05/25/09
After saying such nice things about Adobe and Linux with respect to Adobe AIR I found out yesterday that a problem I attributed to my trying to run Flash 10 on the EEEPC is actually a problem on all version of Linux using Flash Player version 10. Here is the text from the Adobe security announcement.
"Starting with version 10,0,2, Flash Player will not permit use of camera or microphone, or display of the Settings UI, when any of the following conditions are present:
* When the window mode (set with the HTML "wmode" attribute) is "direct" or "gpu"
* When the window mode is "transparent" or "opaque" (Linux only)
The Settings UI is the inline UI visible when users right-click or Control-click on SWF content and choose Settings."
Emphasis added by me. Adobe is incorrect, the settings UI pops up when you visit a site using window mode "transparent" or "opaque" but can't be dismissed. If you right click on Flash area it will also pop up and stay there. There is no way they can pass this off as a security enhancement when the behavior only occurs in Linux. Come on Adobe admit it, it's a bug. You introduced a new mode but decided not to implement it properly in Linux. This behavior makes it extremely difficult to use Linux on Netbooks because they are so useful when you want to use sites like 12seconds.tv, tokbox.com and the like.
Click the images to see them full size.
There are two workarounds, only one of which I would recommend. Go to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html scroll down to the site you want to access and click always allow.
Here is a list of sites where you have this problem from ubuntuforums.org if you try to use your camera. Please add anymore you find in the comments.
- megavideo.com
- supernovatube.com
- stickam.com,
- ustream.com
05/18/09
A little while ago I wrote about my experience with Mahalo Answers which is trying to micro monetize knowledge by offering users tips for answering other users questions.
Now I've heard about another site that is trying to reward their users for providing site content. Docstoc.com is an online document storage and sharing site with a difference. They include Google Adsense ads on the document pages, if visitors click on the ads shown below documents you have uploaded to the site Docstoc splits the ad revenue with you 50/50. You get your money directly from Google so you need to have a Google Adsense account to participate but DocStoc will assist you in setting one up if you need help. Now there are ads in the search listings that don't share revenue with the document uploaders but Docstoc has made it clear what the terms of the program are. It's nice to see sites that rely on user generated content rewarding the content their users generate. I don't think anyone is going to get rich off sharing their spreadsheets but who knows? I hope we see more innovative thinking like Docstoc's in the social media space.
Docstoc supports the standard doc, xls, ppt, pps, pdf, rtf, txt, docx, xlsx and ppts file formats. Docstoc has also developed a flash based viewer that let you embed your documents in a website, I have included a sample for your perusal below. They don't only have invoice forms but they also have amusing documents like The Largest Food Items in the World, documents in the news such as Mel Gibson divorce papers and book previews including When You Lie About Your Age, The Terrorists Win by Carol Leifer.
05/15/09
As I predicted back in November when Rogers stopped providing ad free Yahoo email access to their users today they informed us that our free Flickr Pro accounts would be canceled and become a standard free Flickr account on July 1st. That means a 200 picture limit and lose of access to our pictures at the original uploaded resolution. If you aren't planning on paying for a pro account you need to download you pictures if you haven't kept copies of them at their original resolution. One tool that I found that worked quite well was flickredit. It's a java application that launches from your browser and worked seamlessly on my EEEPC
Strangely when I logged into Flickr to give flickredit access to my pictures Flickr said my Pro account would expire on October 2nd. I already pay for web hosting so I expect I will end up moving my photos here to my own domain.
05/14/09
I wanted to modify one of my Xwindows cursors on my Centos 5 Linux system today and after a bit of research found the following article
"http://linuxgator.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=303" which goes through the process in great detail, and is a great resource to creating your all the cursors you need for your own theme. I didn't need that much and only wanted a quick and dirty way to change one cursor. The instructions below are what I came up with.
The cursors you are using can be found in /usr/share/icons/Bluecurve/cursors/ This assumes you are using Bluecurve theme, if not replace Bluecurve with the name of your theme whose pointers you are using. To see which themes pointers you are using select System, Preferences, Mouse and click the pointers tab. The pointers you are using will be highlighted, you may need to scroll down to see which one is highlighted.
Commands you need to type are in bold, unhighlighted lines are explanation.
Open a terminal window
mkdir icons
cd icons
mkdir cursors
gimp
Create a .png of the cursor you want at the size you want, in this case we are changing the crosshair cursor so we'll call our new cursor file crosshair.png and save it in the icons subdirectory we just created, mine was a 32x32 pixel image.
Use gedit (or your favourite text editor) to create a file called config.in in the icons directory which contains information about your .png, mine contained a single line which looked like this.
32 16 16 crosshair.png 1000
32 is the size in pixels of the .png, the 16 16 is the click point of the cursor, in this case right in the middle. After the file is created and saved continue with the following commands.
xcursorgen config.in cursors/crosshair
The cursors directory should now contain a file called crosshair
su (enter your root password when prompted)
This assumes you are using Bluecurve theme, if not replace Bluecurve with the name of your theme whose pointers you are using.
mv /usr/share/icons/Bluecurve/cursors/crosshair /usr/share/icons/Bluecurve/cursors/crosshair.old (backs up the old cursor)
cp cursors/crosshair /usr/share/icons/Bluecurve/cursors
SAVE YOU WORK AND CLOSE ALL OPEN PROGRAMS !!!!!!!!
Restart Xwindows (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) and your new cursor should be active. There is probably a way to do this without restarting Xwindows but I was in a hurry.
05/11/09
(updated August 20th, 2009)
The Ubertwitter gang have released a paid version of the app. for a $4.99 one year subscription fee and as a result have turned ads back on for users who don't pay. The one year clock starts when Ubertwitter comes out of beta which they are expecting to occur in early September. The ads aren't too bad, and I still think Ubertwitter is a great Blackberry Twitter client.
(updated August 13th, 2009)gust 12th, 2009)
The Ubertwitter folks have heard the anguished cries of their user base and turned off ads until they are ready to offer a paid version.
"We have been listening and have heard you loud and clear! We will not turn advertisements on again until we can offer a a paid option with no advertisements. The paid version will be less then $5 and will likely be a year long subscription model, i.e. all upgrades for a year. If you purchase during the beta period, the year won't start until we release version 1.0. Thank you for your patience and your feedback!" from http://www.ubertwitter.com/
Ubertwitter has released beta 4 (version 0.909) today. The two biggest change >are somewhat super annoying ads in the free version and whether you get the confusing Exit and Close menu choices depends on a setting in the options. The integrated advertising is supposed to be removed from the paid version version but there are no details on the Ubertwitter site on how to purchase Ubertwitter or how much it will cost. Other updates are shown below the video.
(updated June 20th, 2009)
Ubertwitter has released beta 3 (version 0.75) today, with a refreshed user interface, plus a whole mess of new features and many bug fixes. I have updated the video to reflect the new user interface and updated the features list
="http://www.mahalo.com/answers/from-twitter/which-is-better-twitterberry-or-ubertwitter">question on Mahalo Answers led me to UberTwitter, an open beta Twitter client for the Blackberry. All the things you might have thought were missing in Twitterberry are there in Ubertwitter. You get retweet support, built in twitter search, the ability to view trending topics, location setting in your tweet or the location field of your profile using either the Blackberry GPS or in the absence of GPS, cell tower location, URL shortening and another whole mess of new features detailed below and shameless copied from Ubertwitter's website. I particularly like the ability to determine how many Tweets to retrieve and store, I always seemed to run out when scrolling back in Twitterberry. Best of all they are promising more features in the next beta. If you currently use Twitterberry you really should give Ubertwitter a look. I don't have a camera in my Blackberry so I can't comment on the picture taking capabilities and embedding functions. This is beta software so there still are some rough edges but all in all it's pretty polished.
I couldn't figure out how to do screen shots on the Blackberry so I made a short video that shows the main menu and the many options you can set. It's been updated for beta 3 (version 0.75) of Ubertwitter, update for beta-4 (version 0.909) coming soon.
Features list from UberTwitter.com new features in beta-4 (version 0.909) are marked with a #
# Multiple Accounts - You can now configure multiple accounts, each with their own set of on-device preferences.
# You can now BLOCK people!
# Video Integration - We have partnered with TwitVid.com to offer you an outstanding video integration.
# Goto user - You can now enter twitter users name and go directly to their timeline
# URL Shortening - we've integrated with bit.ly so you can easily send those long URLs now and not bump up against the 140 limit
# MUCH faster photo uploads, significantly improving the user experience.
# Use of the internal GPS is now solidly supported with proper fallback to cell tower based location when GPS isn't available.
# Icon Caching If you have and SD card, we will cache avatar icons on the card, increasing the speed of timeline displays and reducing network traffic.
# You can now select pictures and videos that have already been take and are on your device. The interface shows the most recent at the top and offers a preview so you can verify it is the picture/video you expected!
# When composing a tweet you can now insert symbols from a large selection of commonly available characters such as smiley's, hearts, etc.
# Integrated advertisements - Please note, the ads are there to support the freely distributable version of ÜberTwitter. Users that purchase ÜberTwitter will not have advertisement in their version.
# We've streamlined the friends and followers lists
# You can now see both the number of friends, followers, and tweets sent when viewing the details of a tweet.
# Replying to a DM from the timeline will now correctly send a DM and not a regular tweet
# Fixed the bug in reply all where it would truncate some twitter user names
# Added reply all to the menu when viewing a tweet
Features list from UberTwitter.com of previous features.
* Full tweet shown in timeline, rows are variable in size* Two notification profiles, one for new tweets and another for replies
* Full support for viewing direct messages to you and from you
* View your list of friends and all of their details
* View your list of followers and all of their details
* View another users list of friends and all of their details
* View another users list of followers and all of their details
* View when a user joined twitter
* Added 'Follow' to context menu when clicking on @screenname from within any application on your BlackBerry
* Added a free-form search screen, allowing users access to the full power of Twitter Search
* We now support the built-in GPS as an option
* Added an option to not show confirmation dialog after every tweet
* Added options to control the number of tweets initially retrieved and how many to maintain in your timeline
* Added options to control the number of avatar images cached
* Added shortcuts - U - update, R- Reply, T- Top, B - Bottom, Space - Pg Dn, Shift-Space - Pg Up, F - Follow, P - refresh, L - ReTweet, S - Search
* Add thumbnails of pics attached to tweets in the timeline, either from twitpic, or from UberTwitter
* Add larger pics attached to tweets in the full tweet view, supports twitpic, or from UberTwitter
* 'Mentions' are now automatically merged into your timeline view
* Mark a tweet as a Favorite
* Remove favorite from a tweet
* View tweets you have marked as favorites
* View another users favorites
* View your timeline
* We now support WiFi if its available
* Support for ScrollWheel devices (87xx)
* More options for automatic refresh, including a manual mode
* Increased screen name field size on Options screen
* Increase GTalk user field size on Options screen
* Some decrease in battery usage, but we have more work to do here
* Cleaned up and modernized the user interface. The timeline interface, tweet update, and tweet view screens have changed substantially
* Reduced battery drain!
* You can now delete your tweets
* If you are using the internal GPS, we added an icon in the title bar showing if you have a GPS lock (blue icon) or not (gray icon).
* The ability to follow a thread of replies. Once we added this we kicked ourselves for not having it earlier, it is SO useful! On one of the screen shots above you'll see the 'in reply to' button on the view tweet screen.
* You can now select to merge both @Replies/Mentions as well as Direct Messages into your timeline
* Direct messages now have their own notification profile. Note that for @replies and DM notification to work you MUST select to have these merged into your timeline
* Integrated Google Maps when viewing a Tweet, works just like the myloc.me web site. This will view the location of the tweet if it includes a 'myloc.me' or 'mypic.me' or 'myvid.me' URL, OR will use the location in the profile if it includes a latitude/longitude pair. This includes support for the iPhone twitter clients which routinely put the geolocation in the Twitter profile location field!
* When viewing a tweet that has an embedded picture from mypict.me, you can see how many times the picture has been viewed by either ÜberTwitter users and from the web site.
* When viewing a tweet which contains a latitude/longitude pair in the location field we will now provide the 'human readable' address of that location, also works for iPhone geolocations in the Twitter profile location field.
* Fixed the search screen to make 'search' the default menu item and make the 'enter' key start the search.
* Added a separate font/size/style selection for viewing and composing tweet text
* Added the ability to make the timeline font bold
* Added support for the shrinking your tweet through an integration with TweetShrink.com. This will be an option when composing your tweet.
* Added a 'Copy Tweet' menu item so you can copy/paste entire tweets into other BlackBerry applications
* Timeline scrolling is MUCH snappier!
* When viewing a DM, the only reply option is with another DM
* Added touch screen gestures for the Storm to go to the top and bottom of the timeline. Swipe 'east' goes to the top, and a swipe 'west' goes to the botom. Note that we did not use swipe north/south as we are planning to use these gestures in the future to support 'flick' scrolling.
* At the bottom of all timelines there is a row that says 'Load More' which will retrieve older tweets for that timeline.
* Added support for tweets that contain Moby Pictures (mobypicture.com)
