So I moved a Wordpress blog from a Windows IIS install over to an Apple OS X 10.6 Apache install and ran into a couple of errors when trying to upload images via the Wordpress media manager.  First error was the “Unable to create directory” message and it basically came down to the setting under Miscellaneous config screen had migrated the Windows IIS C:\… path setting.  So by changing that to “wp-content/uploads” resolved the first error message.

Second set of error messages were the “Is its parent directory writable by the server?” and “The uploaded file could not be moved to error”.  These were resolved via SSH to the Apple OS X Server and doing a chmod 755 on /library/webserver/documents/{your site name}/wp-content.  After that do a chmod -R 777 on the uploads directory within the wp-content folder.

This resolved my issues and allow me to once again upload images via the Wordpress media manager.  Below are the step-by-step instructions I followed.

1. Log into WordPress.
2. Go to your Settings and then Miscellaneous config screen.
3. Examine the directory parameter for uploads. It should be “wp-content/uploads”.
4. Remove the leading and trailing slash “/” if they are there.
5. make your wp-content folder 755
6. inside wp-content create a new folder called “uploads”, make it 777

x264

A large portion of these speed, size, and quality improvements come to us for free, from the x264 project. The past year, like every year, has seen some massive improvements for that video encoding engine. As always, it has been further hand-optimized for better performance. But it has also gained new features like macroblock tree rate control and weighted P-Frame prediction. The end result? Better picture quality, at a smaller size, faster.

So, if x264 alone gives us smaller, better, faster encodes…what have HandBrake’s developers been doing over the past year?

Oh, all sorts of things

Soft subtitles

HandBrake can now include subtitle tracks that can be turned on and off, instead of rendering them onto the video track permanently (which also reduces video compression). This means you can include Closed Captioning data from DVDs and TV broadcasts, or find SRT text subtitle files on the ‘net and include them. When using the Matroska container, you can also store the graphical subtitle images (VobSubs) from a DVD as a separate track. An added benefit is that multiple subtitle tracks can be included in the same output video.

Live preview

Ever wished you could test HandBrake settings before spending hours on a full encode? Now, you can.

The picture settings and preview sheet has been broken out into a filters and picture settings inspector, and a preview window. The preview window can show you still frames from your source, like always. But it also lets you start to encode a short clip from the current preview with the currently selected settings, and view the results right there inside of HandBrake.

Better input support, for DVD and non-DVD sources alike

HandBrake now uses a better DVD reading library called libdvdnav. This means it can now read some DVDs it had trouble with before, and it can also select different angles on a DVD. As well, some bugs in underlying libraries have been patched.

For non-DVD sources, HandBrake now offers improved transport stream support, especially for high definition sources. A number of decoding bugs have been resolved as well, so Windows users will no longer need fear AAC audio, nor Mac users fear VC-1 video.

Constant quality encoding

No more looking for the perfect bitrate for a source–HandBrake is migrating to quality-based encoding. This means that instead of telling encoders to use a specific size and vary quality to meet it, we tell the encoder to vary size to meet a given quality level. Overall quality improves, since bits are spent only when they are needed, and are saved when they are not. While this means output size is somewhat unpredictable, the results in picture quality speak for themselves.

As part of this change, the quality slider has been made more prominent, and now works off the quality values used by the video encoders, instead of a confusing, custom, percentage scale.

Another result is that 2-pass encoding is not needed. A single pass at a constant quality provides just as much compression efficiency as two passes at an average bitrate.

Presets

There are no more presets for the PSP, PS3, or Xbox 360. Quite frankly, they didn’t work well. None of the development team members own the devices, so testing was minimal and support was nonexistent. Keeping up with the firmware vagaries and ambiguous specifications of these devices was not fun–we get enough of that from Apple’s kit, and those we all have around to test on. The new “Normal” preset should work perfectly fine on any device that supports standard Main Profile H.264 with AAC-LC audio in an MP4 file, which the PS3 and 360 ostensibly do.

There are no more Film, Animation, or Television presets. Instead of a confusing series of content-targeted presets, there is now a single, constant quality, High Profile preset with automated filtering and all the H.264 bells and whistles. This preset should work on the PS3 and 360 too, although we make no promises.

It is now possible to import individual presets in all the graphical interfaces, and to export them as well, in the Mac and Linux GUIs.

Focus on what we do best

As we’ve had on our roadmap for quite awhile now, one of our goals for version 0.9.4 was to refocus on HandBrake’s key strengths and to remove dead weight. As part of this process, several containers and a codec have been removed from HandBrake.

AVI: AVI is a rough beast. It is obsolete. It does not support modern container features like chapters, muxed-in subtitles, variable framerate video, or out of order frame display. Furthermore, HandBrake’s AVI muxer is vanilla AVI 1.0 that doesn’t even support large files. The code has not been actively maintained since 2005. Keeping it in the library while implementing new features means a very convoluted data pipeline, full of conditionals that make the code more difficult to read and maintain, and make output harder to predict. As such, it is now gone. It is not coming back, and good riddance.

OGG/OGM: HandBrake’s OGM muxer is just as out of date. It hasn’t been actively maintained in years either, and it too lacks support for HandBrake’s best features. It requires conditionals to work around missing functionality too…only this one gets tested so infrequently the conditionals were never even put in the code, so it just fails when you try to do anything advanced. This one is not coming back either. And yes, we’re aware of HTML 5. For patent-free muxing, HandBrake still has Matroska, which is a much better container anyway.

XviD: HandBrake, these days, is almost entirely about H.264 video, aka MPEG-4 Part 10. This makes it rather…superfluous to include two different encoders for an older codec, MPEG-4 Part 2. When choosing between FFmpeg’s and XviD’s, it came down to a matter of necessity. We need to include libavcodec (FFmpeg) for a bunch of other parts of its API, like decoding. Meanwhile, XviD’s build system causes grief (it’s the most common support query we get about compiling, after x264’s requirement of yasm). Since we mainly use MPEG-4 Part 2 for testing/debugging, and recommend only H.264 for high quality encodes, Xvid’s undisputed quality edge over FFmpeg’s encoder is inconsequential, while FFmpeg’s speed edge over XviD is important to us.

Well we finally got tired of not being able to find any decent Employee Attendance Software out there that would solve attendance tracking of employees simply and effectively. Attendance tracking should not have to be complicated and that was the premise behind our design. Attendance Software should be a time saver not a time waster for both the Human Resource Professional and the Employee.

InterConnectTM Time Tracker makes it simple for an Employee to see what time they have accrued, pending time off requests, approved or denied requests and a complete history of any activity regarding their banks of time. InterConnectTM Time Tracker also replaces other employee attendance software so that the Human Resource Profressional can easily answer questions that Employees may have regarding their Vacation, Personal, Paid Time Off (PTO), Sick or any other time off type. This allows the HR Professional to get back to more important issues and not the tedious task of tracking and acrruing time off.

So if Attendance Tracking for your Employees is what you need and you have looked at the other employee attendance software out there and you are still not satisfied, then contact Dynamic Solutions Group so that we can give you a tour of InterConnectTM Time Tracker so you can see why we fell that our solution is the best time and attendance software!

Dynamic Solutions Group can help your business through it’s Technology challenges, please contact Dynamic Solutions Group today at 800.979.4374. Offices in Tampa, Clearwater and Chicago.

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I called and got a rep on the phone.  I explained to him that my service was down for almost 4 weeks and that I would like a refund for the downtime since I paid for something I didn’t get.  He told me that Microsoft’s policy is not to give refunds, but they gave us a free download.  I told the rep that I didn’t download the game, nor did I want it, but I wanted to either get a refund or have my memberships extended for an additional month for the downtime.  Regardless of my argument,   the rep who sounded like a broken record kept saying unfortunately, there was nothing he could do.  I then asked to be transfered to his supervisor.  The first rep was courteous and professional, but couldn’t come to grips with the fact that I paid for a service I didn’t receive and felt I was owed something more than a game I didn’t want.

I then got a cockier version of the rep on the phone who claimed to be a supervisor named Tony.  From my experience with this support call, it appears that to be promoted to supervisor you have to have an attitude about you that you are being annoyed by having to take a phone call from one of those, what do you call em again, oh yeah….  Customers.  Tony, (If that was his real name) then proceeded to explain to me how Microsoft Terms of Use say that the service is provided as is and if the service doesn’t work, then you are just out.  I told him that I paid money to access XBox Live and that I was not able to access it and that I either wanted a refund for the time period or my service extended for an extra month.  He told me they didn’t have to do that because of their terms of use and that the policy was the policy.  I told Tony that I felt like money was stolen from me because I paid for something I didn’t get.  I questioned him point blank saying I paid for a service and you didn’t provide it to me and you are telling me that you will not give me my money back for the service you didn’t provide.  To quote Tony “That’s Right!”.  He said their policy is their policy and there is nothing he could do. I then asked him for the contact information for someone who could help me and he told me that there was no phone number in all of Microsoft that could help me.

The conversation went back and forth for quite sometime, but the end result was that I am just screwed because I was foolish enough to believe that if I paid Microsoft for something I would get the service I paid for.  SO, read your terms of use carefully cause in reality if you don’t get the service you paid for on XBox Live it is your problem not Microsoft’s.

Focus Areas

- AirPort

- Back To My Mac

- Bonjour

- DiskImages

- Disk Utility

- FileVault

- Finder

- Firewall

- Graphics & Games

- iCal

- Keychain Access

- Mail

- Networking

- QuickDraw

- Time Machine

- Windows File Sharing

While there was a major change over the weekend, I kept thinking to myself that there is no way this is related to the time change. Computers are beyond the point where a simple time change can cause havoc like this, right?

FALSE

It appears that Dreamweaver doesn’t like the Daylight Savings Time change very much. According to an article on Adobe’s site, which strangely enough was just updated today, when you select certain lines of code while in code view in PHP or ASP sites, you may experience crashes. Keep reading for steps on how to solve this issue.

1. If Dreamweaver is open, quit the application.
2. Delete the WinFileCache-AD76BB20.dat file from the Dreamweaver user configuration folder. Note that on Windows, the Application Data and AppData folders are hidden by default, so verify that your Windows Explorer folder options are set to View Hidden Folders. The location of this file is as follows:
   • Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows Vista:
     C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
   • Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows XP:
     C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
3. Restart Dreamweaver.

Again, this problem is only on Windows XP and Vista Machines and does not effect OS X users.

Here is the link to the article on Adobe’s website.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402776&sliceId=2