bloggingIT

Well, it’s been a little while - so I thought that with this Job’s Bus thing I’m doing at Claire’s school today I had better get ready.

One of the things that seemed to impress the kids last year was using a webcam to post them onto the internet. This was done on Claire’s laptop with CoffeeCup Webcam or something like that.

Needless to say - my trial has expired since then, so I thought I’d try the XP Powertoy Timershot. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perception), it will not install on Vista - even in compatibility mode. I remember it didn’t work properly when I tried it before so I thought that I’d get hold of an alternative.

After a very brief search, I found at32 Comedy Webcam a free webcam publisher that will even upload a (naff) html page.

I had to put a little bit of javascript into the page to make it autoupdate - but it works nicely. It connects to ftp - lets you set the time you wish to update the image, and will preview it if you like. It can supposedly web publish itself as well, but I’ll leave that alone for the time being.

Now all I have to do is dig out that old motherboard again…

I’ve found a pretty nifty (and free) program on the Internet called Desk Marker.

Basically it will allow you to turn your mouse into a desktop drawing tool so that you can annotate what is on the screen. What is even more useful is that when you move any windows around the screen after you have drawn your doodles, the markup will remain as long as it’s visible.

The only catch is that the inteface is a little clunky (you have to press and hold ALT+1 to use the pen by default).

I was premature with the fixing of the squaking beast last week. The problem manifested itself this week again.

To fix the beast, I settles on copying the NTUSER.DAT file from the laptop next door, as the pupil profiles are identical over all the laptops. Let’s hope it works this time.

I suppose it might have been smart if the profiles on the laptops were made to be mandatory. That would stop it occurring in the future…

A new problem from the people at RM. When loading up Talking First Word, one of the laptops barfed with save file dialog boxes constantly popping up. This would happen straight away and not stop until you’d pressed ‘cancel’ a great deal of times.

After ‘repairing’ (I’m still convinced that it does nothing) Office XP, I was still getting no joy. I removed the ntuser.dat file but that killed some of the important (to RM) user settings.

However, this was only happening on one user (Pupil) on one laptop and I’d never seen it before, so on a hunch I trawled into the user profile, Application Settings\Talking First Word. Lo and behold, there was a .tmp file sitting there. One swift click of the ‘delete’ key, and the error didn’t appear again.

I’m guessing that the temporary file had some crap in it which was throwing RM Talking First Word’s silicon toys out of it’s virtual pram.

So here I am back at CCJ and everything is normal. There was a log in the technician book asking for a form to add Internet links to the school’s intranet. So I reinstalled Dreamweaver on the development machine (a loose term - it’s an Intel 500mhz with 64MB RAM).

Anyway, I sat down and completed my work eventually. It turns out and Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Windows 98 don’t like each other that much, so I had to reinstall MX v.6. I cursed writing the thing in ASP and was grateful that I had converted the new version to PHP. That still didn’t make it easier for me. I’ve avoided any ASP scripting this year, and only used VBScript for server-side administration on domains. For some reason, the insert record wizard doesn’t like to make it too easy to modify the action once it’s created. Once I had finished the form and discovered that I had missed a field out (I accidentally removed it), I had to start the page over for simplicity.

And what do I get when I say the work is done?
“So they can add links when they want to? That isn’t what I wanted.”

ARGH!

So I’ve had to jiggle to code. They can still add links, but there’s a stamp in the computer name list of the user, time and date that the link was added. At least then it can be traced.

They’ll have to like to like it or lump it for the time being.