Some people complained that they get this message when they open facebook:

I asked the people if they ever received mails from facebook – they said “regularly”. So I wasn’t really sure what could cause this issue.

So I grepped the logs from our mail servers and found… Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever tried to embed video files in PowerPoint? If you managed to do that, have you ever tried to play that presentation on other PCs or even on a mac? It’s a pain in the ass. I haven’t yet reached the point to say it’s impossible, but at least I can say it’s far from being easy.

The background: If you want the presentation to work out of the box, on every machine, you need to choose a video format that every OS can play by default. This means:

• you can’t use MP4 or any other QuickTime format because QuickTime might not be installed on Windows PCs
• you can’t use WMV formats for the same reason, just on the mac side this time
• you can embed SWF files and flash can be played back on Windows and Mac OS, but because it relies on third party software as well, PowerPoint can only embed SWFs in the Windows version, using ActiveX controls. These are not available on PowerPoint Mac which means the embedded SWF in a PPT created on Windows won’t play when you open the PPT on a Mac
• Of course you can’t use Matroska/DivX/Xvid/other special codecs because that would require a codec pack, otherwise the video won’t play
• You can’t even use MPEG2 because at least Windows PCs can’t play it by default

So I think the only way to do it is to use MPEG1. This means big file sizes and low quality – which clearly sucks.

Do you know a better solution? I don’t…

Often people ask me what is so wrong about the Internet Explorer. Apart from security issues, one of the reasons is the implementation of web standards. I recently stumbled upon the Acid3 Test which can be used to test how well web browsers follow web standards (read the wikipedia article if you want to know more).

So I fired up my browsers and opened the test pages. While the Acid2 test is mostly based on cascading style sheets (css), the Acid3 test mostly tests JavaScript and DOM implementation.

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Today I experienced one of these problems: My colleague in Berlin had that external hard disk drive. It was connected to a Buffalo TeraStation (that’s a NAS, sort of, with a super small linux). It was used as a backup drive there.

Now the TeraStation was horribly, almost hilariously damaged. It couldn’t be accessed from Windows machines anymore because the smb.conf was completely empty. I could edit it with vi (you don’t have vim on that minilinux) and save, nothing would happen. I could also echo stuff > smb.conf – it would always stay 0 bytes in size. Yes, I was root, I was owner, smb.conf had 777, everything. Whatever, that’s not my point here. Just as advice: NEVER EVER BUY SUCH CRAP!

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