Archive for the 'Nerdy/Geeky' Category

Excerpts from the Help Desk

Published
by
Chalupa
on September 29, 2008
in Internet and Nerdy/Geeky
. 1 Comment

I work in the IT profession.  I take phone calls and try to help people.  I create extensive documentation that makes me go crazy so we can try and avoid some of those phone calls.  Whenever I have to call up tech support, which I loathe, I always try to let them know that I’m “in the know” so they might skip some of the rigamorale.  Usually they have no idea what I’m talking about because they are script monkeys.

Recently our connection to Al Gore’s greatest gift to the Earth, the WWW, has been extremely slow.  Last night she gave out completely and much to my dismay, never came back on.  I tried all my tricks to no avail, so I gave Comcast a call after I got home from work.

Script Monkey: “So what’s your problem?”

Chalupa: “Well my internet quit working last night.  I’ve tried all the usual stuff.  I’ve restarted my computer, released and renewed my IP, reset my modem and router, etc, etc.  I’ve even tried plugging directly into the modem and I still can’t get anything.”

Script Monkey: “Ok, I think I can help you.”  <papers shuffling>
“What is the operating system of your modem?”

Chalupa: “My modem doesn’t have an operating system.  Do you want to know what brand it is?”

Script Monkey: “um, yeah”

Chalupa: “RCA”

<silence>

Script Monkey: “That doesn’t make any sense.  It’s supposed to be Vista or something.”

Chalupa: “If you want to know what OS I’m running, I’m on XP with SP3.”

Script Monkey: “Service Pack 3?  I’ve never heard of that.  Ok I need to you go to your computer and click on your Start button.”

Chalupa: “Ok, are you wanting me to check my IP?”

Script Monkey: “I need you to click on Run.  It should be at the bottom.”

Chalupa: “Do you want my IP address?”

Script Monkey: “Ok, now I need you to click on that and hit OK…..oh crap I gotta find the code you have to type.”

Chalupa: “Are you wanting me to check my IP or release it or something?”

Script Monkey: “Oh, here it is.  Type in ipconfig…..space….oh wait, no space.  Then hit OK”

Chalupa: “Are you wanting the IP address of my modem or my computer or my router?”

Script Monkey: “You don’t see an IP thingy?”

Chalupa: “There is an IP address, but this is the IP of my local machine and my router.  Since that’s all internal, it won’t really help you trying to find my modem”

It went on and on like this for a while.  And when she was telling me to hit “ok”, there is no ok.  Fortunately I was able to decipher what she really wanted and got her the needed info.  They kept insisting there was nothing wrong on there end, but after putting me on hold for several minutes, my connection magically started working again.  Luckily it only took me 2hrs to get things working.  Gotta love the Comcast.  How come whenever I call the techies I feel like I ended up helping them more than they helped me?

Battlestar Galactica

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 4, 2008
in Nerdy/Geeky, News and TV
. 2 Comments

It’s coming, it’s coming!

First however, I must bring your attention to a new Wii game, or should I see wee-ing game.  Jeremy assures me this is just an April fools joke, but I wouldn’t put it past our friends in Japan to create something like this.

Now, back to the good stuff.  Battlestar Galactica Season 4 premieres tonight at 10pm EST.  If you’d like to catch up and you have been watching the marathons on Sci-Fi from 8am to 6pm every day this week along with the season 3 episodes from 1am-3am……you can catch the last two episodes of season 3 at 8pm EST tonight, before the new episode.

I know there has been some grumbling about the past season sucking.  I have to totally disagree.  It seems like I heard at least one person say every show was going downhill with the writers strike.  I’m a big fan of BSG and thoroughly enjoyed every episode.  Robby’s coming over tonight to take in all the Battlestar goodness.  It’s too bad this will already be the last season, but at least they’re sticking to a plan.  The whole point is to find the planet Earth, which was also the original plot in the original series*.  They’re going to find Earth by the end of the season so there’s really no point in keeping on once the originally stated goal has been reached and I applaud them for it.

* Yes, this show is a re-make if you weren’t aware.  There have even been some guest appearances by actors from the original show.

Audacity tip

Published
by
Chalupa
on November 19, 2007
in Advice, Audacity, Nerdy/Geeky and Technology
. 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to use Audacity, a few audio editing program, lately to edit my podcast. I had been doing all of the editing with Adobe Audition at work, but really wanted to just do it from the comfort of my own office chair.

It’s a pretty nice program and you can’t really argue with the price. One thing I was frustrated with though is some of my audio clips were sounding all warbly and degraded after I exported my project as an MP3. I finally figured out what was happening. Most of my clips were recorded in mono. A couple of clips I imported were stereo. After I split those stereo tracks and deleted a channel, then the warbling disappeared. Another thing I was playing around with was the bit-rate and sample rate. That can also make a difference, but definitely split your stereo tracks into mono if you’re doing multi-track editing.

Joomla and Google

Published
by
Chalupa
on October 5, 2007
in Advice, Google, Joomla and Nerdy/Geeky
. 0 Comments

If you have a Joomla site out there and you want to start using some Google tools like Analytics or Adsense or the Webmaster Tools check out the Extensions area at Joomla.org before you start trying to do things the hard way.  I found that lesson out the hard way.  There’s some free components and modules that’ll let you easily change your URLs so they’re SEF (Search Engine Friendly), add Google Analytics, create a sitemap, etc.

Feedburner project

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 9, 2007
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Podcasting
. 0 Comments

With my pet project seemingly taking off so well, I’ve been looking for ways to enhance the website, advertise more, etc.  One idea I had was to have a counter of some sort showing the total number of downloads for each episode.  Feedburner already has something setup where you can show the number of subscribers as of yesterday.  I went ahead and put that on the “home page”, but would still like to have some counters for downloads.

The Awareness API, or AwAPI, is something you can activate within your Feedburner control panel under the Publicize tab.  This allows 3rd party applications to access your data.  If that doesn’t make any sense another way to put it is that you can create or use a counter that shows the total number of downloads.  Essentially it allows me to pull out any of the data it collects for the RSS feed or any of the episodes.  This includes downloads, hits, visits and subscribers by date and item.

If you want to use this API it isn’t just all cake and ice cream.  You need to know what you’re doing.  The three main calls for this API are GetFeedData, GetItemData and GetResyndicationData.  I want to use GetItemData to find out how many times each item, or episode, has been downloaded.  I could even get total downloads with this.  When you use one of these API calls it returns data in XML format.  You then have to translate or parse that data to use it in whatever way you want.

You can usually make API calls with several different languages.  PHP is what I’m going to use because it’s what I’m more familiar with and I think it’s easier.  Now even though I was a “programmer” in college, that doesn’t mean I’m a Bill Gates or anything.  I wasn’t exactly top of my class, but I think I have a pretty good understanding of theory and I’m able to figure almost anything out as long as i have some documentation, examples and a buddy or two to ask a couple questions.

Yesterday I spent several hours messing around with things.  Essentially I need to create some PHP code to make the API call, translate the data into something usable and then output my data.  For starters I installed the runPHP plugin on my Joomla! site.  Without that plugin, it doesn’t know how to translate the PHP code and thinks it’s a combination of plain text and HTML.  I then found an example somebody else made and tried to figure it out.  The first snag I ran into was I needed to download his feedburner class and include it in the PHP code I was testing.  After playing around with it for a while I eventually realized the feedburner class was returning empty variables to me.  Which is why I couldn’t get the example to output any numbers.

My next step was to try and get some help on the Feedburner forums.  People are pretty helpful in here, but they’re definitely not going to hold your hand with the APIs.  I asked a few specific questions in a stats thread and got some generic answers.  I then made a new post in the developer’s thread after my three hours of fun.  Right now I need to either figure out why the example I downloaded isn’t working, find a new class that parses the data returned, or find a good XML parser in PHP and tweak it for the data I’m using.

At the moment I’m in no shape to just sit down and create something.  It’s been so long since I’ve been coding somewhat regularly (about 4 years) and I’ve never done anything similar to this before.  I’ll need to do some more research and a lot of testing.  If I really put the time and effort into this I could possibly even submit what I create to Feedburner for others to use or just post it on my own web space.  If I end up sharing it to the world I’ll have to make sure I do some hefty testing and debugging.  I don’t know how far I’ll go with this, but it sure was fun to get back into that type of thinking again.  It’s like riding a bike I guess.

If anybody has any tips or ideas I’d love to hear them.  This month is pretty nuts with work and then I’m on vacation for the first part of September.  I’m also pretty busy with podcasting so this is a when-I-get-around-to-it kind of project.

Deep Freeze Enterprise

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 7, 2007
in Cool, Deep Freeze, Nerdy/Geeky, Software, Technology and Work
. 0 Comments

If you are using Deep Freeze or are interested in this product, I would highly suggest going with the Enterprise edition. We’ve been using it at work for the past 2 or 3 years but haven’t had the management software to go with it. We just upgraded to Enterprise over the summer and it’s saves a ton of time. Now, instead of spending 30 min to manually turn off DF in a lab I can do it with a couple clicks from my PC. You can also easily update your configuration, uninstall the software, schedule maintenance periods, restart, etc. There’s also the ability to create custom groups so you can break your machines into labs, buildings, etc instead of having a long list of all your machines.

If you have different VLANs you’ll want to make sure you setup your configuration files correctly. In the Advanced tab there are some network settings. If everything is on one VLAN, you can use the LAN setting. If you’re using multiple VLANs you’ll want to use the LAN/WAN setting. The last step is to input the IP address or name of the computer hosting the management software. If you’ve installed that on a server or have static IPs, then input the IP address. If you have dynamic IP addresses like we do, just input the name of the computer so it doesn’t matter what port you’re plugged in to.

AllVideos problem fixed

Published
by
Chalupa
on June 29, 2007
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky, Podcasting, Technology and Webcams
. 0 Comments

Turns out I needed to be saving the file at 44,100Hz for a sampling rate and I had saved it at 32,000Hz.  Everything seems kosher now.  Thanks for the offer to help Justin.  I really appreciate it.

As a side note, I would suggest checking your file settings before recording audio files to make sure they comply with any other software you might be using.  Hopefully that’ll alleviate some headaches for you.

PrettyMay-AllVideos Joomla! plugin conflict

Published
by
Chalupa
on June 28, 2007
in Internet, Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky, Podcasting, Technology and Webcams
. 1 Comment

Everything seemed to work great recording my Skype conversation. I posted the mp3 file to my podcast and everything sounded great. I also have a Joomla site that I use for my podcast and I’ve been using the AllVideos plugin to stream my files on the site. When I tried to add my short interview, it sounded like Alvin, Simon and Theodore (Chipmunks). So I found the forum for the plugin on its respective site and it turns out it was recorded in a bitrate the plugin doesn’t like. The default settings for PrettyMay are 32000Hz for the sample rate and 64kbps for the bitrate. The forum had a list of different combinations that work/don’t work using the Lame codec. Yes, that’s the actual name of the codec.

I’ve been using Adobe Audition to edit my podcast files. So I went back and tried to re-save the mp3, using the Fraunhofer codec, with different combinations of sampling and bit rates. I also checked to make sure it was being saved in CBR(Constant Bit Rate) mode instead of VBR (Variable Bit Rate).  No luck yet. I posted my plea for help on the forum. Hopefully somebody will be able to help me. I’ll let you know what happens.

PrettyMay

Published
by
Chalupa
on June 27, 2007
in Nerdy/Geeky, Podcasting, Software, Technology and Webcams
. 0 Comments

Last night I used PrettyMay to record a web cam conversation between myself and one of my podcast fans.  Justin suggested using Gizmo, but I didn’t have time to install it and test it out beforehand.  Next time I’ll have to give it a try.

PrettyMay gives you a free 15 day trial.  It’s pretty simple and easy to use.  I downloaded it, installed it and then you just open it up.  As soon as you start a web cam PrettyMay recognizes it and asks if you’d like to start recording.  Pretty handy.

Gizmo, on the other hand, is totally free.  I was checking out their web site and there are some pretty nice features like conference calling.  It’ll also interface with Google Talk, Yahoo, MSN and Windows Live.

How to record Skype calls

Published
by
Chalupa
on June 25, 2007
in Nerdy/Geeky, Podcasting, Technology, Webcams and Work
. 2 Comments

I don’t use Skype a whole lot. I’ve used it mainly at work to help professors connect to authors and guest speakers during class. This is a very cheap and inexpensive way to have a “video conference” with somebody during class without having to pay for plane tickets, hotel rooms and meals. Some professors have wanted to record this conversations. We have some sophisticated software that could do that, but we don’t have licensing to install it wherever we want. I also thought it might be useful to record some things through Skype for my podcast, so I started looking into some options. I found this site - How to Record Skype Conversations - which talks about a lot of free/inexpensive software out there to do this. I was mainly interested in just the free stuff because I didn’t really want to pay out anything if I don’t use it more than once.

I downloaded PrettyMay and installed it. You get a 15-day free trial. It seems to work pretty well. Records both the audio coming out of my speakers and my microphone. On playback things sounded a bit weird, but that’s just because I was getting some feedback due to microphone/speaker placement in my office. Usually when you’re doing something like this a headset works much better to reduce feedback and weird noises.

I also downloaded PowerGramo Recorder, but haven’t installed it yet. These both had free trials and sounded like they worked ok. If I give PowerGramo a shot, I’ll let you know what I thought of it.

Recording Video is a little bit more complicated than just audio. I did a few searches and read about a few different things. All the software I found just records streaming video on your screen. We have Camtasia here at work. Seems like that would do that same thing. One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily record both cameras. If you do the picture-in-picture thing you’ll get the big picture of whomever you’re talking to with the little corner picture of yourself. Some professors have setup mini-DV cameras in the back of the room while doing this to capture everything. Seems a little bit backwards, but they can then record the students in the room as well.