Category: Technology

Review of the latest iPhone Update (1.1.3)

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A few days ago, Apple sent down version 1.1.3 of the IPhone software. This update is a huge leap in much-needed functionality.

Home Page
The home page interface now makes sense! It always looked as if it were customizable, and practically begged you to add items to it, but it wasn’t possible. Now it is.

Adding a new application is as simple as browsing to the application on iPhone Safari, clicking the “+” symbol and selecting “add to home page.” The various web-based iphone applications available all over the internet are now as easy to access from the iphone home page as the native apps.

And all the icons on the home page can be moved around, reorganized, and shifted to other pages (up to 7 of them.) Even the dock icons (Phone, Mail, Safari, iPod) can be moved.

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Use Subtitle Workshop to generate captions for Rich-MediaProject

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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:

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

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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.”

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