Must read book – Learning to see creatively

by | Apr 17, 2006 | Blog, Books/Reading

CreativeI’ve picked up numerous books from the library on photography and most haven’t been much help. They either talk about film concepts, which I could care less about (I don’t know film and don’t want to learn it), or they talk about concepts and things which either don’t make sense or aren’t explained very well.

This book I really like so far. Bryan Peterson does an excellent job of helping you to see things in a creative way to improve your photography skills. He doesn’t go into the technical matter of photography as far as exposure and lighting and aperature. To me these concepts are better learned by practice than a book. But he gives great advice on composition and color and point of view.

For example here is an exercise in learning your lenses. Take one of your lenses that is capable of viewing at 35mm. Pick a subject and get far enough away from the subject that it is in the center of the view finder with alot of space on all sides. Take 5 steps forward, re-focus and snap, take 5 steps forward, re-focus and snap. Keep doing this until you get so close to the subject that you can’t focus on it any longer. Now go back to where you started and do the process again, this time on your knees. Now go back to where you started and do it again, this time on your belly. Do this process at 35mm, 50mm, 60mm, 70mm, 80mm and 105mm. He says if you do this once a week for 3 months you will gain a knowledge of your lenses that 90% of photographers do not have.

I ordered the book from Half.com for $15.00 used and think it’s one of the few photography books that really will help in shooting. One of the other things that impressed me was that the examples in the book truly are good shots that I would love to be able to capture. So often you look at a photography how-to book and the person telling you how to shoot better has crappy shots.

Manually remove Microsoft Firewall Client 2000

by | Apr 17, 2006 | Blog, Computer Tips, Microsoft Windows

firewallWe ran into a problem with a PC that had the Microsoft Firewall Client 2000 from ISA (Internet Security and Accelerator) on it. We recently upgraded our ISA server to the 2004 version. You can run the older client on the newer version but it doesn’t encrypt the traffic and it allows traffic that is normally blocked on a user level to work. So, we disabled the ability for the old client to work and began removing it from all of our computers and then installing the new version.

On one PC the old version wouldn’t un-install correctly and the new version won’t install if it’s not removed. You will get an error message that says something like “Microsoft Firewall Client 2004 cannot be installed over a previous version. Please remove the older version and try again.” Well, since the uninstall failed and it removed the old version from the Add/Remove programs we were stuck. After some poking around in the internet I found instructions on Microsoft’s site for removing the client from a Windows 98 computer. The computer I was working on is actually Windows XP, but the instructions worked on it as well. Here are the registry keys that need to be removed, so that the new version won’t think the old version is still installed:

Remove 8A95A7C8EBA9A954A939802C184A2A46
from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Features\

Remove 8A95A7C8EBA9A954A939802C184A2A46
from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\

Remove Firewall Client
 from HKEY_Current_USER\Software\Microsoft\

Remove Firewall Client
 from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\

Remove Firewall Client
 from HKEY_USERS\Software\Microsoft\

Remove 8A95A7C8EBA9A954A939802C184A2A46
from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\CLASSES\Installer\Features\

Remove 8A95A7C8EBA9A954A939802C184A2A46
from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\CLASSES\Installer\Products\

Remove 945E895D0A5100149B4B8D6E01A3DA26
 from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\Components\

Remove 8A95A7C8EBA9A954A939802C184A2A46
 from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\Features\

Remove the C”\Program Files\Microsoft Firewall Client
from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\Folders\

Remove the {8C7A59A8-9ABE-459A-9A93-08C281A4A264}
from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

The instructions also said to find the Wspcpl32.cpl file in %Windir%\System. Delete this file to remove the Firewall Client icon in Control Panel. I didn’t need to do this step, I guess the uninstall did this before failing. I did find the install directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft Firewall Client and deleted it. After these steps the Firewall Client 2004 installed without a problem.