Archive for the ‘tech-talk’ Category

Latest ATI driver broke all my .otf fonts

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Okay, I admit it – sometimes I use my PC for graphic design because I’m lazy I have a free FTP client on my PC but I have yet to buy one for my Mac so if I’m doing web development I often do it on my PC. For the most part, I like to use OpenType fonts because they are better in a number of ways, but the most important being added support for ligatures and swashes.

I also use my PC to play video games and WoW was crashing with a fatal exception sometimes when loading new areas. I ran a defrag and that made my programs open faster again but it was still crashing during loading so I updated my video driver (ATI Radeon 3800 HD, PCIe 2.0 w/ 512MB onboard) and upon opening things I’d been working on in Illustrator was greeted with the error message that my fonts were invalid. I tried reinstalling the fonts and got the same error message – for ALL of my OpenType fonts. I recall I had a similar font issue beforehand, but the solution then was to update the driver, but as this was the cause of the problem this time, I needed a new solution.

Once again, Google comes to my rescue

Googling for technical advice can be dangerous territory because there are a lot of sites out there which try to get you to install their “better” versions of system utilities, but they turn out only to be better for the distributor. Be careful out there, folks.

I’m sometimes worried when I see a URL that contains the word “install” in the title, but this one actually turns out to be a legit site – http://www.thomasphinney.com/tag/install/ (my thanks to the folks on TechSupportForum.com for the tip). My problem fits into his solution #4 which requires a registry edit to resolve the issue, as I’ve outlined below. In a nutshell, this problem is caused because Windows expects the device driver (video driver) to be a certain size, and the driver exceeds it, so we need to tell the registry to accept the larger size. Thanks Thomas!

ALWAYS PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU ARE DOING WHEN EDITING YOUR REGISTRY! It is not a toy, it is the brain of your operating system – proceed with caution. A lot of the entries have similar names so double-check to make sure that you’re editing the right one. The following information is provided for your convenience, use at your own risk. :)

  1. First and foremost, back up your existing registry.
    1. Click Start -> Run and type into the Run dialog box “regedit” (and press enter).
    2. Welcome to the Registry Editor, please be on your best behaviour in here. To start with, let’s make a backup of your registry. Click on File -> Export and then save your registry file in a memorable location
  2. Navigate the registry tree to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
  3. Once you have selected Memory Management, in the right plane, right click and choose New -> DWORD.
  4. Give the new entry this name “SessionImageSize” (omitting the quotation marks).
  5. Double-click the new entry, which will allow you to edit it, and switch the radio button from Hexadecimal to Decimal, and give it a value (Value Data) of 20. Then press OK.
  6. Restart your computer for the change to take effect (the registry is loaded at startup).
  7. Your OpenType fonts should be working again.

Further resources:
Adobe User Forums (long) thread about this issue.

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Got the Radeon 1600 with Jaunty Jackalope Blues?

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

It all started as an ordinary Wednesday morning, I booted my Jaunty Jackalope box and once past the grub menu, all I got was a corrupted display on my ATI Radeon 1600. I know it’s a working video card, (liveCDs work just fine) so I tried using recovery mode but whenever I started the xserver, I’d get the same corrupted video and I couldn’t switch terminals, keyboard input was ignored. My initial reaction was that I had to reconfigure xserver-xorg (#dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg) but it made absolutely no difference.

I hunted around Google and found various Ubuntu forums and bug reports about the ATI proprietary fglrx driver but none of the suggested solutions worked for me. (This thread has a number of useful suggestions for others encountering this issue.) For me, I could not “sudo apt-get autoremove xorg-driver-fglr” because I got an error that the package wasn’t installed and “sudo aticonfig –initial” gave an error saying that it couldn’t find any supported hardware.

My solution in the end was to run the following from the recovery root shell (with network support):

#apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx

I then rebooted and used the graphics fix option in the recovery menu and then booted normally et voila! Hope that helps someone out there on teh intrawebs.

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Adobe CS4 OpenType Font Problems

Friday, June 5th, 2009

I have been running CS4 for a little while now on my Win XP workstation (normally the one I use to play games but it’s a beast so I figured it’d run CS4 well and it’s cheaper than the fancy iMac of my dreams) but I had pretty much none of the fonts install properly during the initial installation.

I thought that perhaps the font problem had to do with my virus protection but I noticed even with virus protection disabled that installing some new fonts would fail, giving me an error that said that the file was corrupted or invalid and that I should contact the font vendor for a new file:

Cannot activate font "$font_name". Font may be invalid or damaged. Please contact the vendor for a new file.

After some experimentation I found that TrueType fonts installed for me just fine and the problem was only with OpenType (OTF) fonts. I did a lot of searching around on the internet, most of the advice was completely useless or stupid so I figured I should document this in case someone else has the same issue.

The problem was caused by the video driver. I found in my internet travels that some people running Windows Vista and XP had a similar issue with an NVidia driver (I use an ATI Radeon) so I thought updating my driver was worth trying. I downloaded the latest driver for my video card from AMD’s website and restarted (after all, it’s a PC). I then tried to install the OpenType font I recently purchased from Veer and it worked! I then copied the fonts over from CS4′s goodies folder and I now have my fonts available in my CS4 applications and life is sweet once more! Huzzah!

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Posted in design, tech-talk | 1 Comment »

External USB drive won’t clear space using Backup Exec 11d

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

I’m using Exchange with Backup Exec 11d for Windows (on Windows Server 2003) and backing up our Exchange server to it.We are running extremely low on tape drive storage space and we can’t afford a new tape drive (thanks Great Recession) and so I’m doing a MacGuyver and using an external 500GB USB hard drive that we had around to run a nightly backup of our Exchange server. This setup had been working great, that is until the drive ran out of space.

When I noticed the low disk space warning, the first thing I tried was to recycle the media by putting it into scratch media but the backup didn’t seem to grab it when running, it would just sit there and ignore it. I tried to just delete the files and then ran an inventory to see if it would detect that the space is available but this just led to having a failed inventory run.

The next thing I tried was to create a new media set with a one hour retention cycle (as a test) and still Backup Exec wouldn’t overwrite the data. I even tried rebooting but the media still said it was available in the Backup Exec management console. Argh!

At last I figured it out and the way to get rid of the media files was to move the Backup Exec media that needed deletion to the “retired media” media set and then deleting it from there. I then paused the backup to disk folder from the devices tab in the Backup Exec manager, and then unpaused it. Space is now available again and crisis averted.

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