Category: Technology

Settings to get Drupal 7 working on Hostgator

Posted on December 24, 2010 by ellen

At the moment, Hostgator’s default PHP version is v.5.2.4, although version 5.3 is available. Drupal 7 requires 5.3, so until they make it the default, it is necessary to manually tell Drupal where to find PHP v. 5.3. Do this by adding

Action application/x-hg-php53 /cgi-sys/php53
AddType application/x-hg-php53 .php

to an .htaccess file located in the public_html directory of your site. If Drupal is not at the root of your site, and you don’t want to change the entire site over, it works just as well to modify the .htaccess file in the Drupal directory.

An .htaccess file is just a text file named “.htacess” which can contain many different types of directives understood by the apache server.

Make the console.log() command IE-8 compatible

Posted on December 14, 2010 by ellen

I often use the command console.log() to trace the execution of my javascript functions in Firebug’s or Safari’s consoles. The only problem is, Internet Explorer doesn’t understand console.log() and moreover, it doesn’t error out gracefully.

Acrobat was unable to make this document accessible… error

Posted on October 27, 2010 by ellen

The other day I received a PDF file that need to be converted back to Word or text format. But every attempt to save it from Acrobat Pro to Word resulted in the error shown above:

“Acrobat was unable to make this document accessible because of the following error:

Could not save page structure. [12]

Please not that some pages of this document may have been changed. Because of this failure, you are advised to not save these changes.”

Suddenly blank Inbox in Mail.app IMAP account for Groupwise

Posted on October 21, 2010 by ellen

I use Groupwise at work, and other accounts for everything else, and I have them all in Mail.app so I can go through all my new mail quickly. Mail.app cannot do Groupwise calendaring and appointments,

VB error: Object required: ‘[string: “foo”]’

Posted on October 20, 2010 by ellen

When writing a script to display an RSS feed, I got the following error:

Error: Object required: '[string, 136]'

This is because I was using the SET command to create a string, as shown below:

Dim itm itm = lnk.link Response.Write(itm) Dim itmid Set itmid = Split(itm,"=")(1)
resulted in the error

Error: Object required: '[string, 136]'

Installing .mobileconfig files on iPad (Setting up MWireless and U-M VPN)

Posted on October 10, 2010 by ellen

Secure wifi networks often require installation of a certificate on mobile devices trying to connect. Apple provides a utility to allow companies to create configuration (“.mobilconfig”) files for iPhone and iPad that install the appropriate settings and certificates for their wifi network.

These .mobileconfig files can be put on the web for download to the device through Safari, but sometimes this doesn’t work. If the web server is not configured with the correct MIME type (application/x-apple-aspen-config for .mobileconfig files), the device’s Safari browser may not allow it to be downloaded. The link may not even function at all – it is not clickable in some cases.

If this happens, you can still install the .mobilconfig file by downloading it on a laptop or desktop computer and emailing it to your i-device. When you click on the attachment, it should start the installation process. However, you may have to change the extension to “.der” before emailing it to have it recognized as a certificate.

The University of Michigan has .mobilconfig files available for connection to the MWireless network and U-M VPN, and I found that emailing them to my iPad as described above was the only way I could install them.

Captivate 4 not generating SCORM support files

Posted on October 7, 2010 by ellen

If you have a Captivate 4 file that refuses to generate any SCORM support files when publishing, check your Publish settings. Make sure that “Fullscreen” is not checked in the publishing settings. Then it will publish fine.

Since you are eliminating the Captivate generated code for maximizing the window, you may want to add that back in. To force the Captivate window to maximize to full-screen upon opening, add the following to the head of your published HTML file:

Captivate 5: Endless “Loading…” screen fix

Posted on October 7, 2010 by ellen

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

Drupal OpenWYSIWYG text editor

Posted on October 4, 2010 by ellen

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!

Audio, but no video on GoToMeeting WMV videos (G2M3 format)

Posted on October 1, 2010 by ellen

The 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.