Category Archives: Internet

Feb 04

Liberating Video From Flash or Silverlight via Quicktime Screen Recorder

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Example Quicktime video made from a embedded flash view

I had a recent situation where some video I need to deal with was locked into Silverlight, Flash or other website embed from the source. I am not advocating you duplicate restricted material with this method. You shouldn’t. This is just a quick guide to generate an editable movie using the default software inside Mac OS X. In the following example, I am just going to snag a clip from an embedded video on my own site.

There are other ways to do this and you can use additional software options from various vendors for video and audio, but my way only uses the following:

1. MacBook Pro with Line In and headphone jack
2. 3.5mm audio cable
3. Mac OS X 10.6.x or Mac OS X 10.7.x
4. Quicktime Player version 10.x (version that ships with Snow Leopard (10.6) or Lion (10.7)

I am running Lion (OS X 10.7) in my example. Here we go.

Step 1: Confirm Audio Settings and Cable setup

You can just trick the audio recording with a simple 3.5mm cable in the headphone and line in jacks. You can get software from Rogue Amoeba or others like SoundFlower, but I have always found quality issues and “stadium” echo sound effects when doing that. A simple audio cable does the trick.

Simple audio cable looped into both ports

 

Simple audio cable looped into both ports

 

Once you have the cable plugged-in, you need to check to be sure your Sound settings are correct. These will probably be set by default, but good thing to check.

OS X Sound Preference Pane Input Setup

OS X Sound Preference Pane Output Setup

Step 2: Position and setup video

In my tests, lowing the resolution down from the very high-res setting makes sense to do. In my tests, I usually cut the resolution to 1200×1024 or even 1024×768. If I am watching the clip in non-fullscreen mode so I don’t generate a huge video file.

Thinking about the setting of the display

Then, you want to go to the video via the web browser or whatever and get it queued up and ready to play. The more you have it setup, the less you will have to trim for the final video.

Prepping location for the video you want to capture

If you have the option, you can decide to record the video in fullscreen mode. Most embedded videos will give you the fullscreen option, but in my example, I am just snagging a fixed size embedded video.

Step 3: Quicktime Player New Screen Recording Prep

If you have the audio setup and the video queued and ready to go, then you can start the Quicktime Player. Inside QT Player, select “New Screen Recording”

File > New Screen Recording

Screen recording functionality is wonderful for training videos on how to walk people through something on the computer. The audio setting is typically the internal mic by default so you can narrate or do a voice-over of what you are doing. You do though have the option to change the audio source. In our case for this, you will change it to Line In.

Use Built-In Input: Line In

I have Soundflower installed, but am not using it. You might have other audio sources available too, but because of the audio cable setup, you will use Line In. Move the Screen Recording controller out of the way of the video location on your screen and get ready to record.

Step 4: Start the recording and play the video

When ready, press the record button. You can leave the volume on this controller down to the minimum. It does not dictate the volume. The Sound prefs do. (step 1 above.) When you trigger the record, you have to select the region of the screen to record.

Starting the Screen Recording

Get as close as you can to the core of the video you want to snag. If you just click, it will record the whole screen, so you probably want to just create a region around the video only. You can do the whole screen and then trigger fullscreen playback on the video, but that may or may not be really necessary depending on what you want from this all.

Selecting the Screen Recording Region

They press the the button to start recording to start the acquisition. Immediately then play the video. You will need to trim the screen recording of you pressing play on the video but that is super simple in Quicktime.

When have recorded the piece of video you require, you can stop recording and stop the video playback. Quicktime Player will open the screen recording capture for you.

Screen recording as a Quicktime Player movie

You can trim that initial part of the recording and you have a viable quicktime movie to export to mp4 or whatever.

Yes, not the most elegent or highest video quality in the world, but it does generate a workable video file with decent audio that came around via the loop cable. Hope this helps if you get caught in a situation that requires something like this.

Jan 25

Secured Pages Under Public Menus Workaround in WhippleHill Podium

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We had a need where we wanted some pages for the Parents’ Association to have public pages in our public navigation but also wanted to limit access to a few of the sibling pages. This is not the default functionality of the current WhippleHill Podium Page Manager system. Due to the way the pages get their security settings via the menu/page hierarchy makes it so that public or non-secured menus cannot have secured pages underneath it. All makes sense and totally acceptable. But, I still wanted to do it. Making sense and having things be acceptable has never stopped me before and didn’t this time either. I figured out a simple way to do that. It involves standard functionality of Podium, but a little use of redirect pages, vanity URLS. The initial effort is not minor, but the lasting value for your community might be worth it if you want to have a smooth transition from sibling pages that the world can view to those that you only want certain roles in your community to view. Here goes what I did with my example, your need will probably differ but hopefully this helps seeing the options you have.

Working within the functionality of the software

We have a top-level, or “Level 1″ menu that is part of our over navigation to every visitor of the website. Under that we have a menu that we wanted to have pages that are navigationally visible publicly, but require the visitor to have a level of security with a login to be able to view the content of the page. We did not want to do anything custom on the recently updated site, but still provide a non-disruptive flow for our parents. Again, your level of need may be different than ours. You might be able to just get by with a vanity URL for your community but we wanted something that would be more fluid for the parents, reward being logged-in to the site and blur the line between what was public and private content without constructing what felt like two separate sites under a single one.

Our Situation and Process

Here is what our sibling pages under the PA area of the website look like. We have the first two tabs (Mission & Welcome, Board & Committees) on the horizontal menu on the site are public and have page content. The other three tabs were actually pages (with channel content) nested under the PA public section originally but we wanted to secure them.

Sibling Pages with Horizontal Menu channel under a "Level 2" menu structure in WhippleHill Podium

Step 1: Get vanity URLs Going ASAP

If you aren’t using the SEO tab on your Podium pages, you are crazy. Do it immediately. If for no other reason, it is something that can really help you when you need to link to other pages and manage the site. As we also found out in the recent transition to a redesigned site, making effective use of the vanity URL functionality in WhippleHill Podium helps search engine referrals stay consistent between sites since Google and others reference those if you have them setup.

Adding a custom or vanity URL under the SEO tab in Page Manger

Step 2: Creating organization and redirects in the secured part of Page Manager

In Podium Page Manager, I took these three pages we wanted to only allow a certain group (role) in our community to have access to and created a new “open child” page with the desired security-level. Creating the “open child” page and securing it really is just to make a folder and something you can tack the pages you are moving into the secure world of Page Manager in an orderly way. Here is what the structure in Page Manager looks like after we are done.

In the above screenshot from Page Manager, the bottom three pages have actual content along with vanity URLs and were moved under this non-public “child only” page title “Parents’ Association (Secured)” which is kind of used too because of the page title channel to show users when they are in or out of a secured area. “Mission & Welcome” and “Board & Committess” are the same titles as the public pages under the website nagivation, but the are not really pages. They are just placeholders that redirect to the public page that has it’s same name. You can see in this detail of the page from Page Manager.

Page created in the secured area to redirect to the public page

I set up these two pages so when we have the horizontal nav on the secured pages linked to the siblings, it would look identical to the public pages. When clicked from one of the secured pages, it will use the vanity URL to go over to the public page cleanly. The user doesn’t know or care what is happening behind the scenes.

Step 3: Creating Redirects in the Public Part of Page Manager and Navigation

This is basically the same as step 2 but creating the redirect pages to go over to the secured pages vanity URLs. Here is a screenshot of the Page Manager structure in this area of our site.

In this public area (the 100. Parent’s Association page/menu is under a Level 1 menu that is public) all the pages inherit the public permissions. The first two pages have vanity URLs and have content channels and content for public viewing. But, the last three pages in the sort are just identically titled redirect pages to the secured pages from step 2. The redirect page to it’s vanity URL page equivalent is set to public.

But, when it redirects on these pages, it will prompt for a login and password because the target page has a security layer on it in Podium and I am not logged in.

In our case, we restrict these other pages to require “All School” role access level. This is the security setup on those pages.

Wrap-up

Anyway, I know this is a long blog post on this and it might be seem more confusing than it should. The overall concept of this workaround is to create two locations in Podium Page Manager where you will have secured and public pages. Then, get the pages you want it each area and hard-address them easily with vanity URLs and create whatever pages are necessary to make the areas identical through the use of complimentary URL redirect pages on both locations.

Here is what the two sides of the section look like. I used the Page Title channel options to reference the “Secured” title to subtly show parents they were in different areas when they click between if they were already logged-in. We do lose the nested menu orientation in the side nav because the pages are not really under the navigation if you are on a secured page, but that is a minor issue in our opinion so long as we can make the flow from public to private pages seem non-disruptive for community members.

Public Page

Secured Page

Hope this was helpful in some way if you are looking to get around the security limitation on public and secured pages that you might run into using the WhippleHill Podium CMS.

If there are any questions, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

Jonathan Mergy
mergy@mergy.org

 

Nov 04

Blocking The Big Education (Edu-Junk) Spammers

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There are two main organizations that I know must be dishing a thousands or millions of spam a day out to the school community. I have been watching the constant spam spewing from a few sources over the last couple of years and I have finally starting to look at some patterns to alleviate at least some of the junk our teachers are getting specifically from these junk engines. The two organizations I see as massive senders of edu-junk are Mindstreams / Lifetime Learning and Edupartners. I am sure there are many others out there you might be dealing with, but these two sources are prolific in the volume they spew daily.

Both Mindstreams / Lifetime Learning and Edupartners do put unsubscribe links on their junk, but the way they acquire the addresses would mean every single member of your faculty and staff would need to individually unsubscribe. This is not something any of us what to deal with so if you can, it is worth just getting some simple rules in at the server-side to inhibit this as much as possible. They seem to be immune to RBLs for some reason, so you will have to go it alone.

Here are some examples of the kind of junk they have servers pump to the school community.

EDUPartners SPAM

Lifetime Learning / Mindstreams SPAM

Except they pump thousands of these out and insert teacher names from the database, etc. This is nothing different than other spammers out there do daily either, but the difference here is a real volume increase and targeted audience for people that work in schools. They use multiple servers, outside spam vendors and tools like Silverpop Engage and probably a lot of other tools we don’t even know about. I finally had to do something on this.

If you want to inhibit this as well, here are a few items that have worked.

 

Block the entire routable IPs that Lifetime Learning / Mindstreams owns.

They have servers across their Class C ranges that do nothing but send and send. I have currently seen and blocked a couple of their ranges from even being able to send email to our networks. Here are the ranges I have seen and blocked outright because I have seen in the logs spam attacks across the entire ranges.

12.9.130.0/24
12.9.134.0/24

Just block it from even connecting to your network at all or at least at port 25 for SMTP. They are not (yet) doing SSL on port 465.

Here is a log showing a quick round from the second class c trying to send to us.

 

Anything from 208.85.51.183 is bad news.

This is a Silverpop-owned IP address. The whole block can probably be blocked, but I have consistently seen 208.85.51.183 do nothing but spam.

Here is there WHOIS lookup (as of 11/04/11)

#     “n 208.85.51.183″

NetRange:       208.85.48.0 – 208.85.55.255

CIDR:           208.85.48.0/21

OriginAS:       AS19795

NetName:        SILVERPOP-IP

NetHandle:      NET-208-85-48-0-1

Parent:         NET-208-0-0-0-0

NetType:        Direct Assignment

RegDate:        2007-12-03

Updated:        2008-02-22

Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-208-85-48-0-1

OrgName:        Silverpop Systems Inc.

OrgId:          SILVE-32

Address:        200 Galleria Pkwy

Address:        Ste 750

City:           Atlanta

StateProv:      GA

PostalCode:     30339

Country:        US

RegDate:        2007-02-22

Updated:        2011-08-03

Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/SILVE-32

OrgTechHandle: NETWO1905-ARIN

OrgTechName:   Network Operations

OrgTechPhone:  +1-678-247-0500

OrgTechEmail:  InfrastructureTeam@silverpop.com

OrgTechRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/NETWO1905-ARIN

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE1713-ARIN

OrgAbuseName:   Abuse Handler

OrgAbusePhone:  +1-678-247-0500

OrgAbuseEmail:  abuse@deliver.silverpop.com

OrgAbuseRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/ABUSE1713-ARIN

OrgNOCHandle: NETWO1905-ARIN

OrgNOCName:   Network Operations

OrgNOCPhone:  +1-678-247-0500

OrgNOCEmail:  InfrastructureTeam@silverpop.com

OrgNOCRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/NETWO1905-ARIN

RTechHandle: NETWO1905-ARIN

RTechName:   Network Operations

RTechPhone:  +1-678-247-0500

RTechEmail:  InfrastructureTeam@silverpop.com

RTechRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/NETWO1905-ARIN

RAbuseHandle: ABUSE1713-ARIN

RAbuseName:   Abuse Handler

RAbusePhone:  +1-678-247-0500

RAbuseEmail:  abuse@deliver.silverpop.com

RAbuseRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/ABUSE1713-ARIN

RNOCHandle: NETWO1905-ARIN

RNOCName:   Network Operations

RNOCPhone:  +1-678-247-0500

RNOCEmail:  InfrastructureTeam@silverpop.com

RNOCRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/NETWO1905-ARIN

 

Setup rules on your email server

Provided you still run your own email now that most schools seem to be going the Google Apps route while it is currently no charge.) I have a few rules that pick-off the current batches of junk from the Edu-Junk companies.

1. Anything received/sent from or has text string matching mkt5354.com

2. Anything received/sent from or has text string matching edupartners.com

3. Anything that gets a received from text string that has PowerMTA in it. This is a junk email sender they (and many others use constantly.

4. Block 208.85.51.183 outright as well. Crazy how much spam that IP is trying to send on behalf of edupartners.com.

208.85.51.183 Spam Attempts

 

I will continue to update as I can when new patterns emerge. Hope this helps.

Jun 19

Why Tweetbot Rules

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TWEETBOT LOGO

I have bought just about every Twitter client for iOS and have found them all pretty much as waste. They have features that are hit or miss and they are all probably fine for the basic user if you want to just stay within the bounds of what Twitter and the known services want to dump your way. Tweetie was great until Twitter acquired the developer and app to make it the official Twitter for iOS client then proceeded to strip-out functionality that actually made it really useful.

I run my own URL shortener and image hosting service so the options with Twitter clients are super important to me. Just about all the clients now for iOS stick to the standard services and do not allow custom configurations. This year, with the dumbing-down of Tweetie/Twitter, that I just started to use the web or mobile interface for Twitter for quite a while because the various clients were just so limited on configuration options. The key to Twitters success has always been innovative clients to help users (and power users) provide an interface to the stream of consciousness that is the Twitterverse. As Twitter tells developers to no longer develop client software to protect their own search for monetization, I fear the value of ease of use will decrease and ultimately destroy all that has been built. Twitter as shown it can rapidly inspire revolt with new ‘tools’ like it’s hated ‘QuickBar’ if there is a not a diversity of client interfaces.

Tweetdeck was a shining light in the dismal landscape, but that, like Tweetie, is now under the ownership of Twitter to soon be parted-out or stripped down based on the urgency of Twitter to figure out how they will be about to sell ads or something. Many feel Twitter acquired Tweetdeck to try and minimize client competition and unify client interface for it’s own benefit (not the twitter users that actually provide the content for Twitter.)

In this declining state of affairs for Twitter client innovation – Enter Tweetbot.

Tapbots is a small company that really gets it. In Tweetbot, they have developed the best user client for Twitter I have seen period. It runs on iOS but I hope they get it running on OS X as well. It runs circles around the other clients out there if you are looking for configuration options and settings. Here are some screenshots to show you what I mean.

Tweetbot rule because in this day of limiting user options and conforming to Twitter company mandates it pushes the focus back to the user of the tools and services to give us options on what and how we want to do. I hope many support this product and what it represents. If you have an iPhone and are not using Tweetbot, you need to give it a shot and trust me, you will be happy you did. @jmergy

Link: Buy Tweetbot From The Apple App Store

May 11

Use the Evernote Clipper With Safari On iPad and iPhone

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The Evernote Clipper is a great way to add URLs and sites to Evernote notebooks. It is a bookmarklet javascript that one can place on their browser bookmark bar to quickly select. But, in iOS, you don’t have that kind of functionality. Good news is the bookmarks function in Safari on iOS does allow execution of javascript. Works well on iPad, works okay on iPhone.

Here is what you do.

1. Go to http://www.evernote.com on your iPad or iPhone

2. Bookmark that in Safari

Add Bookmark on your iOS Device

 

3. Go to Bookmarks in Safari and edit the Evernote bookmark you just did.

 

4. Change the name/title to ‘Evernote Clipper’ or whatever you want it to be.

 

5. Paste this in the field where the URL is (from the “j” in javascript to the “;” ) and save.

javascript:(function(){EN_CLIP_HOST='http://www.evernote.com';try{var%20x=document.createElement('SCRIPT');x.type='text/javascript';x.src=EN_CLIP_HOST+'/public/bookmarkClipper.js?'+(new%20Date().getTime()/100000);document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(x);}catch(e){location.href=EN_CLIP_HOST+'/clip.action?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}})();

 

Pasting the JavaScript Into the URL Field

 

6. Save out of everything and go to a website or something and then when you are on the page, hit the bookmarks icon and select ‘Evernote Clipper’ bookmark to get the Evernote clipper screen.

Using the Clipper Bookmark on iOS

 

You might need to do the initial Safari login to Evernote, but after that, you should be good to go.

Clipper Javascript Bookmark on iOS