Peter Wooley’s Blog

English: Friggin’ sweet.Javascript: superDuperGood++:Nerd: It’s Neato-Torpedo!

I can’t believe it. I’m getting married on Saturday! It’s all ready Friday! Well, I’m practically excited enough to just do it tomorrow. I don’t want to wait anymore!Everything appears to be lined up, and if anything goes wrong, who cares? We have the certificates, we have the rings, we have the pastor, we have everything we need and want! Now all we need is to wait until Saturday.Again, I must stress, that it’s Friday all ready!

Hey, who ever said the Internet is for Dummies? I just had my worst Internet search experience in years. I was designing a document, and got the idea that I could really use a little trick I had learned in 9th grade “Keyboarding” (our first typing class, go figure). The trick, as I was taught, was to make one piece of text align to the left of a given text box, while another piece of text aligned to the right of it, and periods filled in the whitespace between the two pieces of text (to create a literal line for the eye to follow, not that I was actually taught that). Well, I remembered that, but I could not remember how to do it in Word, Open Office, or InDesign (which I needed it in). So, I tried the InDesign search; that didn’t help, because I was searching for “periods between two words” and other such nonsense. I just couldn’t remember what this little beast was called.I ended up looking in the OpenOffice documentation, hoping it would be more specific and my “periods between words” might actually turn up something. No luck.So, I started my Google search to figure this out. I tried endless entries, and everything kept turning up absolute nonsense about grammar classes and such. I had to try another approach.I then remembered that I saw this often in restaurant menus, so I may be able to look up restaurant menu tutorials for Word. I assumed this was an easy thing, and could be found in a tutorial; No such luck. All I found were ads telling me of the wonderous (read: horrible) layouts I could buy for my restaraunt for the low, low price of $99! I had to try something else.I then went for the catch-all of “typography terminology”, then “restaraunt typography terminology”. I was hitting a dead end, I was about to just send an email to some good friends who would probably have known. I hit up Adobe.com and their search to no avail… it was an awful search, to say the least.Oddly enough, I did just what Jim Lanzone would want me to do and tried my search at Ask.com. Of course, nothing came up (they’re all searching the same Internet, “human” tools or not).So, coming full circle, I went back to Google and tried my luck one more time. I entered “making restaurant menus in word” – and, 5 entries down, I saw a Microsoft Office Assistant (read: Clippy) link. I clicked, fearing the worst, but was met with none of than an awful looking image of exactly what I needed – two words with a bunch of periods stuck in between it. I scanned the image, giddy with excitement and relief and found my Holy Grail of the night. They’re called Tab Leaders. I have no idea why, but I couldn’t care any less. I popped in my newly revised Google search “dot leader tab” and wham, bham, thank you designorati I was in business with my very own Indesign Tutorial on how to produce such an effect.With this blog post included, it took me 40 minutes for me to find this answer. It sickens me that it took that long, but I’m too full of joy to complain any more than I have.If I’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that there aren’t any chat rooms full of people waiting to answer my InDesign questions, and that I still think Internet search sucks – as freaking sweet as it is.

I need some help.Update: With amazing speed, Matt Bay found the game to be that of Worms. My guess is that it was Worms Armageddon (examine comparison shot). A big thanks to Matt – I feel much better.Recently, while I was assembling a picture-show, I came upon an image that shows me – at a much younger age, playing a game that I cannot recognize. I would like you, esteemed knowers of me, to help me figure out what game that is.I cannot offer a reward of a monetary value, but I can tell you that I will feel much, much better if I can figure this one out.So, examine the picture below:And let me know what it is!

Recently, as many of you know, I found a piece of open source software called Launchy. The idea was great for a keystroke application launcher, and it has worked fairly well and making improvements since I’ve found it. I started making skins for it (that are now included in the official download) and wanted to help in any other way I could.The biggest thing I saw was the web site. It had made use of the super-small effects javascript library known as moo.fx, included a very web2.0 badge and everything worked pretty well. But, I felt I could make it a bit more cohesive and bring the feel of a very handy (and beautiful) application into the site.I decided the information architecture was pretty well set, considering they were all ready using intelligent semantics with their headers, the rest kind of fell into place. In that way, I was able to just re-construct the design, which made things really fast.So, after two days from inception to tested code, you may see what I came up with.And a big thanks goes out to Josh Karlin, whose hard work brought us Launchy and allowed me to be a part of the project. Thanks!

Four down, one to go. And the last one isn’t even difficult! I’m talking about my classes and I’m quite happy. I just finished an awful final that I might be failing, but hopefully it doesn’t destroy my change at passing the class. The class was History of Material Culture III, and it was quite challenging… in many, many ways.I’ve finished three other classes besides the awful one, and they went better. I had a paper and a test for an Astronomy class that wen’t pretty well, then I had a project due in Interactive Motion Graphics that turned out pretty well and lastly I had a portfolio that was due in one class that turned out fairly well (You can see the portfolio site for a limited time – act now!).I have one more class tonight (3.5 hours away) that will involve meeting together and discussing projects we finished last week (see mine) and how we feel about them. It should go well, and we won’t have a test! Woo hoo!Oh, and I didn’t sleep last night. I did fall asleep with my head down next to my computer before my last final for about twenty minutes, but Tyler and Matt made sure to apply a sign to my back that says “in case of invalid code, slap this back”. Thankfully, there was no invalid code.

Greetings! I present to you, the first and finest WooleyTip. I figure everyone needs a catch word for at least one thing or another, so I’ve “wooley’d” up the word “tip.” Anywho, onto the tip.Recently, I ran into a problem with Adobe InDesign CS2. For some reason, upon startup, it errored out and told me that it was “Missing required system fonts or cmap files.” I searched around until I came to a handy dandy site that had all the answers.It took a few posts, but someone had the right idea. Apparently, some common files (a font in particular) is required for InDesign (and other Adobe programs) to start at all. The idea given on the site was to download the tryout of InDesign and use the commonFilesInstaller.msi (found in all Adobe Tryouts) to re-install the missing fonts and all the other common files.The trouble with this, was that with updates that have come out, newer common files have been released and the common file installer will not install older versions of itself. So, I searched around and found I still had the Adobe After Effects 7.0 Tryout on my hard drive. Since it’s the newest product I’ve downloaded, I used its commonFileInstaller.msi and voila! it worked!So, in summary: To fix missing fonts or CMap files for Adobe products, use the latest commonFilesInstaller.msi you can find (whether that is on an installation CD or a downloaded product Tryout).Hopefully this will help someone now or in the future!