Solving technology problems, one at a time
I have had trouble getting Windows Media Player to consistently seek to markers embedded in the video itself, but it does seem to seek to specific timings.
Some sample code is provided below:
For about 4 months, I fought a war against greenwater algae in our big aquarium, home of our pet oscars. If you don’t know what an oscar is, they are the most cantankerous, petulant, opinionated tropical fish ever created and they make great pets. They are members of the cichlid family, and are extremely smart, even trainable.
My oscar, Galadrial, showing her friendlier side
But this article is not about oscars. It’s about their unwanted tankmate: greenwater algae. This algae was so thick I couldn’t even see the fish! They would swim in and out of the green gloom. There are those who will tell you that greenwater algae is good for your fish, and indeed, it may be. But it doesn’t look very good in your living room, and I wanted to be able to see the oscars! So I determined to rid my tank of the ugly, smelly stuff.
This looks a lot like my tank did. Try to imagine 120 gallons of this algae soup in your living room!
photo © Charles Yu, from an FAQ article on algae by George Booth
When I got my new computer about a year ago, I transferred all my files via ethernet from my OS9 Mac to the new one. In the process, although I didn’t know it at the
Continue readingRemember all those sci-fi stories where people learn the date and cause of their own death? “Life-Line” by Robert Heinlein is one that pops to mind, but there are many others.
Well, you may not be able to tell when you will die, but you can make a pretty good guess what you may die of, based on age-related statistics published by the CDC. The latest final statistics are for 2001, so this is based on those numbers. The complete report can be found here: Leading causes of death for 2001
Note for clarity: percentages given in the samples
below are the percent of the total people in a given age group
that actually died in 2001, not the percentage of all people
in that age group.
Note 2 : 2001 data includes the 3028 deaths they
were certain of by the publish date of the statistics caused by the terror
attacks on September 11. Of these, 2,922 are classified as homicides and 4
as suicides. Only residents of the United States are counted in these statistics.
A client gave me a powerpoint presentation recently that contained a lot of symbols: arrows, greater-than-or-equal-to signs, and the like. They showed up fine in the powerpoint, but once incorporated into an MS Producer presentation, and published, they disappeared, or changed into letters.
It turns out the reason for this is that fonts are embedded into powerpoint presentations, but Producer is creating HTML pages, which of course are dependent on the end viewer’s computer for fonts, and on browser options for default font preferences.
When inserting symbols in powerpoint, (on a PC) it is not immediately obvious that you are switching fonts. By default, when you select “Insert Symbol” the font that comes up highlighted in the dialog is “Symbol” which does not always show up in a finished Producer presentation. Select another font, like Arial or Times New Roman and choose one of their symbols – they have almost as many.
The alternative would be to position graphics of the symbols in place of temperamental text characters. However, this isn’t such a great solution, since you can’t place inline graphics inside text boxes, so the symbols won’t stay in postion, especially if the font size varies a bit depending on the user’s computer.
Continue readingCreating SAMI files for Windows Media Player is now quite easy, using Subtitle Workshop, but I had a lot of trouble getting captions to play correctly. They would play just fine locally on my hard drive, but once I put them on a webserver, they wouldn’t play at all.
That made me think it was a path problem, but finding the exact solution was tough.
Here’s my canned solution for embedding a windows media player in a web page, adapted from Microsoft’s instructions which do not seem to work for me.
The example shown here is for a Windows2K web server, with the video being streamed off a windows media streaming server.
I started with instructions from this page.
I tried using their clever little selector which lets you change styles and languages, but got a lot of javascript errors, although it mostly worked. I gave up on it after a while, and simplified things. You need 4 files:
Here are the steps I use to create a new captioning file in Subtitle Workshop. Create a new file. (File–>New Subtitle–>Save–>Select a format, then double click its icon–>in Save AS dialog, Browse to chosen location,
Continue readingI’m not quite ready to say it’s the Holy Grail of closed captioning, but Subtitle Workshop by Urusoft.net for Windows is really pretty good. It is not buggy, like Magpie, and it saves to any of about 20 different formats, including SAMI.
It can be downloaded from HERE.
Continue readingHaving recently recovered from a bad case of the flu, I got to wondering why they can’t just make a vaccine to take care of it once and for all, like the measles?
It turns out the flu virus is unique in its ability to mutate and adapt, making it impossible to use a single vaccine to combat it. The situation is complicated by the fact that animals, both wild and domestic, are a sort of “mixing bowl” in which new strains of the virus are created.
The variation in the virulence of the flu is apparently due to the varying degrees to which our immune system recognizes the two types of proteins on the surface of the virus -hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).
The virus strain is said to undergo “drift” when there are minor changes in the two proteins. This is what happens most years. But sometimes it undergoes a more major change, called “shift,” which is due to reassortment of the viral genes, often when it is mixed with another strain in animals. This is a really bad thing because it means humans will have no antibodies that recognize the new strain, and so no immunity to it.
1. Navigation should be visible most of the time. The first time I looked through a book created with the Drupal’s book module, I recall being confused about how to proceed through the document. My confusion resulted from starting on a long page, so that the “previous/up/next” navigation had fallen below the “fold.” Since I was new to Drupal-based books, I wasn’t even aware it was there.
A long page where navigation has dropped below the fold.
The only other visible navigation which was relevant to the book was the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page, which allows the reader to jump “up” a level but not backwards and forwards between pages of a chapter.
I did figure the system out within a few minutes, but I’ve watched others who are less interested in “figuring things out” attempt fruitlessly to find their way around such issues, and pretty much give up. It is amazing how people don’t think to look around the page, or having looked, misunderstand what they are seeing.
Continue reading