Month: February 2004

How we die

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Remember all those sci-fi stories where people learn the date and cause of their own death? “Life-Line” by Robert Heinlein is one that pops to mind, but there are many others.

Well, you may not be able to tell when you will die, but you can make a pretty good guess what you may die of, based on age-related statistics published by the CDC. The latest final statistics are for 2001, so this is based on those numbers. The complete report can be found here: Leading causes of death for 2001

Note for clarity: percentages given in the samples
below are the percent of the total people in a given age group
that actually died in 2001, not the percentage of all people
in that age group.

Note 2 : 2001 data includes the 3028 deaths they
were certain of by the publish date of the statistics caused by the terror
attacks on September 11. Of these, 2,922 are classified as homicides and 4
as suicides. Only residents of the United States are counted in these statistics.

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Symbol fonts not displaying in MS Producer

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A client gave me a powerpoint presentation recently that contained a lot of symbols: arrows, greater-than-or-equal-to signs, and the like. They showed up fine in the powerpoint, but once incorporated into an MS Producer presentation, and published, they disappeared, or changed into letters.

It turns out the reason for this is that fonts are embedded into powerpoint presentations, but Producer is creating HTML pages, which of course are dependent on the end viewer’s computer for fonts, and on browser options for default font preferences.

When inserting symbols in powerpoint, (on a PC) it is not immediately obvious that you are switching fonts. By default, when you select “Insert Symbol” the font that comes up highlighted in the dialog is “Symbol” which does not always show up in a finished Producer presentation. Select another font, like Arial or Times New Roman and choose one of their symbols – they have almost as many.

The alternative would be to position graphics of the symbols in place of temperamental text characters. However, this isn’t such a great solution, since you can’t place inline graphics inside text boxes, so the symbols won’t stay in postion, especially if the font size varies a bit depending on the user’s computer.

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How to get captions to play in embedded Windows Media Player

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Creating SAMI files for Windows Media Player is now quite easy, using Subtitle Workshop, but I had a lot of trouble getting captions to play correctly. They would play just fine locally on my hard drive, but once I put them on a webserver, they wouldn’t play at all.

That made me think it was a path problem, but finding the exact solution was tough.

Here’s my canned solution for embedding a windows media player in a web page, adapted from Microsoft’s instructions which do not seem to work for me.
The example shown here is for a Windows2K web server, with the video being streamed off a windows media streaming server.

I started with instructions from this page.

I tried using their clever little selector which lets you change styles and languages, but got a lot of javascript errors, although it mostly worked. I gave up on it after a while, and simplified things. You need 4 files:

  • index.html – the html file that people will use to view the embedded movie
  • movie.wmv – the windows media file
  • movie.smi – the caption file
  • movie.asx – the file that refers to the windows media file with a path
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