Category: Technology

A brief complaint about Microsoft Windows Media Player!

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A colleague at work needed to know how to turn on captions in Windows Media Player. I started to write her a note explaining it, but needed to check exactly how to get to the setting since I knew how to do it in older versions but not 11.

This turned out to be just another opportunity to experience Microsoft’s creative approach to usability.

Here’s a snapshot of the the player. Note, there is no "File" menu, no Open command, nothing that appears useful unless you are purchasing music from their store or ripping from an old CD. And really, aren’t "Rip" and "Burn" SO 2006? Who even cares about ripping CD’s anymore?

ifLooksLikethis.jpg

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Video Recording on the iPhone

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There are many iPhone applications available, but so far, no one has come out with an official application that does video recording. To get that functionality, you must jailbreak the iPhone and install one of the unofficial video recorder apps, and some type of networking so you can transfer the video files back to your computer.

The main problem with jailbreaking the iphone is that it is no longer in a standard, supportable condition afterward, and so things may not work as expected. I found that my syncing setup was all messed up, and I was basically starting from square one in terms of settings. There are some things it still does not do well, like syncing to iPhoto. However, there are enough benefits to a jailbroken phone to try it out, and hopefully (haven’t tried it yet!) it can be restored if it no longer seems worth all the effort.

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iPhoto stops syncing photos from iPhone

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noSynciPhoto.jpg

I just noticed that iPhoto was no longer syncing new photos off the iPhone. As you can see in the image above, when the iPhone was plugged in, nothing shows in the import window, although there really are photos there!

From the number of pictures left on the phone this has probably been going on for about a week or so. I tried downloading them using Image Capture and it appeared to see them and looked like it was downloading them, but ever nothing arrived in the download folder.

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Dialogs too big in Vista to fit on small laptop screen

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My first attempts to work with Vista have definitely been an “experience”. I’m trying to get a Lenovo ThinkPad set up for use primarily for Qwizdom and Powerpoint, which would seem to be well within the limits of what Microsoft intended, but you almost have to wonder if they ever tried Vista on a laptop before releasing it! What a mess!

The default size of windows is often just a little too big for the screen. I’ve double and triple checked the screen resolution – it is set to maximum. We did set the default font size larger than the minimum because it is too hard to see otherwise.

Yet the windows are all over the place in sizing – sometimes they are correct, sometimes obviously wrong, with title bars above the top of the screen or dialogs with Accept/Cancel buttons below the bottom of the screen.

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Installing Adobe Reader on Vista

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The case of the missing confirmation dialog
A problem I’ve encountered several times on Vista: dialogs will open, then refuse to disappear, and the Windows Task Manager simply tells you they are “expecting a response”. They are “expecting a response” from a confirmation dialog that has completely disappeared.

This seems to happen when another window pops up and steals focus unexpectedly. The confirmation dialog is not hidden behind any other windows, nor minimized, but simply vanished. This can be very confusing even when you know what you are looking for. This happened while I was installing Adobe Reader. Here’s what it looked like when it got stuck:

adobeReaderInstaller.JPG

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Connecting to wireless networks on Vista

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We were having trouble connecting a ThinkPad to a local wireless network. It would first say there were no networks available, then when I would locate one, it kept requesting Username, Password and Domain, as if there were an authentication server involved. The wireless network is simply set up with a WEP key, so there are no individual users associated with it – anyone with the WEP key can log on.

It turned out that previous efforts to connect had set up a “wireless network” entry in a list somewhere which needed to be deleted and set up again correctly.

  1. IMPORTANT: be sure to check that the wireless switch on the front of the laptop is turned on. It is difficult to see and it must be turned on or all your other efforts to connect will be unsuccessful.
  2. First, select Start Menu > Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center. Under “Tasks”, click Manage wireless networks.
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Changing the window scope in Firebug

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If I had to choose one piece of advice for new web developers, I’d tell them to learn to use Firebug. Firebug is probably the most valuable debugging tool available, but if you are just getting started, it may seem pretty opaque at first.

In addition, some things do not appear to work as advertised. In particular, the “cd” function does nothing as far as I can tell.

The page that documents the commands you can use within Firebug lists the cd command as a way of changing the window scope:

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Error #1056: Cannot create property x on loaded clip in AS3

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I had a particularly sticky flash problem where a MovieClip worked perfectly when run on its own, but when loaded into a container clip using a loader, would give:

Error #1056: Cannot create property someProperty on loaded clip myLoadedClip
At first I thought it was some kind of timing problem or failure to declare the items in the clip, but it turned out, simply adding the word dynamic to the class definition fixed the problem. Dynamic classes can have properties added at runtime. The MovieClip class is already dynamic, but apparently, the dynamic property is removed in some other part of my code.

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