Month: August 2005

Wink to record screens to flash

From Lifehacker I was pointed to a free utility called Wink which records screen, mouse and keyboard and saves them as a flash or an exe file for tutorials. In common with other software I’ve tried before, in the autorecord mode where it automatically takes screen captures on a mouse and keyboard press, the screen capture takes place after the screen has refreshed from the mouse click. So what you tend to end up with is the mouse moving to a certain location on screen 1 which doesn’t make sense. Then the screen refreshes and the mouse is at a sensible location for screen 2.
To get round this problem, just make sure you screen capture before and after every click of the mouse and then the cursor seems to move to sensible places.
I’ve used it this morning to upload about 3 tutorials on using Mambo (the incredibly powerful but too confusing cms). One of them was to use with the podcasting capabilities of MamboPodcast so that the website can now have mp3 downloads and podcasts too.
I can’t link to the tutorials as it contains urls that I don’t want public – yet.
Update Other (free) products that do something similar are Camstudio and Bulent’s Screen Recorder, the latter I’m sure I’ve used before.

Error 403 when using firefox and Visual Web Developer Beta 2.

I tried my first web page in .net using the visual web developer beta 2 (why am I a sucker for trying out beta software?) and it didn’t work – returning an error message http error 403 Forbidden. Oddly enough, if I opened the same page in Internet explorer it worked ok. From my experience with IIS I knew this was something to do with NTLM authentication but trying to find out where this was configured was rather bewildering. In the end, the post on the microsoft forums gives the answer – “Select the Solution Explorer view, and right click the very first element of the tree (the project itself). Choose property pages and select Start Options. On the Server section, clear the NTLM checkbox and save the configuration and it now works in firefox. MS’s official response is that this is by design to ensure websites are secure. Personally I just wonder how many websites on the internet insist on using NTLM authentication…..not many I guess so I’m afraid this excuse doesn’t ring true to me.
As a side note, I can’t see how you are meant to permalink to the individual post in the forum – there doesn’t seem to be any visible anchors to use. I had to use the WebDevelopers Extension to display the anchors. I’ve logged a bug in the forums on this point too.

Automated WordPress backup

Lifehut has a good post on how to enable the automatic backup of WordPress to an email system such as google. Worked great although I couldn’t use the form of [email protected] as the mail server that wordpress runs on does not allow + in the email address as strictly speaking its not rfc compliant. Yahoo groups also has this problem in that you can sign up for a mailing list with a + in the address but not use that address in their web interface.

Be careful of the flickr loginid merge

If you use Flickr Importr and merge your flickr id with your yahoo id then the importr program will stop working. This will be due to the authentication progress failing behind the scenes. Last time this happened the patch came out pretty quickly. Flickr does warn that this might happen – I guess what they should have said is it will happen.
I must admit I am a bit surprised that they’ve launched this capability without publicly testing it or confirming it works with the more popular tools. After all a lot of the tools like flickrimportr are promoted on the flickr blogs so they do know about the big ones.
Update And this is my 2500’th post on this blog. When I started this I never knew I’d be that prolific!