Archive

Archive for November, 2011

More printing problems in the LRC: How to deal with student swipe card not being read

2011/11/16 Leave a comment
  1. Problem: You get this error message "Unable to communicate with vending hardware" (when student swipes the student id card):
  2. Things to try:  Try first restarting the print release station computer (How?). If this does  not help, in the past, this has indicated campus-wide problems. Call the HELPDESK to find out more. If they confirm, post a warning note for students on the print release station.
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, Glitches&Errors Tags:

Is there a better way to cross-link within Joomla?

2011/11/15 Leave a comment
  1. I find my best bet to find anything in the hyperlink dialogue is to go to the published site and search for the article. Here I finally found the article in questions, knowing that it lived (“had been filed”?) in “uncategorized”, which the site search results kindly let me know:
  2. joomla-cross-linking
  3. Obviously you do want to use the internal URL which should survive DNS-related changes.
Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, e-infrastructure Tags:

Microsoft Contextual Translator

2011/11/14 Leave a comment

Certainly an advance over the MS-Word thesaurus (unlike the MS-Word 2007 and up spell check, still not contextual). Does this work at least well enough to serve as a fruitful pedagogical exercise: “Which phrase does not belong in the group?”

contextual-thesaurus

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, Intermediate, Speaking, websites, Writing Tags: ,

How students access language learning materials on the Library ereserves system

2011/11/11 Leave a comment
  1. Note the important update in red below.
  2. This has been tested at post date with Firefox. ereserves seems to be not compatible with Internet Explorer 8: irealplayer-cannot-open-ram-from-ereserves-in-ie8
  3. On the Library home page, from the top menu: “Research & Course Help”, choose menu item: “Course Reserves” (or, if this menu changes again, I have a hunch that deeplinking may be more stable: http://library.uncc.edu/caos/coursereserve,  what’s in a URL…),
  4. sign in with your Ninernet ID,
  5. enter search term
    1. select from the dropdown “search by name”, an enter part of your course name in the textbox,
    2. or click on tab:”Course Reserves Pages by Instructor”, and from the dropdown, select your instructor,
  6. click search,
  7. then select your course from the results grid.
  8. ereserve-search-result-page-example-name=french
  9. Enter the password, which has been given to your by your instructor.
  10. ereserve-password-page
  11. In the results grid, click on the desired chapter and tracks. Note: You need to disable your web browser”s “popup blocker”.
  12. In the popup window, click on link: “More information”,
  13. when offered, , like in this screenshot:
  15. you cannot save the file,  or rather: only a text file with links to the audio which you cannot play, like rtsp://dlib4.uncc.edu:554/e_reserves/CD1bonneforme12-16.rm). That is by design.
  16. Instead of trying to save, select to “open” the file. You need have a streaming audio playing software installed, like Real Player or the open source VLC-Player.
  17. instead of VLC, as offered by default, like so : ram-download-fail
  18.  choose “Open with”, “Other”, pick “RealPlayer” from the list, like so:realplayer-cannot-open-ram-from-ereserves-but-from-firefox
  19. Here is a more on what does not work with ereserves. The only combination I could get to work with eReserves streaming audio is  – see resulting screencast (requires Windows Media Player) of streaming a long file successfully  – is RealPlayer 14, Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP3, and that only after resetting the Winsock catalog which I can do for the entire LRC only nownext time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible.
Categories: audience-is-students, e-languages, learning-materials, library-unit, Screencasts, service-is-library, websites Tags:

Streaming Problems with Realmedia via RTSP from ereserves with VLC Player (and Internet Explorer. And NetOp School)

2011/11/10 Leave a comment
  1. VLC-player
    1. version 1.1.9,  but also currently newest 1.1.11 as well on Windows CXP SP 3
    2. opens from IE8 and Firefox 3.6
    3. but is not able to play files (tested even multi) through. Rather, it nicely falls on its face, with the audio stream simply appearing to stop, mid-sentence, after 2:38 (pretty consistently – a buffering bug? A great way to slip through pre-testing).
    4. In the LRC, I could hardly bring the taskswitcher up, let alone (15 minutes of waiting) the task manager, to even find that vlc.exe is the culprit, with a CPU utilization of 99% solid (Ouch!). ereserves (4)
    5. Not quite so bad in the office computer where it hovered slightly above 25%, maybe busying  only one CPU core. ereserves-crashes-vlcplayer-at238-diana
  2. My Google searches do not find anything quite similar.
  3. RealPlayer 14 to the rescue?
    1. In IE8, RealPlayer does not open when clicking on the web page link with the RM file which causes a dialogue to open if VLC-player is the default player, rather a strange unplayable content error..
    2. realplayer-cannot-open-ram-from-ereserves-in-ie8
    3. In Firefox, RealPlayer open and plays (and pre-buffers) the stream completely.realplayer-cannot-open-ram-from-ereserves-but-from-firefox
    4. Note that ereserves “download as zip” cannot serve as a workaround: gives you only the links like http://dlib4.uncc.edu/streaming/media_play.php?file=9364cb66b9e1cae26aed0f471e9eab5b, which require you to re-authenticate, even if in the same browser session, and do not redirect to the resource, neither audio nor web page form which you could launch the audio (in short, I do not get what this download as zip is good for)
    5. Next Problem: This may work on my office computer. In the lab we have NetOp School installed. That adds another layer of NetOp School problems which look like they can be resolved next time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible. next time I get around to design and run a Symantec-Ghost Software and File Action on the computers (all LRC lab PCs) and test the result (on PC10) which was now.
Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, Glitches&Errors, Listening, LRCRoomCoed434, Media, Presenter-Computer, Student-Computers Tags: , , , , ,

MS Universal Language Input Tool offers correction and transliteration on any web page

2011/11/10 Leave a comment

Using the UIME, you can “type any language with any keyboard on any web page, using only the Roman characters present on every keyboard.”

ms-universal-Language-Input-Tool

And you can install your favorite input language in your web browser, like so:

ms-uime-add-japanese-ie8 ms-uime-add-japanese-ie8-test

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Arabic, Beginner, e-languages, English, French, Greek (modern), Intermediate, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, software, websites, Writing Tags: ,

Netop: Nhstconf.ndb update/locking error

2011/11/10 Leave a comment

netop-error-nhstconf.ndb

netop-error-nhstconf.ndb2

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors Tags:

Implementing a Deepfreeze upgrade via Symantec-Ghost file operations instead of

2011/11/10 Leave a comment

•    To upgrade from novell to AD I need to implement a deepfreeze maintenance thaw window, to allow updating of the domain machine password on the normally frozen client.
•    If you have no other than built-in/FOSS means, you can probably achieve this with RunOnce, AutoAdminLogon, AutoAdminLogonCount, and reading out the client @computername DefaultDomainName with AutoIt. I rather try using Ghost:
•    Put files on headless to be able to ghostcast them without access to fileshares
•    ghosttask: df6 boot thawed (I need to unfreeze, w/o deepfreeze clients connected to deepfreeze server)
•    ghosttask: df6 uninstall:
o    ghostcast transfer deepfreeze 7 and 6 installer to c:\
o    C:\df6wks.exe /uninstall
o    Reboot
•    Ghosttask: df7 install
o    ghostcast transfer deepfreeze installer to c:\
o    C:\dfwks7726.exe /install\
o    reboot
o    Should be safe to have the installer lie around: While Deepfreeze 6 uninstall does not require a password, it will be history; also, to permanently uninstall, you first need to unfreeze, which requires a password
•    ghosttask: df7: boot thawed : Dfc.exe [installs into path] pwd /bootthawed
•    ghosttask: winsockreset
o    netsh winsock reset or cmd /c netsh winsock reset
•    ghosttask:
o    ghostcast transfer schliessnicht.exe into C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup to keep Sanako alive for oral exams (permanently, this should be enabled using this TBA:extension method to do advanced remote control of Sanako study1200 student clients; where is the delete option? can only think of overwriting with an empty file of the same file name) 
•    ghosttask: df7: boot frozen: Dfc.exe [installs into path] pwd /bootfrozen
•    as long as I do not make changes to the default user and to user settings (like what app rm is associated with), I do not need to reimage – BUT: to run acrobat, flash, windows updates, without reimaging, instead of task, I would need to automate gui interaction after autoadminlogon as labadmn, which means
o    ghosttask: ghostcast transfer 1 autoit that rewrites registry and reboots to autoadminlogon 
o    then startup autoit to automate gui interaction with nal?

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, e-infrastructure, mental-notes Tags: ,