Solving technology problems, one at a time
Captivate 5 has many bugs that have been complete showstoppers for my elearning projects. Among them, there is a problem with SCORM courses that get perpetually stuck on the gray “Loading…” screen. This is because
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One of the biggest drawbacks of Drupal for several years has been the lack of a single rich-text editor that is totally compatible with all browsers. Two years ago, I tested all of the WYSIWYG modules available at the time, found they were all riddled with bugs and incompatibilities, and finally settled on the YUI editor for a large Drupal site I run.
Unfortunately, it never really worked that well: the site’s members upload lots of photos, and it did a poor job of sizing them – users had no idea how to ensure they were not displayed at full resolution – and with 10 megapixel cameras, full resolution is enormous!
Continue readingThe other day I came across a Windows Media file that would not play correctly on any player on Mac or PC. The audio track played fine, but there was no video – it was black. Nor would any encoding software convert the file to Flash Video, which is what was really needed.
Looking in Quicktime’s Movie Inspector I could at least tell that the video was in “G2M3” format. G2M3 is a proprietary codec, used in GoToMeeting by default when you save a recorded session.
GoToMeeting allows users to record meetings in either G2M3 or in standard Windows Media format. The latter choice is likely to be overlooked by most users, so chances are their recordings will be un-viewable and un-convertable on non-GoToMeeting software. However, even if a GoToMeeting session has been recorded in the proprietary format you can still convert the file after the fact using a little application called g2mtranscoder that is installed in the GoToMeeting folder.
Continue readingThe search for the perfect WYSIWYG text editor in Drupal goes on. The best I’ve seen yet is YUI Rich Text Editor, but it still has some serious browser incompatibilities and usability problems. One significant is that there is nothing stopping users from upload a huge image, and not resizing it down using the provided resizing tools.
Now that just most cameras produce images of enormous resolution, users in my Drupal sites’ users often upload gigantic photos, which remain splashed across the entire layout until I get around to fixing them. I finally got tired of correcting users’ posts for them and fixed the CSS so it will never happen again.
Continue readingI’ve written in the past about some of the solutions people have come up with to deal with the dreaded “No-Service” message on an iPhone. But yesterday I realized I’d forgotten one of the easiest to try: make sure your hand is not covering the antenna. Covering the antenna accidentally may not cause you to see “No Service” but the effect will be the same – no bars at all.
Continue readingLast night’s harvest moon was so big I couldn’t resist trying to get a shot of it with my little camera, a Canon powershot SX210IS.
It’s easier to take pictures of the moon with a point-and-shoot camera in the afternoon, because there is very little contrast between the sky and the moon itself. Here’s an afternoon shot taken a few months ago. This was hand-held, at maximum zoom, using the automatic settings. Exposure was .02 sec (1/50), ISO 80. The craters are clearly visible.
Google Docs has an A3 selection right within File > Page Setup. In Google Sheets, you will find it under the Print Settings (File >Print). No more special settings are needed, as in the past.
Continue readingIn most Windows applications, the version number is listed under Help > About. For some reason, IIS Manager is an exception. There are significant differnces between versions of IIS, so it’s crucial to know which
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When running Java or other types of applications which use an XML file as part of the input, you may see this error: The Processing Instruction Target Matching “[xX][mM][lL]” is Not Allowed.
Often the cause is a malformed XML file, with a common problem being a blank line accidentally inserted before the required first line of the xml:
[ A blank line here will cause the error ] <?xml version-"1.0"?>Continue reading
We are using an ASP script to create iCal files from a database, so another department can display the events on their web-based calendar.
Their calendar page is outside the corporate firewall. The ASP script needs to reside on and IIS server within the firewall. I needed a fool-proof way to transfer the ical file nightly out to an external web server so it could be accessed by any calendar applications that need to use it. The best way I’ve found so far is to create a batch file with command-line FTP instructions, and add it to a Windows scheduled task.