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Archive for May, 2012

How to bypass email cloaking in Joomla 2.5

2012/05/31 1 comment
  1. If you have URLs on your Joomla site that contain @-signs, Joomla 2.5 will mangle them, since it seems to think out of the box that these are email addresses that need to be protected (anybody else using Joomla 2.5 with MS-Exchange 2010 calendars…?).
  2. If you do not want to give directive {emailcloak=off} on top of  the article, try url-encoding the @-sign (%40). May be more difficult for your users to memorize, though.
Categories: e-infrastructure, lab-portal Tags: , , , ,

How to use the MS-Office Labs Community Clips Screen Capture Tool

2012/05/31 7 comments
  1. I seem to remember this initiative of having MS-Office users sharing tips and tricks using screencasts has been faded out – but the screen capture tool is still available, and it is not restricted to recording MS-Office applications.
  2. After download and install (here on Windows 7), image
  3. click the community clips system tray icon to easily start a screen capture: image
  4. Or access the context menu with advanced options: image
  5. including restricting recording to specific windows:
  6. image
  7. It does not start up very fast: image
  8. It flashes a frame around the recorded area.
  9. This is a test…
  10. clip_image001
  11. image
  12. image
  13. The preview starts automatically: image
  14.   About the file quality: image
  15. Both the save and the email option imagework, only the built-in upload fails, likely due to the demise of MS-Soapbox: image, but can be easily uploaded to other services, e.g. MS-SkyDrive
  16. Unfortunately, like the Windows Media Encoder clips, it won’t preview without download on SkyDrive – unlike the (newer) MS-PowerPoint 2010-recorded screencasts: image
  17. Still, the MS-Office Labs Community Clips Screen Capture Tool seems to have a friendlier interface than Windows Media Encoder, and is as free.
Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, multimedia-recording, service-is-documenting, service-is-learning-materials-creation, software, Student-Computers Tags:

Check out this web page…

2012/05/26 Leave a comment

Ds sitze ich um Mitternacht in einem gottverlassenen campsite im 3400ft hohen nirgendwo neben dem blue ridge parkway und lese matte glossen über germanisten auf meinem hp touchpad über verizon, and cannot help but thinking that these are two great engineering companies. Here’s a website I think you’ll like: Martenstein: “Der sibirische Tiger ist weniger bedroht als das Komma” | Gesellschaft | ZEIT ONLINE

Categories: Personal, tablets Tags:

How in Windows 7 multiple windows can share in one screen, and multiple screens in one window

2012/05/23 Leave a comment
  1. The windows management improvement I use most in Windows 7, in order to view multiple windows simultaneously (after introduction of preemptive multi-tasking in the late 80s, the operating system was renamed from MS-DOS to MS-Windows, not to “MS-Window”) is the snap-to-edge which you can access
    1. either by “throwing” your window (drag the title bar) to the left or right edge of your screen (top or bottom will maximize or minimize your window);
    2. or if you rather use the keyboard, image + left/right arrow (+ up/down arrow will maximize or minimize your window). Keep pressing the combination and you will cycle the window position. Note that this works also across dual-screens.
  2. Also a welcome relief: In Windows 7 dual screen environments, you can drag and drop maximized windows between screens.
    1. The fact that you could not in Windows XP (where you have to de-maximize the windows first before dragging it) has caused much confusion wherever I introduced multi screen computers for teachers;
    2. in spite of the fact that you could not drag a maximized window away in the single screen environment that our users are more accustomed to.
    3. Guess I can now rather focus on upgrading a 11-year old OS to Windows 7 than on coming up with a more memorable explanation. Actually, people are currently raving about the dual-screen management improvements in Windows 8, but I that will take a bit longer to trickle through. 
Categories: audience-is-teachers, Presenter-Computer Tags: , ,

Java IDE for NLP with DkPro – A running log.

2012/05/19 2 comments
        1. UPDATE: dkPro has been updated, see the comment below by the dkPro Project Lead.
        2. MyLyn Web Connector 3.8 for Eclipse Indigoeclipse-mylyn-webconnector-dkpro
      1. I next got an error (“Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
        Software being installed: Mylyn Incubator SDK (Incubation) 3.8.0.I20120414-0402 (org.eclipse.mylyn.experimental_sdk_feature.feature.group 3.8.0.I20120414-0402)
        Missing requirement: Mylyn Tasks Connector: Web Templates (Advanced) (Incubation) 3.8.0.I20120414-0402 (org.eclipse.mylyn.web.tasks_feature.feature.group 3.8.0.I20120414-0402) requires ‘org.eclipse.mylyn_feature.feature.group [3.8.0,4.0.0)’ but it could not be found
        Cannot satisfy dependency:
        From: Mylyn Incubator SDK (Incubation) 3.8.0.I20120414-0402 (org.eclipse.mylyn.experimental_sdk_feature.feature.group 3.8.0.I20120414-0402)
        To: org.eclipse.mylyn.web.tasks_feature.feature.group [3.8.0,4.0.0)”), but starting over and updating my MyLyn installations form menu: Help / Install Updates fixed that.
      2. Show Task repositories window: image
      3. Error:  “Query Synchronization Failed _______ Q Failed to parse RSS feed: “Invalid XML: Error on line 114: The element type “meta” must be terminated by the matching end-tag “«meta>”,””
      4. . Well, the Google Code integration is anyways only for users that cannot run Maven. Maybe I can
          • [window /]Preferences -> Maven -> Discovery -> Open Catalog
          • search for “subclipse”
          • clip_image002

         

      5. Install Fails also (“Missing requirement”, again: this time it is “org.sonatype.m2e.subclipse.feature.feature.group 0.13.0.201107071330”), and here we are up the creek with no paddle: You do not want to read a thread on the developer site that ends in ”this must be a bad joke”.
      6. Then there are the heroes (as opposed to process) who make it work nevertheless: To bring back back the SVN SCM handler, extract this to your Eclipse dropins folder.
      7. eclipse-m2e-subclipse-dkpro
      8. Unless of course you suffer from extremely bad timing:
      9. Now to the real getting started
          1. Wait: “First Programming Steps with DKPro Core: This page is currently outdated. We are working on a new DKPro Core release which makes several steps of this tutorial obsolete and changes others (Updated May 8, 2012)”. Can referring to the help provided on the mailing list may bridge that gap for you? Or may this “Setting up Maven and Eclipse for DKPro Core development (Updated May 10, 2012)” currently be the best instruction?
          2. “Go to the Package Explorer in Eclipse [Window->Show View->Other…->Java->Package Explorer] and create new a Maven Project”:
          3. imageimage
          4.  imageimage
          5. Other potential sources of confusion:
          6. settings.xml: There are 2, one in your Maven install directory and one in your .m2e directory – it seems the latter which counts
          7. my .m2e recursed (think ~/.m2e/.m2e) – did I cause this when trying to change its location (which supposedly you can)?
          8. file: nexus-maven-repository-index, in various forms of compression: What is this, and what prevents it from getting downloaded?
          9. maven repositories:
          10. the expansion option for the ukp-oss-releases comes and goes. if I right-click / rebuild index, I even get an error “Unable to update index for ukp-oss-releases”, but afterwards, the expansion option reappears.
          11. You are provided a settings.xml for Maven (m2eclipse) that points to the dkPro online Maven repository.
            1. Which looks like it needs an update to include a pluginrepository for snapshots.
            2. Check you are loading it alright by going to Menu: Window / Preferences / Maven / User Settings: image
              1. You are advised “to check if your Maven and Eclipse are configured correctly, try opening the “Maven Repositories” view in Eclipse, open “Global Repositories” and check if there is a “ukp-oss” folder in it with contents”, like so: image, or else fix your /m2e/settings.xml or Eclipse:
              2. Show Maven Repositories View by going to Menu:Windows/ Show View / Maven Repository: image
              3. Like so: image
              4. You get an overview of updating
            3. image
            4. and finally: image
            5. TBA: what causes the central maven repository to not get resolved?
          13. Build your own project, with guidance from a variety of documents (some need updating) and mailing lists
            1. My attempts to “browse” for the parent when creating my own project have remained unsuccessful: image
            2. I could however use as a model an existing POM.xml that loads a parent: image
            3. Which seems to work, at least if you click “open parent pom”,image
            4. it connects you to the dependency: image
            5. Afterwards, the search feature started working when selecting dependencies: image
            6. For the DkPro version updated 05-28, I also could not browse for parents or dependencies from m2eclipse, but needed to first manually add to my pom.xml (the syntax of which is explained here and here)
              1. the <parent> entry
                image
              2. Managing dependencies from within m2eclipse started to work for me only once I had added manually the <dependencyManagement> entries. This allows for autodiscovery of the snapshot-version (1.4.0 currently) version, whether you add a <dependency> into the pom.xml without <version>, like here: image, or browse for and select the latest released version (1.3.0 – I cannot browse for snapshots). like here:
            7. While I still can only browse for release versions (1.3 currently), the <dependencymanagement> updates
            8. Reminder: Given the current transitional status of DkPro, you need to first enable snapshots like in my settings.xml.
            9. HINTS
              1. You cannot “remove” through the gui-button a dependency that you erroneously added as empty. image Open the pom.xml with a text/xml editor and remove it there, then have the GUI reload the pom. image
              2. See here for some tools that helped me debug my project setup in Eclipse.
            10.   If you cannot use the built-in javadoc help for stanford-corenlp, and/or, when trying to set  up, get “Can’t download JavaDoc for edu.stanford.nlp:stanford-corenlp:1.3.2:javadoc”, this is a known issue, seems to have no resolution currently, but may have one in the future. imageWorkaround: browse the source elsewhere…
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags: , , , , , , , ,

When installing apache-maven-3.0.4 on Windows 7 (64-bit), environment variables do not expand in %Path%

2012/05/15 4 comments
  1. Do not follow the instructions for installing apache-maven-3.0.4  on “Windows 2000/XP”, or your final test running mvn –version to verify that it is correctly installed will fail.
  2. When adapting the Environment variable path, do not use %M2_HOME%\bin, but rather repeat the explicit path, e.g. “G:\conf\lang\java\apache\maven\apache-maven-3.0.4” 
  3. maven install
  4. Why is that?
Categories: Glitches&Errors, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging Tags: ,

How to easily upload, distribute, share and play large multimedia files with Google Apps

2012/05/11 Leave a comment
  1. Tired of burning, lugging around, inserting, ejecting, or forgetting, losing, scratching and replacing CD- and DVD- media, or hard- and thumb drives to handle your large multimedia files? Do you have internet and web browser where you need to access and play your files? Then you can use UNCC Google Apps  instead.
  2. Go to your UNCC Google Apps (you have to log into UNC)
  3. Click on the Hard-drive-icon in the upper left uploadand on “files”, select a video file:
      1. upload-file-dialogue (many formats and underlying codecs supported, including Flash, MOV, AVI, WMV, MPG. File size limits: currently “every user is given 1GB of free storage space for files” (not enough for much HD footage, but difficult to upload, and didn’t Google Drive just increase this limit to 5GB, or does this not carry over to Google Apps? Stay tuned for updates), click “Start upload”..
  4. Wait until upload is finished, upload-progress and then, depending:
    1. if you want to share the file with colleagues, click on “share” (appears after “cancel”) and fill out the dialogue. You can share your file both
      1. inside the university community and share
    2. outside of the university community: share-outsideshare-outside1
    3. if you want to share the files with students in your course, there is a better way using Moodle Kaltura video upload;
    4. if you just want to play the file yourself (including to your students in the classroom), you are already done.
    5. Go to your files playand click on the file in the list to play the video: play1
    6. Also, you can always “get your file back” by “Download”: download (and note you can also prevent users from downloading the files. This is useful if you only want to temporarily share it, but later revoke permissions).
  5. More help is available from the  from the  source
    1. How save files to your Google Docs
    2. How to play back video files in Google Docs
Categories: e-infrastructure, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, learning-materials, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags: ,

AP Exams in the LRC with Sanako Study 1200

2012/05/11 Leave a comment

You first need to enable AP examinations in the Sanako Study 1200 settings (not enabled by default).  image

Only then you can follow the instructions from the Sanako documentation: “The AP® Exam is an exam type that is used in the highschool level by the Advanced Placement Program in the United States. With Study 1200 you can also accomplish externally-certified AP® oral exams and the Study 1200 student application provides a quick, easy and efficient exam vehicle. Before initiating the actual test, the students give their exam number code. To start the entering mode for the students’ PIN codes, click Send ID requests. The students enter their exam PIN code in the dialog that appears on their screens. The PIN codes appear on your GUI’s class view under each student icon. To initiate the exam, click Start. The media source is connected to the students, and the students are automatically recorded. The students hear all further instructions and the exam questions from the exam source and proceed with the exam as instructed. To end the exam, click End. The student recording collection window opens automatically and you can collect the student tracks for later evaluation.”

Categories: assignments, service-is-assessing Tags: , , ,