software: February 2009 Archives

When I finish using my laptop each night, I gently close the lid and shut my eyes. When I wake each morning, I lift the lid, press the power button, and return to where I was working. (Been doing this for years.)

This morning however, the laptop wouldn't start. The BIOS loaded fine, and transferred the start-up sequence to GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader).

But GRUB failed to offer a boot option, and instead kicked me back (automatically) to the BIOS .. in an endless (tho very short) loop. Sukage maximus.

Not much you can do when the boot loader fails to offer an option. I tried powering-off the laptop & powering it back on. Still no dice. "This ain't good," I muttered, wiping the sleep from my eyes.

Last summer, I installed a copy of Linux » Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron (.. to a separate 20-gig partition, formatted as EXT3).

As part of the installation, Ubuntu automatically installs a copy of the GRUB boot loader, which has worked flawlessly .. (uh, until today, that is).

My hard drive is pretty new, so I didn't think it was a problem with the drive itself failing. So maybe GRUB somehow got corrupted, I thought .. tho I did nothing that should've affected it. I mean, GRUB sits in the Master Boot Record (MBR), and I have no reason to go there.

To make matters worse, I haven't backed up in waay too long. Just yesterday, the thought passed thru my head » "You need to back up your system drive soon."

I'm not even gonna say how long it's been .. cuz I'm kinda embarrassed .. especially since Radified is very much about backing up your hard drive (with industrial strength Cloning tools).

Last fall, Adobe released Creative Suite 4. The CS4 upgrade featured a new Flash Video encoder. Encoding Flash video is a big deal cuz video-on-the-web is a big deal (and getting bigger every day), and cuz Flash video is the predominant web-video format .. with some sources claiming usage as high as 84%.

The new CS4 Flash Video encoder comes with the following products:

1. Flash CS4 Pro
2. Premiere Pro CS4
3. After Effects CS4

Up to CS3, this encoder was called the » Flash Video Encoder (FVE) .. or the Flash CS3 Video Encoder (FVE.CS3). [ *** See UPDATE note #1 at the end of today's entry. ]

With the release of CS4, Adobe change its name to » Adobe Media Encoder (AME) .. or Adobe Media Encoder CS4 (AME.CS4) .. cuz it does more than encode just FLash Video files (FLV).

If you search for the terms » Adobe Media Encoder CS4, you might wind up » HERE, a page which contains a 62-MB *upgrade* (v4.01) to the AME.CS4. But nowhere could I find a download for the AME.CS4 encoder itself (a stand-alone version).

You might also stumble across this page, titled » Flash Media Live Encoder 3 (FMLE.3), which offers a free download (~5MB). But the free FMLE.3 encoder is not the same product as the Adobe Media Encoder that ships with the CS4 versions of Flash & Premiere Pro.

Even more confusing .. you might stumble across links to something called the » "Adobe Flash Media Encoder" (FME - note no 'Live' here). But this is not the new AME.CS4 encoder either.

Actually, this is an older version of Flash Media Live Encoder 3 (FMLE.3). With version 3, Adobe added the word 'Live' to differentiate this product from the new AME.CS4 encoder.

While recovering from the crud this weekend, I took the opportunity to work thru a video-tutorial for Dreamweaver CS4 .. consisting of ~10 hours worth of instruction and 18 chapters.

So I've gotten up-to-speed on DW.CS4 .. the world's finest web design software. (This page you're reading now was created with Dreamweaver.)

Excellent tutorial. Last year, I worked thru the same title (» Essential Training) for Dreamweaver CS3, which was also good. But this one (done by different guy) was noticeably better.

I especially liked how the guy who narrates this video tutorial (for DW.CS4) spent significant time focusing on the intracacies of working with CSS.