, I had plenty of time to think. Thinking and time are a dangerous combination.

I was not happy with the job, position, stresses and many other things as Channel Sales Manager at Adobe. Even more dangerous, I wasn’t hungry enough — or had the energy level to do what needed to be done. I was out of juice. The company’s local culture was changing; and it just didn’t suit me.

Returning to work part-time, I offered Adobe my position back, and asked for a Leave of Absence for at least 6 months, unpaid and with no benefits so I could fully mentally and physically recover. Also, I would use this time to “re-educate” myself to go back to what I really loved: doing technical stuff with end-user customers.

Due to various “shenanigans” with Adobe HR, the Macromedia ‘merger’ and other legal guidance it was recommended that I resign. It was easier for Adobe this way.

So I resigned.

That felt so good.

Recovery

I didn’t feel 100% until mid-September-ish. That is, I could do a full-day without getting too tired. Now, if I go too hard for too many days — I get the same aches in the face; but know how to manage the pain and the associated tiredness.  Essentially, when I am not tired I work at 125+% to be 100% productive. Finding an appropriate, and less-stressed and probably less financially beneficial job was my goal.

By this time, Adobe had nothing on the plate for me fulltime, so I started looking elsewhere for stuff to do. A small gig for Adobe came, I took that and completed that contract.

What you will read in my posts of that time: I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my working life.

This “Enthusiast Evangelist” job at Microsoft appeared. Knowing Frank Arrigo through Mike Seyfang, thanks to http://linkedin.com, I applied and the rest is now history. It’s the first job that I saw that I really felt I wanted, and would be at >100% at.

So, that’s the story of the last 12 months. Some people heard that I was “seriously ill” and just experienced me not being at work all of a sudden. Speaking to these people since, it was if I had fallen off the face of the earth.

Not quite, just my face had fallen, that’s all.

I hope this post helps someone else in the future. There is life after, and with Bell’s. It will just be all different.

Update 2nd June 2007: strange cramp in the left-hand side of my neck/face today. Resulted in a slight dipping of the nerves around my mouth and soreness. The muscles seem out-of-place and aching along my cheek-bone.

Mergers of two companies, such as Macromedia and Adobe, from the outside seem a “joining of likes”. A marriage made in heaven. The perception that the companies were very alike is external only.  I doubt since the acquisition that Adobe executives sleep better at night.

We are seeing the internal cultural difference exposed externally: the smart auntie Adobe of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator’s fame and friendly attitude being smashed by the boys-club, leather booted Macromedia cowboys.

This is probably one major reason why I am no longer at Adobe. Forgetting who your customers are has to be the first big strategy of big companies aiming to be smaller. As a customer of Adobe, and with many friends who still work there — I would be saddened to see this strategy working. [edit: I would be, not am]

I am at Microsoft as they recognise that forgetting your customer is a sin that must never be committed.

So, as an Adobe user (daily), shareholder: tone it down, talk to customers and don’t forget customer base.

Are you are losing sleep because:

1. Elvis left the building some 30 years ago in August 1977?
2. Myf Warhust thinks Elvis serves fish and chips somewhere in Bendigo, Victoria?
3. Las Vegas MIX07 has been completely booked out?

Don’t lose another minute of sleep!

The MIX experience is being transported and ReMIX’d at the Crown Promenade on 25-26th June 2007.

Remix Australia will be the first of its kind from Microsoft bringing together Web Developers & Designers with our key sponsors. It’s a jam packed two day experience – a 48 hour conversation.

The event is only $140 per person, and all delegates will get, experience and generally, or whatever:

• A Microsoft Expression Web
• New networking friendships without Twitter.com
• A choice of 20 sessions to check out from expert leaders & case studies
• Hear from Australian Industry & overseas experts
• Time out at the Sandbox, especially if you are not playing nice with the other kids
• A sighting of Elvis
• Action packed evening at Galactic Circus on Monday evening. (you’ll find me on the Defender game)
• Participate in Meeting Point – pick the conversations you want to hear and be part of, or just read the blogs and drool over the Flickrs and wish you were there in person
• Meet with Microsoft Partners to understand how they can facilitate Web 2.0
• Discover: Internet Alley; the entertainment lounge web jams.
• Go large and become world-famous with “The Geek Stories”

I’ll be there, maybe with a session or two of my own. I’m thinking about doing a demo of how I use Photoshop, Premiere and Vista with some other cool goodies.

More info as it comes to hand.

As I use Photoshop and Premiere Pro in production and anger daily (more than I ever did whilst working for Adobe!), I feel it even more. The OnLocation will save me another ratio of post-production (video->harddisk).

Getting this internet video thing down to a fine art.

Cool stuff.  I am buying a Creative Suite CS3 Master Collection. Just want to keep up-to-date on my InDesign, since I was there from its public birth, through the troubled toddlerhood into teenage years and now adulthood.

From what I can see (but obviously not experience until it ships!) prepress people making masks (deep etches in AU magazine speak) are going to drool at this feature.

The Photoshop engineering team is going to have operators fall at their feet as gods: just like the healing brush.

Ship it!

In the early 1990s, when Adobe Premiere was a new thing, and Quicktime overshadowed anything Microsoft had until at least 1995 — we created this video.

Starring Uncle Mike, Uncle Paul, Uncle Peter (Peter Harris) and myself — the DOSBOX (original Munge Car) and Mike’s passion for windsurfing intersected my passion for the Newton PDA. We created this little advertisment as an advertisement for Random Access Consulting; or the Munge Brothers.

OK, this a little cheeky. I never got the “programming in XML” thing of Coldfusion. Give me PHP anyday. Photo from Barcampsydney

Summary: no Acrobat 7 support for Vista, only Acrobat 8: with an update expected first half 2007 for full support. There are known issues with Acrobat 8 on Vista. Similarly with Office 2007; the update will have support. You can make PDFs directly from Office 2007 using the Save as PDF and XPS plugin.

For Adobe Creative Suite 2.3: (note that Creative Suite Premium 2.0 with Acrobat Professional 7.0 is not a good combination). For Macromedia Studio 8, the following seems to also apply.

we are not currently aware of major issues that would adversely affect customer use of
Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 on Windows Vista.

In the document, it is worth noting the paragraphs in regards to the forthcoming, pre-announce status Adobe Creative Suite 3.0:

…Adobe Creative Suite 3 is being designed for and thoroughly tested on 32-bit versions of four editions of Windows Vista—Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

Adobe Production Studio (video products) seem to install OK, but Vista is not recommended as an OS. EncoreDVD is reported to not work on Vista. Shame, as I was just about to purchase a Production Studio for some Microsoft video projects. 

Altsys/Aldus/Adobe/Altsys/Macromedia/Adobe Freehand? Oooh. Maybe not so good:

Adobe does not plan to update Macromedia FreeHand to install or run on Windows Vista

Do go have a read, and look at the support forums: Vista in Adobe Support Forums.

As a Microsoft Vista and an Intel-based MacBook Pro user, this year is a key year for Adobe products.

Things like CMYK, colorspaces, high-dpi images, Postscript fonts, trapping settings (overprint/knockout) and the Crop/Bleed boxes. All those high-tech printing things.

The short answer is yes.

(testing process: InDesign document, export as PDF 1.3, open in Acrobat 8 Professional, Save as “PDF in XML Format” using Mars plugins, re-open, check with Acrobat 8 Advanced>Print Production tools. Open SVG as text)

XAML “smells” like the W3C’s Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). DOM-inside-a-DOM, Declarative animation, 2D graphics. XAML maybe not SVG, but it certainly tips its hat to SVG.

Adobe today pre-released their XML-in-a-PDF technology, Mars, for Acrobat 8. Essentially, Mars as a technology is presently delivered as plugins for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 Professional. You can save an existing ‘binary’ PDF out as a .mars file. These .mars files are like .jar or .war files: manifested, structured ZIP files. Looking inside a description of a page, you have an SVG Tiny 1.2+ (as Adobe state, SVG/FSS0 representation. The specification clearly documents that .mars takes the current concept of PDF, a document format, and extends this as XML.These technologies do not directly intersect: an XML representation of SWF rather than PDF would be closer to XAML. Having cross-platform viewer support for Microsoft’s XPS would be closer to PDF.

I was premature in saying SVG was deprecated.

Demonstrating software: the collection of skillz are not taught by Toastmasters. Nor most Presentation Trainers. It is a set of unique techniques, that are generally nutured and passed on from master to trainee; generation to generation.

You need to have your eye and ear on the audience; the setup for the next joke is on your mind; you need to be “on message”, the software needs to be working: and most importantly, what you are showing is getting through. In these days of instant blogging, everything you say is public property.

So, Eric’s comments on the Acrobat 8 roadshow in Canberra are interesting. Mark, the Adobe presenter has responded.

Sometimes to communicate a story, words and phrases are used that may be a little too combative. Yeah, I’ve dissed non-Adobe software vendors in presentations: usually to sell a point or get an emotional response from an audience. This style only works with medium sized audiences. My favourite was playfully dissing Microsoft whilst presenting at Microsoft.
Onto the Facts.

1. XML does NOT magically equal a smaller file size; in fact the reverse is probably true. In the case of PPT in PDF, the file size benefits of PDF accrue from image compression (including gradients/blends and reused elements). Other benefits are cross-platform packaging (especially typefaces) and security (ensuring people cannot change the presentation)If you were sending a document to people expecting changes, PDF is not the answer.
2. Outlook PSTs suck in a cross-platform world. And let’s face it; in the future no matter what platform you are on, everything is a legacy platform.I have 6.5Gb of email locked up in PST files containing 6+ years of email history. Searching these involves launching Outlook, loading the PST and doing a slow search. Thank goodness for Google Desktop search if you are a Windows person. You’re stuffed if you spend most of your time outside the mono-culture. Putting emails into a standard published and open file format, say PDF/A, for future reference is something many people care about.
3. Mark covered this Fact in his blog. There is a law of entropy working here. Once data is squeezed out in PDF, getting back a fully working, semantically rich document is going to be difficult. In the case of Office applications, PDF is not an editable exchange format. The getting data back out of a PDF is best a utility; and included in Acrobat 6, 7 and 8.
4. Launch Acrobat 6 and compare/contrast the Acrobat 7 and 8 launch times; even the Reader. There is a world of difference even without Windows caching the application in RAM (something you can turn off with a few Registry entries on Windows). Adobe has dramatically improved the launch time from a woeful Acrobat 6 (launch times sucked)

I didn’t attend the Canberra launch; only the morning session of the Sydney Acrobat 8 launch. Splitting the group into two “halves” is a recognition that Acrobat has two large audiences: one creative and the other standard office style users. Canberra has always been a tough demographic to get right audience-wise for Adobe. I agree with Eric: 20 people is not good: the whole tone of the presentation changes with less than 50 people.

Also, in the modern highly connected world — it is my opinion that “Launch” style presentations with too much sales hype are a thing of the past. People need content, and lots of it. Conversations such as blogging post conference are excellent mechanisms of making the content more relevant.