Solving technology problems, one at a time
I’m not quite ready to say it’s the Holy Grail of closed captioning, but Subtitle Workshop by Urusoft.net for Windows is really pretty good. It is not buggy, like Magpie, and it saves to any of about 20 different formats, including SAMI.
It can be downloaded from HERE.
Continue readingHaving recently recovered from a bad case of the flu, I got to wondering why they can’t just make a vaccine to take care of it once and for all, like the measles?
It turns out the flu virus is unique in its ability to mutate and adapt, making it impossible to use a single vaccine to combat it. The situation is complicated by the fact that animals, both wild and domestic, are a sort of “mixing bowl” in which new strains of the virus are created.
The variation in the virulence of the flu is apparently due to the varying degrees to which our immune system recognizes the two types of proteins on the surface of the virus -hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).
The virus strain is said to undergo “drift” when there are minor changes in the two proteins. This is what happens most years. But sometimes it undergoes a more major change, called “shift,” which is due to reassortment of the viral genes, often when it is mixed with another strain in animals. This is a really bad thing because it means humans will have no antibodies that recognize the new strain, and so no immunity to it.
1. Navigation should be visible most of the time. The first time I looked through a book created with the Drupal’s book module, I recall being confused about how to proceed through the document. My confusion resulted from starting on a long page, so that the “previous/up/next” navigation had fallen below the “fold.” Since I was new to Drupal-based books, I wasn’t even aware it was there.
A long page where navigation has dropped below the fold.
The only other visible navigation which was relevant to the book was the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page, which allows the reader to jump “up” a level but not backwards and forwards between pages of a chapter.
I did figure the system out within a few minutes, but I’ve watched others who are less interested in “figuring things out” attempt fruitlessly to find their way around such issues, and pretty much give up. It is amazing how people don’t think to look around the page, or having looked, misunderstand what they are seeing.
Continue readingOn my Mac, running Jaguar I use a Kensington Orbit trackball on my left hand to give my right hand some relief from common scrolling and dragging tasks. However sometimes the Orbit seems to lose
Continue readingI needed to schedule an automatic hit to a page that resets a server in windows. Problem is that the Windows task scheduler will not open a shortcut. It errors out with “Invalid filename” because
Continue readingNote: a wiki containing this article and many other more in-depth discussions of drupal usability is HERE
A while back I promised to write up some suggestions for improving the book module. I finally got some time, so here they are. I’m posting this here because as far as I know, the drupal.org forums don’t yet allow images to be posted.
I am mostly interested in improving the navigation for the end user of drupal-based books, but I will start with my suggestions for changing the administration of books. Navigation suggestions will follow in another post.
1. When you browse to any page of a book, and click “administer,” you go to the editing screen for that one page.
At the very bottom of the editing screen, there is a button “Edit book outline” that allows you to administer the relationship of that one page to the outline of the rest of the book.
takes you to:
