LexArrow - it’s in your mind…

This links to something I have written about in the past on the Blogger account (that I have deleted in the mean time). More precisely, about the “state of grace” which the presenter in the next video calls “flow”. The video explains scientifically, but clearly, some of the things I felt but cannot put my finger on. Watching the presentation kept me on a constant “A-ha! So that’s what it was!”. If you like knowing more about creativity creative flow, I recommend watching the video below. Just click on “Player 7″ or “Player 8″ and an embedded movie will appear.

I’m in 7th Heaven after me and Chris pulled it off!

I’ve been working for a while now at a script that downloads, installs and configures server applications: OpenLDAP, Apache HTTP, PHP, MySQL, Postfix, Dovecot, Samba, Joomla, Bugzilla, KnowledgeTree, SugarCRM, PHPLDAPadmin, Pure-FTP and Webmin. I think such software would be very useful for system administrators and developers because you waste a lot of time installing and configuring something that is critical for an enterprise and can be automated.

The problem was I have a dynamic IP address, and the only solution to have a working domain/subdomain is through a dynamic DNS. So, on Chris’s advice I went on www.afraid.org, created an account for free, submitted my desired subdomain test.lexarrow.com. I also had to upgrade the firmware on my Linksys WRT300N router so it can update the IP (got the upgrade file from : www.dd-wrt.com ).

The new admin interface on my router is just awesome! Built-in VPN server, wake-on-lan and lots of others that it didn’t have before the upgrade.

This wasn’t all it took. Chris had to update the NS for the subdomain and voila : test.lexarrow.com works!

Now I can finally begin my real-life testing

P.S: If you are interested in the software I’m developing, please drop me a comment. If there will be enough “desire” for it, I could make it a public project.

Yellooo there. Mozilla wants to establish a world record for downloads/24h. What’s to download? Firefox 3! I’ve been using it since Beta 3 and I had no problems whatsoever. It’s faster than Firefox 2 and with a lot of new features. INJOY!

I bought a Philips GoGear HDD1830/17, 8GB digital audio player in August 2006 from Walmart. It worked for 3 weeks and then it froze when I tried to sync some songs. I unplugged it, then plugged it back, Windows saw it as a hard drive and on the device’s screen I could see only “Please connect player to PC”. From that moment on I’ve been trying to fix it. I read a lot of forums and reviews relating my problem and I found out that many people had my problem. I even went to Philips’s support store and they told me, without looking at it that they’ve been having problems with this model ever since they started selling it and it’s probably a hardware issue that would cost me almost half as much as a new one. Anyway, I FIXED IT TODAY!!! by creating a new folder and putting the right files in.

In case you have the same problem here’s a more detailed description of the process:

1. Plug your GoGear HDD into the computer
2. From ‘My Computer’ right click the GoGear drive and format it. Be SURE you format it as FAT32 and quick compression is not on
3. Create 3 folders on the newly formatted disk called: ‘_System’ , ‘Data’ , ‘Media’
3. Download fom Philips the latest Device Manager for your kind of player
4. Install the Device Manager
5. On the Desktop, right click the Philips Device Manager shortcut, then Properties, then open file location.
6. Copy the folders you see there into the ‘Data’ folder
7. Copy the Firmware.ebn file into the ‘_System’ folder
8. Unplug the device and now it should run fine

It can work for several models, from HDD 1420 to HDD 1835

Good luck!

I was looking to add some media content to my blog and I found coolplayer, but the installing information was in Chinese. I got lucky, as I found another site, so I pretty much copy/paste the text there

The plugin supports the following formats:

Google Video, Youtube Video, vSocial Video, ASF, ASX, WM, WMA, WMV, WAX, WVX, OGG, APE, AVI, MID, MIDI, WAV, SWF, SPL, MP3, FLV, RM, RMVB, RA, RV, RAM, SMIL, PDF, FDF, XFDF, XDP, XFD, MOV, QT, MQV, MPEG, MPG, M1S, M1V, M1A, M75, M15, MP2, MPM, MPV, MPA, FLC, FLI, CEL, RTSP, RTS, 3GP, 3GPP, 3G2, 3GP2, SDV, AMC, MP4, SDP, GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, XPM

The plugin is suppose to work with IE, Firefox, Opera, and other browsers. I can confirm it does work with IE, Firefox, and Opera.

A nice feature about the Cool Player is being able to specify more than one file at a time (see my “Let it snow” post). In addition, a user can enter a media url to play by double clicking the bottom of the player.

Let’s get started:

1. Download the plugin here (coolplayer.zip)
2. Uncompressed, upload the coolplayer folder to your plugin directory, and activate the plugin
3. Insert the player code into your post by modifying the code below. Feel free to change the width, height, autoplay, and loop.

<coolplayer width="320" height="240" autoplay="false" loop="false">
<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/yourfolder/blahblah.wmv”>Your Video Title</a>
</coolplayer>

The plugin does not like single quotes in the title so don’t use them. If you want to include more than one media file, just add another line between the coolplayer tags:

<coolplayer width="320" height="240" autoplay="false" loop="false">
<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/yourfolder/filename.mp3″>Your MP3 Title</a>
<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/yourfolder/blahblah.wmv”>Your Video Title</a>
</coolplayer>

By default, the player points to a RPC server in China. You can improve the performance by downloading the server to your own site:

1. Download the RPC serverhere(coolplayer_rpc.zip)
2. Uncompressed the files to your coolplayer folder
3. You need to change the location of the RPC server in two files: rpc.php and coolplayer.js

In version 8.5 you have to change the following:

In coolplayer.js, change (line #1) from:

coolplayer_plugin_path = “http://www.coolcode.cn/wp-content/plugins/coolplayer/”;

To (line wrap not intentional):

coolplayer_plugin_path = “http://yourdomain.com/yourplugindirectory/plugins/coolplayer/”;

In rpc.php, change (around line #11) from:

$coolplayer_rpcpath = “http://www.coolcode.cn/wp-content/plugins/coolplayer/mbstring.php”;

To (line wrap not intentional):

$coolplayer_rpcpath = “http://yourdomain.com/your-plugin-directory/coolplayer/mbstring.php”;

After you have modify the server entries, upload all of the RPC files to your server - this folder “http://yourdomain.com/your-plugin-directory/coolplayer/” (you don’t need to activate the RPC server). You are now done configuring the files.

When using a media file format, be sure you have the codec for it. Otherwise, in IE you can’t play it (you or your viewers who are in the same situation). Firefox usually finds a plugin/codec and downloads it for you. My suggestion here is to transform akward file formats into something “classic”. I found an easy to use software for rendering called Total Video Converter

I hope you find this useful enough not to post comments for troubleshooting If you still have problems I’d be happy to help you out

I’ve created a new category for all the things I think you might find useful