TheDesignspace

Acer Aspire One charge light does not light up and battery does not charge

Posted on November 4, 2009 by ellen

My Linpus Acer Aspire One was laying idle for a few months, then I pulled it out to use it, and was dismayed when it would not charge. The orange battery charging light would flash for a second, then turn off.

Problem 1: The Acer would not power up with the AC adapter.

After scanning the web for a while, it appeared there were several possible reasons for this:

Bad battery
Bad AC adapter
BIOS update needed
Loose jack on the motherboard, necessitating service.

The easiest possibility to deal with was to assume that the AC adapter cable had gone bad so I ordered a new one. Fortunately they are inexpensive. I found one through Buy.com for a total of $19.84 including the shipping and handling.

Infinite JW FLV players on a page, with error catching for Red5 bug

Posted on October 30, 2009 by ellen

NOTE: this has been revised to make it more flexible, and allow multiple streamers and multiple video types, using the same code.

This is a script that allows you to add as many JW FLV players to a page as you want, using a single block of code. The players all have separate event listeners to keep them from interfering with each other. Events or actions executed in one player do not affect others.

This particular demo also corrects for a problem we have noticed recently with Red5, where RTMP streams will hang with a “BUFFER.EMPTY” status code. I’ve set up meta-monitoring so that it catches “BUFFER.EMPTY” codes and starts the player up again a little bit previous to the break. It creates player names and function names dynamically, based on how many players you request. If this function seems to be giving you problems, if your videos start jumping back and restarting a lot, search for the following line and comment it out by adding “//” in front of it:

window["player_"+obj.id].sendEvent('SEEK', parseInt(window["positionarray_"+obj.id][3])+100);

We’ve also had problems with some videos that simply refuse to stream, although they will play using progressive download. You can use a mixture of streaming and non-streaming by altering the playlist for each video.

JW FLV Player and Red5 apparent buffering bug

Posted on October 27, 2009 by ellen

Update 12-18-09: Longtailvideo has apparently resolved this bug with its player v.4.7beta. At this time v. 5 does NOT have the fix in it. The code changes that fixed the bug can be seen here: [Changes to RTMPModel.as]

A few months ago, we installed Red5 0.7.0 on a Windows server to stream Flash video inside the firewall. This server is used mainly to stream short clips that are embedded in learning modules.

The JW FLV player v. 4.6 is included in the learning module template and enables us to display the videos with a high degree of flexibility.

Example of a player that contains multiple short video clips.
The player generates a navigation listing on the right from the XML playlist.

Using toggle javascripts to build an FAQ page.

Posted on October 19, 2009 by ellen

FAQ pages are sometimes requested in our learning modules so we’ve built in the scripts to create an easy- to-read, easy-to-use FAQ by applying simple CSS classes to elements on the page. When the FAQ page loads, all the questions appear in a collapsed view which can be quickly scanned.

On clicking any question, its associated answer expands and pushes the rest of the questions down. When another question is clicked, the first answer closes and the new answer opens up.

Here’s how to add this type of FAQ to your own HTML pages.

Hide the playbar in a Presenter presentation

Posted on October 16, 2009 by ellen

One of our content experts wanted to use Powerpoint to create an interactive presentation. Although Captivate would probably be the ideal choice, she only owns Adobe Presenter, so I suggested she use that to convert the Powerpoint for the web.

The problem is that Presenter, by default, shows a navbar on the side and a playbar below the presentation. In this case, allowing linear movement would break the logical flow of the interactive module. This project is more of a decision-support tool, and less a linear learning module where the user must view every page. To make a module like this function correctly using Adobe Presenter, follow these steps:

Before entering Presenter, add navigation buttons or hyperlinked images to your Powerpoint slides that allow user interaction to choose the path through the module. Many slides will probably just need a “Next” button, but certain slides will function as decision points where your users will choose which path to follow. You may have to draw out a flow chart to do this correctly if there are a lot of slides and decision points.
Continue reading