No Viddler joy on the iToys?

Viddler has always provided successful video hosting solutions in my past experiences with them. I have not done much with them of late. Today ... I thought to finally get around to looking for a web based solution for hosting video. Since YouTube has fallen from grace on the iWorld, thought that perhaps Viddler may be an alternative.

On first glance through their site, things looked promising as they touted a new HTML5 option for embedded video that sounded as if this may work. Fired up DreamWeaver and some existing links and hopped into the embedded code to give a test run. One option proclaims to use HTML5 with a fallback to flash as needed depending on the platform. Initial tests on OS X Safari worked well, Firefox also worked well (although both of these were using flash). The iToys however proved to be problematic (thought they might as obviously flash will not be an option there with the much proclaimed mobile device support issues and the outright public rejection of the flash technology from Steve ...) with the test results on both IOS 5.1 and 6.0 showing only a picture of the video page and symbol overtop with a line through ... :-( (as in NO Support here).

This is curious as there is little overall feedback on their site for this topic. There was one post to suggest compatibility issues. Will continue to look for options. Perhaps there is a YouTube solution will prevail that may work better after all?

More to follow when time allows for additional research in this area ....

Here is my first update.

Wow was I wrong about YouTube.

With all of the recent "bad apple" press about dropping YT and such, it appeared they would be lagging behind. However, a quick search of YouTube reveals to all that they have the tools and the tools worked quite readily as documented along with ease of installation.

Here is a quick HTML5 iframe tag example to embed:

<iframe class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID" frameborder="0">
</iframe>

YouTube has a quite different marketing model then the Viddler folks, but guess that is why they are "YouTube" and Viddler is trying to compete.

No response yet from the folks at Viddler about the problems with their interface (will posted when they do). But in the meantime the YouTube interface is up and working.

As a test I posted the first find today from a you tube search and fired it up on the iPad through Safari. Looks to play well without issues. Now I will need to transfer my videos from a pay service to a free service that works. So much for Viddler's business model. his is all kind of a sport anyways as I do not do much video web posting but it is there and wanted to see how this works.

Update number 2 ....

As I progressed with the direction found upon the initial views on YouTube, I found as usual, “the devils in the details”. For a quick embedded viewer, the YouTube player will be a good option. However there is currently on glitch discovered on the viewer in that “PlayLists” do not appear to work on the player in the iToys environments. From what I can tell, the YouTube development teams are aware of this and there should be a code fix solution in the future releases, so this does offer what appears to be the best long term solution. 

If one wants to build a list on their page to select specific videos to play (on iPad – does work on PC browsers), they will need to script this outside of the YouTube interface. Found some neat scripts are available to do this. Here is an example of one on github – This script will allow one to pass a list of the videos, display the play and select by thumbnail or text name which one to play.

I used this one on the web page I was building and it seems to have worked out quite well. Let me know if you need an example of this and I can share a link as requested.

Think the best long term solution will be to wait for YouTube player fix if you can as this advantage will offer a great and flexible way to manage the content simply by adding and deleting content in your defined playlist right through the YouTube site.

Good luck on your solutions and happy coding.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Blogsy for iPad

This week I had the opportunity to test Blogsy for the iPad. The original version was somewhat buggy and I find the current release to be much improved in feature function and stability. Another plus is that I am now able to post directly to the Blogspot site so no more double conversions needed to accomplish this.

Posted a photo continues to work well as it did in the original tests. Will keep testing for the 14 day trial as agreed before publishing the final report and feedback to the team.

Is a nice feature to be able to publish on the go and not have be tethered to the desktop. Definitely makes the iPad case with attached keyboard come in quite handy as well. Still a pain to do heavy typing via the glass. The combination of the two areas (Keyboard & Blogsy) make the blogs much easier to accommodate on the run.

Posted with Blogsy

Software Asset Management

Current events finds me revisiting what modern tools and processes are available to address SAM. The current working environment for a large worldwide multi-data center environment seems to have a jigsaw puzzle of pieces that do not add up to form a clear picture.

There is a elementary version of a CMDB but is server hardware centric without populated data for software assets or contracts related information. There is a contracts database that does not tie to physical assets in either the CMDB or individual contracts reporting. There are some discovery tools such as Opsware but the implementation does not address this need?

My current path forward is to leverage this three ring information circus to form a cohesive view. My initial thought is to work with the Opsware folks to write scripts for both intel and unix flavors that will identify software installed on a per server base, populate this information into the CMDB and then link the CMDB reporting to contracts base information for the combined reporting and management.

Not clear yet how this strategy will tie in and would be interested in any relevant opinion of those that have tamed this beast in the past. Particularly interested in how to mine the license keys using Opsware (versus just knowing a product is installed). Would also be interested in COTS solutions that address this IT Data Center / ITIL Asset Management function.

Blog Test 1 2 3 Moving from Go Daddy to Blogger hosting test

This is a test blog that was introduced on June 22 from Trasente Dot Com. This blog could be used for ongoing technical discussions and / or business related topics. This topic will focus on direct interaction from me in publishing my first blog and will collect useful links and perspectives of how blog's are used along the way.

Lets get started!

Can we post a url back to the launching website here? http://www.trasente.com/
As a further test I also applied this link to the graphic in the top left corner which is now outlined in purple.


Here is a test paste from another random web link:

http://www.trasente.com/images/picasso189.jpg


as a picture link:






and a blog link:

http://science-community.sciam.com/forum.jspa?forumID=300001666


This is a test at a direct copy and paste of a graphic from another Windows application.



Looks like you can wrap text around the picture post's. Similar to that of web page HTML editor.

New Update 9/12/06 - Still playing with the blog thing a little bit. I think I have a much better understanding of how these work now. Seem to be an easy and effective means of administrating dynamic web content that changes a lot. This allows updates to content with no direct web site maintenance or html tagging required. It also allows for a quick way to allow multiple update from many users and administrates the publishing process, time stamping, content review, etc. I see now while these are becoming so popular and haw they can be used.

After some investigation, I found that the GoDaddy service did not have a link to the many RSS search feeds? They do not publish to any of the feed services and as such they are content unsearchable? This is a major malfunction to their offering as no one will find the content unless they specifically know where to look. What a marketing brain-fart! As usual their support is useless and rambles off some BS about updating the search engines directly which is of course not possible since the engines are updated by crawlers offline, anyways long story short, I am trying another hosting service to see how this one works.

More to follow ....

Windows XP Date and Time Keeps Changing Mystery

Yesterday I noticed last Friday that my weather page was being updated with the wrong date. This started a series of investigations to get to the bottom of what seemed to be a minor issue. The first action was to log on to the server and change the date and time back to current.

Issue solved, or so I thought. Several hours later I noticed the date was wrong again. Hmmmm, this is odd. Perhaps my battery in CMOS is failing? So my first test was to check out the BIOS. All appeared fine upon inspection and all other settings remained in tact. Back to XP to see if I could recreate the event. Sure enough a pattern is developing here. I noticed that the date and time were always going to January 2 1999 and +14 hours or so for the time setting. This is odd.

Virus? Mal ware? After a series of exhaustive searches, no joy! No other reports of similar patterns found in my normal support sites. Lets check, my PC-Cillin virus scans revealed no problems found. Subsequent scans with CA web scanner confirmed, no viruses found? Microsoft windows defender checks clean, Ad-Aware clean, Spybot clean? HiJackThis log shows no unusual events or recent changes, here is the current short version log:

Log file of HijackThis v1.99.1
Scan saved at 3:46:47 PM, on 7/17/2006
Platform: Windows XP SP2 (WinNT 5.01.2600)
MSIE: Internet Explorer v6.00 SP2 (6.00.2800.1106)

Running processes:
F:\WINDOWS\System32\smss.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\winlogon.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\services.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\lsass.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe
F:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\spoolsv.exe
F:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE
F:\Program Files\Symantec\pcAnywhere\awhost32.exe
F:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\ctfmon.exe
C:\initialed\Processes\procexp.exe
F:\WINDOWS\system32\wscntfy.exe
F:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe
F:\PROGRA~1\BEAGLE~1\CLOCKW~1\CWSrvc.exe
F:\Program Files\vws\vws.exe
F:\Program Files\Hijack This\HijackThis.exe

O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Windows Defender] "F:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MSASCui.exe" -hide
O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [ClockWatch.exe] F:\PROGRA~1\BEAGLE~1\CLOCKW~1\ClkWtBkg.exe
O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [Regrun2] F:\PROGRA~1\Greatis\REGRUN~1\WatchDog.exe
O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [Registry] "F:\Program Files\Greatis\RegRunSuite\lsoon.exe" -1 30 "F:\Program Files\Greatis\RegRunSuite\rescue.exe" /a "c:\backreg\rstore.ini"
O16 - DPF: {6414512B-B978-451D-A0D8-FCFDF33E833C} (WUWebControl Class) - http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/v6/V5Controls/en/x86/client/wuweb_site.cab?1138492117453
O16 - DPF: {7B297BFD-85E4-4092-B2AF-16A91B2EA103} (WScanCtl Class) - http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/webscan.cab

More searching continues but still no joy!

Having found no similar cases in web searching, I proceeded to using the "process of elimination". Using the system task tool I stopped all but the most basic system tasks and then sure enough after watching for hours the time remained the same. Therefore, I concluded, there is a software thingy that is changing the date. Staring up the applications one by one I determined that the weather Ambient VWS weather station application when running would recreate the condition. After numerous reconfigurations and reinstalls of the software, the mystery turned out to not be software at all. It was in fact the Oregon Scientific WMR-968 weather sensor collector. The batteries had run out and the unit was reporting the 1999 date through the collector. Apparently the software has a feature that changes the time of the PC to the time of the collector to ensure the database entries for historical weather data remains accurate.

After replacing the batteries and resetting the collector all has been running with no more date issues to report.

Joy at last

MSMONEY 2007 and GM Card (gmcard money MSMONEY gm card online error)

My GM Card automatic (background) Microsoft Money updates appear to have encountered an issue in my configuration. My online updates for only this one of my defined credit card accounts began getting an error about two weeks ago.

I can go to the GMCard website and everything is fine. I can also initiate a download via money and it works. However the automatic (Background) online services no longer recognize the userid.

GM Card online support rambled off something about a purchase of the GM Card by another company and the new company does not support online banking? Has anyone else experienced this? Is there another selection for the new company that will work? I will keep exploring and post any answers that I find.

An interesting update - On September 12 @ 13:03 the update started working again? Does this mean that help desk person corrected something on the GMCARD server to allow this to work again? Or did the help desk person no know what they were talking about when they said that this function is no longer supported since the merger? I am tempted to call back when time allows to force the issue and see what the real deal is. In the meantime the updates are working again. Joy

If anyone else is experiencing intermittent loss of update like this, please let me know so I can add to the history collection in case this returns. In the meantime ... Happy updating!