Schinckel.net

I had a training afternoon on Friday with Scholaris, and came across a few issues I found hard to work with.

• The first thing I noticed was that in lots of cases there were 2 buttons with the same name (usually Add) in the one window - when you said “click on Add”, I (and others) invariably clicked on the wrong one some of the time. Whilst most of the time this can be fixed, there was at least one instance where all settings could not be changed once this had been done. (Virtual Classrooms, cannot change theme once Add has been clicked). I think that more specific buttons names (“Add User”, “Create Virtual Classroom”) would create less confusion than relying on positional context alone.
• Another issue I came across was that in the Assignment Manager, it’s possible to drag one Target Group ‘into’ another. This results in some weird behaviour, that is difficult to describe. Basically, the top-level target group is then given a name that is a number, and contents are not accessible. You can delete this top level group, and then everything seems to be a bit more back to normal.
• The biggest issues for me were in the Content Editor, specifically to do with Images. When you insert an image, and then resize it, pressing Control-Z deletes the image, rather than un-resizing it. Secondly, I feel that the “Lock Ratio” button images should be reversed - it would make more sense that the image reflected the state of the function (ie, a locked image indicates that the aspect ratio is locked, not that clicking on the button will lock it). Another alternative would be a checkbox with “Lock Aspect Ratio” as the label. (I have written down that this function didn’t work anyway, but I can’t remember for sure).
• I also think that all windows should be resizable - in a couple of cases I had editing windows that only allowed me about 4 lines of text entry - which is generally not enough. Having to scroll all of the time, especially when I have a large monitor and this window takes up a small fraction of the available space, seems silly.
• Finally, I think that all “Preview” windows should have a “Close Preview” button. At times I wasn’t sure whether to click the close box or not: sometimes a new window is created, sometimes one isn’t (in the general context of Scholaris), and it would be much easier to see when in a Preview window if a specific “Close Preview” button/link was in these windows.

I’m trying to create reference movies (as Quicktime .MOV documents) for all of the movies on my Media server, and the most obvious method is to use AppleScript and Quicktime Player. Why am I doing this? Because iTunes requires Quicktime Movies, I’ve mainly got AVIs, and I don’t want to (a) convert all of them, and (b) have iTunes manage them. I’d rather have the files in the right spot, and allow iTunes to manage the reference movies. Quicktime will often open files of varying types, even though iTunes will not. It’s then possible to save the file, and choose not to create a stand-alone movie. This will create a reference movie, which is much smaller than the original, but requires that the original remains in the same place in order to work. However, using AppleScript, the following will not work if AVIs are set to play in another player, like VLC:

    tell application "Finder"
    	set theMovies to selection
    end tell
    
    repeat with theMovie in theMovies
    	tell application "QuickTime Player"
    		open theMovie
    	end tell
    end repeat

That is, the movie opens in it’s default application. To get it to work requires simply the following:

    tell application "Finder"
    	set theMovies to selection
    end tell
    
    repeat with theMovie in theMovies
    	tell application "QuickTime Player"
    		open theMovie as alias
    	end tell
    end repeat

That little as alias causes Quicktime to open it, instead of VLC. How bizarre! The next problem is that by default, it puts the document(s) into a list. I often make the mistake of operating on a list, rather than each item individually. Especially when there’s only one item in the list. It’s like my eyes don’t see the curly brackets. So, we can save the movie, and by default it will save it as a reference movie. Next problem, how do we tell it where to save the movie? It will default to the root directory of the boot disk. Not really where I want to save this file, as I want to do multiple copies. But, what I can do is save the file, import it into iTunes, (ensuring that iTunes creates a copy of this file in it’s library) and then delete the file, or create the next one over the top. What I’m up to so far (and this doesn’t deal with names or anything yet):

    tell application "Finder"
    	set theMovies to selection
    end tell
    
    repeat with theMovie in theMovies
    
    	tell application "QuickTime Player"
    		set mov to first item of (open theMovie as alias)
    		save mov in (file "movie.mov")
    		close mov
    	end tell
        
    	tell application "iTunes"
    		add alias "Macintosh HD:movie.mov"
    	end tell
        
    end repeat

More later. Sleep time now.

I like that iTunes displays half-star ratings, but I want my tracks rated 51-59 to display this way too. That doesn’t work, but if you use the following script, it will round the ratings of selected tracks to the nearest half-star:

    tell application "iTunes"
    	repeat with trk in selection
    		set rating of trk to ((rating of trk) / 10 as integer) * 10
    	end repeat
    end tell

I hope Apple don’t include the functionality of odd-rated tracks to play different amounts, otherwise I’ll need to re-rate all of my music. Again.

MyMac.com: Macspiration 22 - Four More Hidden Preview Tricks

1. Change the File Format. Yep, knew this one.
2. Scan an image directly into Preview. Excellent. That’s one more reason not to have to load up Photoshop, just to scan an image!
3. Take a Screenshot. Harder than ⌘$ (Cmd-Shift-4) for Window/Selection (Space Bar to toggle mode), or ⌘# (Cmd-Shift-3) for Screenshot. Can do timed screen, but generally don’t need this with ⌘#.
4. Slideshow. Didn’t know it specifically, but I did know you can drag multiple documents to Preview at once and cycle through them.

So, one out of four ain’t too bad!

…via The Tao of Mac - Battlestar Galactica (Image cropped to fit site width).

I set up a ‘fake’ domain to use as testing, I basically made up a word, Shotza, to use. So, I could use it as http://shotza/ in a podcast - it would remind me that it wasn’t really supposed to point to my computer, just as a temporary thing. Anyway, when online tonight, I tried it from within iTunes. It wasn’t working. So I tried it in Firefox. http://shotza/ worked fine, so I tried http://shotza/rn/ Imagine my surprise when I get transferred to the page: http://www.ilovedmypet.com/view.asp?id=11753&preview;=yes&warned;=yes How the hell does my browser get hijacked like this? I’ve never turned on a setting that allows for host names to be used to try and find out what I meant! Is this a Firefox setting somewhere? It doesn’t seem to happen in Safari…I wonder if it could be a hard-coded thing in FireFox? Update: It seems to have something to do with Google, as this site is the first hit for a search for Shotza. Hmm, how do I turn that off?

I’m involved in a trial program using Microsoft Scholaris, an online educational management and teaching tool. There are some issues I’ve come across as I work on it, and I’ll keep a bit of a record of them as part of this blog.

• The first, most obvious one is that it doesn’t work correctly on a standards compliant browser. You guessed it, it only works well on Internet Explorer, and only on a PC. IE mac is pretty ordinary anyway, btu Safari and Firefox both have some serious display issues. It’s almost like it’s been deliberately coded to not work properly.
• econdly, I’d like tools to work with tables better. HTML is notoriously hard to work with tables under. Surely a WYSIWYG editor that can do tables acceptably well isn’t that hard to include.
• Third: I don’t want the students to be able to enter styled text unless I deem that it is necessary. I am interested in content, not style.
• Finally, it takes so damn long to set up one assessment task. To do one questions, where the students have to enter five words, and five descriptions (Electrical Safety/First Aid, DRABC), it has taken me about 10 minutes to set up, and it still isn’t looking right. When I choose not to have a line break, don’t keep on inserting one!

I would love some software like this, that makes it easy to set up online tests and the like, but at this stage, Scholaris isn’t easy. I don’t know who Microsoft bought Scholaris from, but I think they should have waited a bit longer before doing so.

I teach _AutoDesk Inventor _at school, and I love using it. I have come across what I deem to be a major issue. I work from a USB Drive, for a couple of reasons - the main one of them is that most machines I work at are shared machines, and the second (the reason I cannot just work from the network storage) I sometimes take work home. Finally, the USB device seems somewhat faster to access than my network drive. However, my USB Drive doesn’t always mount as the same volume letter. On most machines, it mounts as E:\, however, on the machine I am on now (a different pool), it mounts as J:\. Normally, this doesn’t matter, as files tend not to refer to one another. What’s not cool is when these locations are hard coded into a Project file. And moving machines means I need to go through and change each location. And then repeat this when I go back to the original computer.

One of the most common issues we see on the Blogsome Forums is when a user tries to post an article that has non-latin characters in the title. I found I had done this, with a recent post without realising this. What I propose is a change to the Blogsome code that either just strips out the extended characters, or replaces them by similar characters. It could convert any of the characters: à áâãäå into a, for instance, and æ into ae. For others, it could either convert ² into 2 or squared. I’m guessig a simple function could be rolled to do this, or even found out there already on the Internet.