Category: Applications

Exporting high resolution Graphics from Microsoft Word 2003

Posted on March 11, 2008 by ellen

In Word 2003, it is not immediately obvious how to export pictures that have been inserted into a Word document. Even if you select “File: Save As…” and select the format “Web Page” in the “Save As” dialog, the images that get saved along with the web page are usually low resolution.

The solution to this is a menu selection “Compress Pictures” which is hidden in the “Tools” menu in the “Save As” dialog.

Safari occasionally stops responding to mouse clicks

Posted on February 26, 2008 by ellen

A rare but irritating problem I’ve had with Safari for a couple of years now is its habit of suddenly no longer responding to mouse clicks. It simply stops dead: you can’t click links, type

SyncServer can take up 100% of CPU on OS X

Posted on February 13, 2008 by ellen

On an underpowered G5 iMac running OS X 10.4, I spent a lot of time troubleshooting performance issues. One of them was the “spinning beachball” effect, where some process would take over for a moment, resulting in everything else hanging until it released some CPU.

On at least one of these instances, launching Activity Monitor showed that Sync Server was taking up 100% of the CPU every few minutes.

Apparently this is a common problem on both 10.4 and 10.5:

SyncServer Problem Post on Mac Forums

Voice recording with the iPhone

Posted on February 5, 2008 by ellen

UPDATE 2: March 27, 2009 I’ve been using QuickVoice for a couple of months now. It’s good enough that I use it to record piano sessions and meetings. It is pretty sensitive. I did purchase the 15.00 syncing software which you need to pull the files off the iPhone if you haven’t jailbroken it.

UPDATE: Jan 24, 2009 Since this article was written, the app store was launched and there are now many Voice recording apps for the iPhone. Click here to search for the latest list of Voice Recorder applications available in the iTunes Store

Now you can record your voice with the iPhone (or any other phone), and get speech to text functionality as well!

Use Subtitle Workshop to generate captions for Rich-MediaProject

Posted on January 18, 2008 by ellen

Over the last couple of years, Microsoft Producer has become less and less of a viable option for synching powerpoint and video. Probably because of browser changes, it works on less browsers than before, and is no longer compatible even with Powerpoint 2007. So I went in search of a Flash-based replacement for MS Producer. I’ve found it in the Rich-Media-Project’s Rich-Media Pack I.

RMP I features 4 components: A Flash-Paper “player”, an FLV video player, a slide list and a media playlist. You create a flash-paper version of the powerpoint or word document, then synch it to the video with XML. The playlist is generated by another xml file, and the captions are created using a third XML file.
The only thing missing is an easy way to create the XML files, so I am creating templates for the captions and slide list XML files in Subtitle workshop. Below is the code for the Custom Format file for the captions:

Power Light is on but computer won’t turn on – Power Mac G5

Posted on January 7, 2008 by ellen

I just walked in on a Monday morning to find the Power Mac G5 off. Pressing the power button did nothing, although the power light was on. Pulling the plug for a moment did nothing

Wet iPhone screen stops responding to touch

Posted on December 30, 2007 by ellen

I pulled my iPhone out of its cradle to make a call today, but my hands were damp. As you probably know the iPhone’s touch screen won’t respond if you are wearing gloves, have damp

Preview images crash Finder

Posted on December 28, 2007 by ellen

When viewing items in column view, you have the option to display a Preview column, where a preview image of your image or movie will be displayed, along with some file info. Sometimes, viewing that

Safari 3 on PPC iMac – Slow!

Posted on December 11, 2007 by ellen

I’ve seen a lot of talk on the web about the slowness of Safari 3 on Windows. Am I the only one who finds Safari 3 on OS X slow also? I have a 2

Perception 4.3 meets an Oracle 10g bug: Unsupported network datatype or representation

Posted on December 6, 2007 by ellen

Last January, I installed a test instance of Questionmark’s Perception server, version 4.2, in preparation for upgrading our version 3.4 Perception server. At the time, we were using Oracle version 9i. Once installed, our testing went well, and we did not notice any significant problems.

In July, we finally got around to doing the actual upgrade, and decided to upgrade the database to Oracle 10g at the same time. The installation and conversion of our version 3.4 data went very smoothly. Everything ran well for about a week. Then things began to go wrong. When we would open the Authoring Manager, it would refuse to show us any assessments (“assessments can’t be found”.) Then it would tell us administrators couldn’t be found. After a few days, the assessments disappeared from the Perception Server as well, meaning users could no longer take them. After trying numerous fixes, we reverted to a recent backup of the database from a couple of days before, and the problem disappeared. The one Oracle error that both Perception Server and Authoring Manager were giving was “ORA-03115: unsupported network datatype or representation.”