Terminally Incoherent

At some point in the past we sent out an email to the staff saying that we can assist them with file conversion services. Very often they get large data files (agings, inventory, sales receipts) in various formats. Some are plain text, some are comma/tab delimited ASCII but most are PDF. Using tools like Monarch we can relatively easily extract the data locked inside the PDF files and convert it to just about any format. The one requested most often is of course Excel.

To this day we regret not wording that email a little bit better. We still have to explain to people how this conversion process really works.

For example one guy found out that we can convert PDF files to excel from a co-worker. It just happened that he had some large, tab delimited text files that he wanted to manipulate in excel. So he came up with a brilliant plan:

1. He printed out what came out to be close to a 60 pages of data
2. He then scanned them in as PDF files
3. Naturally he was scanning them one page at a time since he didn’t know better
4. The copy machine sent the ~60 scanned PDF’s to him, one page per email
5. He then took the time to download all these files, save them, rename and reorder them
6. Finally he zipped the 60 PDF files and emailed them to me asking if I could convert them to excel

I didn’t know this story. I’m recounting it to you now because it’s silly but at the time all I knew was that I got 60 PDF files all of which essentially contained scanned images. I really didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry. I decided to call him up and find out what the deal was. When he recounted this process to me I had to take a break to bang my head against the wall for 5 minutes. Afterwards I called him back and explained to him how to open the tab delimited file in Excel and then click next 2 or 3 times and watch the built-in import feature does the magic.

Sigh… At least he didn’t photograph the pages on a wooden table.

Another lady was doing test counts one day. She painstakingly recorded the values of the counts using the old fashioned pen and paper method. Normally she would have to re-enter all this data into some XML file but fortunately she remembered that email we sent out. So she scanned in all these hand written notes into a PDF file and then sent them to me for conversion. It took me a while to explain to her that I didn’t really have tools to do this type of OCR. She just kept saying “But they are PDF files!”.

I don’t think she ever got it, but she eventually gave up trying to convince me to convert them. She probably figured I was lazy or something.

There seems to be something about PDF files that makes the small minded people very confused. We had another guy who kept sending word documents to the office to be “scanned in as PDF”. The secretary would then print them out, walk across the hall to the copy room, scan the printout, type in her email on the copy machine’s touch screen, go back to her desk, wait for the email, and forward it back to this guy.

They were both floored when I introduced them to PDFCreator. They absolutely loved it but it introduced a brand new problem. The Word guy would now create a document, generate a PDF and then realize he had few typos and/or mistakes in it. Fortunately he remembered we had full version of Adobe Acrobat (the one that can do touch-ups on PDF files) in the office. So he would now send us his newly converted PDF file along with the list of corrections.

I called him up and our conversation basically went like this:

Him

“Can you remove the fourth and sixth sentence in the third paragraph? This should make the whole document fit on 2 pages.”.

Me:

“Well, you see… The Adobe tool is mostly for touching up text objects. It doesn’t really re-flow the paragraphs. Btw, how do you know it will cut down the size to 2 pages?”

Him

“Oh, I did it in my word document so I can see how it will look when you do these changes.”

Me:

“Um… Wouldn’t it be easier if you just used PDFCreator to generate another PDF file out of this updated Word document?”

[long pause]

Him

“Sigh… I just thought it would be easier with the adobe thing”

I don’t know what is it about the PDF files. These folks seem to be doing ok working with Word and Excel files. But PDF files seem to have some sort of extra magical properties that induce confusion in some people.

I figured I should probably post my solution to the blinking dash problem. As you may know, few days ago I rebooted my machine only to be greeted a blank screen and a blinking dash in the upper left corner of the screen. This was happening right after the BIOS memory tests. The system was booting just fine from the CD and so I was able to back everything up.

I tried just about everything to get my windows installation bootable, including running FIXMBR from the recovery console, repairing windows installation, doing parallel install and etc. Nothing worked.

I’m glad to report that I finally got this machine up and running. My solution?

Format the hard drive and reinstall windows.

Yup, sorry that’s the only thing that helped. I tried, and tried to find a better way to do this but there was just no way this machine would cooperate with me. The interesting question is: what caused this? Was it the graphics card as Alphast suggested in the other thread? I kinda doubt it since the installation went so smoothly after I reformatted. Was it a hard drive issue? It would be odd since this was a relatively new HD. I got it in July when my old system drive failed on me. Could it be the HD controller? But if so, how come my second drive is working just fine?

I hope this was just some random fluke…

As a side note, I noticed that it only took me few minutes to get the machine to the point of usability after I finished installing the drivers and AV suite. Here is the list of apps I really needed to function:

1. Firefox
2. Vim
3. WinRar
4. VLC
5. uTorrent

That’s about all I needed to feel at home. In fact I don’t really “need” VLC and uTorrent right away, but I installed them for a good measure. I will probably need MS Office on here sooner or later, but for now I’m fine. I hardly use that damn thing anyway. I will probably end up installing MikTex and Emacs first.

I guess this is an evidence that I do live in the browser more than I think. Once I copied my Firefox profile from the backup drive, I was ready to pick up things where I left few days ago. Btw, does your browser let you completely save the current state (including all the open tabs in the current session) by simply copying a folder? This is why I love Firefox so much - all my plugins, bookmarks, custom adblock filters and greasemonkey scripts fit nicely in just few KB - and that’s just about everything I need for my daily browsing and blogging.

What are the crucial apps that you install after a clean install?

I love easily solvable problems. I call them instant hero issues - you can solve them in 5 minutes flat, and you instantly become a hero. I wish my problem that I was struggling with for the last two days was this easy to fix. A guy dropped off a desktop at my desk yesterday with a BSOD on boot. I looked at the message and it said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that nv4_disp caused an infinite loop.

I love infinite loops - they are awesome. Whenever I cause one, I sit back and say “behold mortals, for I have created infinity”. Of course I can usually kill my own infinite loops. Ones that occur during the windows boot process are not nearly as much fun. So I decided to track down nv4_disp which turned out to be an Nvidia display driver. Thanks Nvida!

Solution was trivial:

1. Boot windows into Safe Mode with Networking
2. Go to Nvidia website and nab brand new set of drivers for the GeForce FX 5200
3. Install the drivers
4. Reboot
5. ???
6. Profit (INSTANT HERO BONUS +30)

Apparently this problem is caused by the well known “NVidia Sucks Ass” issue with the GeForce drivers. Hopefully this won’t happen again - the drivers are up-to-date now, and the machine seems to be fully functional. But you never know. At least I should be able to easily fix it next time if this thing comes back.

I know, I know - a half witted monkey with a full frontal lobotomy could probably fix this. Sigh… I wish my users were as smart as monkeys with full frontal lobotomy. But you know what, sometimes it’s nice to solve an easy problem for a change. Cause, really these are the only types of problems that can give you this sort of instant gratification. Putting a check in the win column now and then, and actually helping someone gives us the energy to plug away on those hopless projects that have no real solutions - only workarounds an mega-hacks. It’s nice to have someone actually thank you for resolving a problem rather than trying to explain to them you not secretly the infrastructure and crashing the servers just to have something to do. ;P

I did some more tinkering with my blinking dash issue and I found out the following things:

1. FIXMBR + FIXBOOT did nothing. Fortunately it didn’t seem to hose my partition table so that’s good
2. Booting from the WinXP SP2 CD and choosing to repair the installation did nothing
3. Running the Windows Repair from the WinXP CD did nothing
4. Parallel install of windows on the same partition (without formating) did nothing
5. My backups seem to be ok - Captive NTFS actually works in Knoppix these days (yay)

I will try few other tips I got in the last thread but I guess I will need to format and reinstall Windows in the end. But will this work? The repair option should have theoretically fixed any corrupted files on windows side. FIXMBR and FIXBOOT should have fixed the boot entries. WTF else is there? What the hell is preventing windows from booting? Chances are that I might still have this issue after I reinstall.

In the meantime I wanted to share something very special that I have found while googling for potential solutions to my problem:

Best advice evar: “SHUT DOWN YOUR HOLE COMPUTER”. LOL! This, ladies and gentlemen is the collective wisdom of Yahoo Answers. I swear, I haven’t read a Yahoo answer thread that didn’t make me chuckle and weep for the downfall of humanity at the same time. And I’m not even talking about technology advice - any thread on that site is LULZ-worthy to some degree.

Oh boy… My home PC did a number on me once again. I’m currently confined to the laptop propped up on the nightstand next to my bed. Yeah, I can’t even sit at my desk, because I have a CRT which is obscenely long in the back and takes up 85% of my desk space. Typing from my bed can be done in two positions: uncomfortable, and fucking uncomfortable. The laptop is kinda big to actually be a lap-top.

The desktop was working just fine for the most of the day yesterday. In fact, I only did two changes to the system in the last few days. First one was installing the intelisense drivers to support my brand new Microsoft Sidewinder Mouse that I got for Christmas. I will write a review at one point btw, but seeing how my desktop is out of commission right now that post is on the back burner. I restarted the system after the installation and it was fine. The second change was a Windows Media Player update. Recently I noticed that I was experiencing weird discoloration when playing WMV files. In hindsight, I think this issue started when I updated by graphic card’s drivers but initially I thought it might be a media player or a codec issue. I usually use VLC for most of my media but for an obvious reason, WMV files sometimes work better in the MS player.

Since I hardly ever use Windows Media Player, I figured I might as well update it. So I hit the “check for updates” menu item, and allowed it to pull down and install required files. Oddly enough it asked me to reboot afterwards. So I did, and as windows was shutting down I went to grab some food. When I came back, I was greeted by a blank screen with a single dash blinking in the upper left corner.

So here is the situation: when I power up the machine I can see the POST screen, and I can access the BIOS as normal. Right after the POST the screen goes blank and I get that damn blinking dash. I can boot from the CD normally - and in fact, when I booted Knoppix, I was able to access and back up all my data on the C drive. It doesn’t seem to be a hard drive or a controller failure - it even passed the quick built in Dell IDE diagnostic test available from the F12 boot menu.

I ran CHKDSK on the drive from the recovery console and it said it found and repaired some errors but this did not fix my issue. I even ran FIXBOOT to write out a new boot sector, but that didn’t help either.

My next step will probably be FIXMBR, but I don’t want to do that just yet. As far as I can remember, this would always hose the partition table and make the problems worse. So I want to make this the very last step, before formating and reinstalling windows. If I hose a partition or two then, who cares. Before that I want to make sure my backups are working, and uncorrupted. Since I was using Knoppix to write to a NTFS partition, I want to test the backed up files and make sure they are ok before I do any irreversible changes to the master boot record.

Anyway, did anything like this ever happen to you? Any suggestions on how to fix it without killing my current windows install?

Sigh… At least this didn’t happen yesterday or on Christmas Eve. It would surely ruin the holidays for me.