Thomasso’s weblog » Nifty Plug-ins

This is Just a Little Test Post to Get My Twitter-feed Working – Not Important

July 21st, 2010 Thomasso

I’m setting up my Twitter Feed to work with the blog. This is tough getting everything just right with so many settings, yikes.

Lets see if I can get this damn thing to tweet for me.

Added: Success! It worked! Yeah!

Now when I post, my Twitter feeds are send out to alert everyone that I have posted. Am I doing the world a favour by broadcasting my blog posts and jumping on the social media bandwagon, or is all this internet stuff just a complete waist of time and energy? Well, I kind of like it, and I am paying for it.

Heh heh, it appears that there are some who are anti-social media. I guess not everyone is a fan of networking. Hey-this is how you get the “better” employer to notice you, as compared to the social Luddite employers who are still stuck in the 80′s.

Posted in Blog Problems, General, Nifty Plug-ins | 5 Comments »

Installing Flash and Java for FireFox for Ubuntu 10.04

May 7th, 2010 Thomasso

This is for my friends who have either upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, or just did a fresh install, and are having problems with their Flash and Java for web sites like www.pogo.com. If you have installed from a fresh installation, or did a major upgrade from the last long term support release, more than likely your Flash and Java have been reconfigured.

The first part of this how-to is installing Flash, and the second part deals with installing Java and adding the plugins for FireFox, which are easy to follow, but they look daunting and seem labour intensive, but trust me, they are not.

PART ONE

Flash is not open source, and is propitiatory software, meaning that you cannot freely reconfigure it, or copy it and write to it unless you purchase a licence to do so. I personally have some issue with having it, but because it is so wide spread on the net, many web sites use it; it is practically unavoidable.

There are two ways of getting it. First is from the repositories used through synaptic. Although I prefer to use that version of flash, I found in my travels that it has some bugs that makes some web sites not function so well. The second, is to use Adobe Flash Player’s software, which is the better of the two. I will direct you to use Adobe here.

You can find the download page here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Once at the page, you should see, “Download Adobe Flash player”, “Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.45.2 Linux,” the current version at the time of this writing. Below that you will see a small drop-down box that you can click on that will have the following four options, choose: “.deb for Ubuntu 8.04+” Click on it and the file should start downloading onto your hard-drive after you agree with the terms and conditions of the software.

This file should download quickly. Once the “install_flash_player_10_linux.deb” has finished, double click on it and the installer will open and begin installing it on to your system.

Next, I recommend that you install the flash plugin for FireFox, called FlashGot. You can get it by clicking on tools –> Add-ons, in the FireFox menu, and choose the tab “Get Add-ons.” Then search “FlashGot,” in the search box, and once found, click “Add to FireFox.”

And that is it. Restart FireFox for the plugins to take effect and Adobe Flash to run.

To test to see if your Flash is properly working in FireFox, I would recommend that you try this web site : http://www.barbie.com Why? This is one of the most Flash ridden web sites I have ever seen!

PART TWO

Now for the Java and Java plugin for FireFox. I would only start this process if you plan on playing games over at pogo.com, otherwise, just ignore this section.

You need Java to navigate through Pogo and play the games that are on that web site. This link is the best site I have seen for installing and setting up Java to work with FireFox for Ubuntu. These Ten plus steps look like a lot hard work, but it is not. The whole process should take you about 15 minutes, and once done you will have the proper Java and Java plugins running with FireFox. Please click on the following link to get to the Java website where the instructions are.

Click here for installation instructions: JAVA. (You are reading the left-hand column!)

Note: if you are running the 64bit version of Ubuntu 10.04, you can find those instruction their also.

If you want, please leave me some feed back here and let me know if this was helpful or not. Good Luck and happy gaming!

Posted in Blog and Web Tech, Nifty Plug-ins, Software | Comments Off

I Like Google’s Street View Maps

October 22nd, 2009 Thomasso

This is so cool! I remember the Google truck driving around town, going from street to street, with this weird looking camera sitting on a tripod on its deck. In a way it is freaky knowing that the world can now see your street, house, even the garbage can and mess on the lawn. Only if there was some warning? This adds a whole new dimension of public view.The Google Street View service started up on October 7, 2009 for some areas of Canada, mostly the large cities and their urban areas. They got much of the Lower mainland, the Fraser Valley and Metro Vancouver area covered.

View Larger Map

Above, you can use your mouse to move the 360 degree picture around to see the main street in Fort Langley, and the street I live on. Of course I am not going to show the exact location, for privacy reasons. Have fun, take a tour of Fort Langley and the rest of the Metro Vancouver area – street by street!

I’ve already used the Google Street View for finding what a house or building looks like before I leave to visit it. I can see many more uses such as road conditions for large trucks, or parking spaces–whether it is pay parking or free public parking. The list seems endless.

I even checked to see if my image was captured becuase I did see that truck drive by me while I was walking to the market that day. No, I’m on it, or at least that I am aware of?

Posted in Blog and Web Tech, General, Nifty Plug-ins, Photographs | Comments Off

Don’t Mind me, Adding Plugins….

December 18th, 2007 Thomasso

I’m just experimenting with setting up Flash on the Blog here. This is taking more time than I thought?

/images/X.flv

If you are interested, I’ve just installed a Flash plugin on my Blog, called FlashVideoPlayer for Word Press. So far it has worked right out of the box, and seems to have lots of goodies as far as settings goes. But it needs that Thomasso Touch; it is not quite right…..

OK, another test for the FLASH Plugin, but this time I’m using streaming video. This video was from the Fraser River Flood of last June, 2007, the same video I uploaded to YouTube then. I think I can get the quality a bit better here on this Flash Player.

/images/fraser_jun112007.flv

The above video is 21.4MB and about 5:11min in length. When I converted the mpeg to flash, It had developed a flicker on the bottom? Weird? So I decreased the side of the video, 340 x 280, and the problem went away. At least the quality of the video is good compared to streaming AVI.

Posted in General, Nifty Plug-ins, Video | Comments Off

Working in Open Source: Bug1174H23

November 5th, 2006 Thomasso

Another hurtle was stepped over in the free world of Open Source–the Adobe Flash bug in Fedora-Core 5 and 6 (FC5, FC6) was fixed. I was getting a little peaved when, for the last 3 weeks, I could not get any flash-plugins to work on my machine–FC5 in any browser, including FireFox.

First I skewered, (literally too I might add), the net looking for the answer: That was a dud! At first I thought it was a bug, as I found out latter at this assumption was correct, and then I looked at some of the known fixes out there, such as the YUM Repositories where automatic install can be done with little or no hassles. The Flash plugin had a font / scrip problem where it would not, or could not read some of the various fonts that it uses. Adding to this, the font problem seems to have invited a unexpected security breach, thus causing it not to work at all in FC5.
After following some of the FAQs and fixes, I then gave up, and searched for another way to fix the problem. Then after some sole searching and reading about this problem, I then went to my favorite repository for RPM files, typed in “Flash-Plugin” and presto! The Flash Plugin worked right from the start–the power of the RPM file stood its grown again.

This raises some issues about repositories for open source systems, and how people are suppose to get right to the heart of the matter without spending too much time downloading, then ending up with 50 files installed?

Posted in Blog and Web Tech, General, Nifty Plug-ins | Comments Off

A Few Thoughts on Stuff

December 11th, 2005 Thomasso

When I first started to type out this post, I was going to talk about how ridiculous it was running around town while the mad x-mass shopping rush was taking place. I was also going to say how put off I was with the whole commercialization of penquote:x-mass:closequote: and how our children are getting sucked into the gift giving scheme. But no, I am not going to talk about that–instead I am going to talk about how happy I am that this term at College is almost over and that I have one last exam to do. I am going to talk about how happy that I will have some time to myself and will be able to spend it with some friends and hopefully some family.

But first, I reactivated my Smilies Icons today because I thought this theme could use them. I never reactivated them when I did the upgrade from Word-Press 1.2 to 1.5. I thought at the time that having them was a little too tacky for the theme’s tastes. Now that I am creating this theme from scratch, I could use them as long as I keep them to a minim. Word-Press came with about 20 to 22 stock smiley Icons, and adding them was real easy, with just a plug-in and some added code, the task was pure and simple. I may put them back in the comment section too if I find someone who would like to have them when they comment here. So, if you want them, just let me know–just one person needs to say penquote: Give me my Smillies back :closequote:….

I managed to do what I had to do for x-mass shopping. I did the bear minim that one could do in such times–that is, I sent Money Orders out to my two sisters who live way out in the boonies and bought gifts for my two nieces and nephew who live closer but do not live in the same house. I figure I will let them do the shopping and I can take all the credit for that. great plan eh?

For those of you who have been trying to keep in touch with me, well, you will soon have a much easer time as I may brake down and purchase a Cell Phone! Yes, that’s right folks, I my have a mobile phone and you can leave messages as apposed to not leaving anything like it is now. You all know how much I hate having the phone…. peroid….. but you have made your point about contacting me for various things when they come up. I will keep you posted as to when that actually happens.

So, until then, you all have a happy season holiday and happy shopping, spending money, running up those credit cards. I know I am being sarcastic.. he he he. But hey, you might as well have well you still can–right! Leave a comment if you are just saying Hi!

Posted in Diatribe, General, Nifty Plug-ins, University classes | 4 Comments »

Hey, the Week is Over

November 26th, 2005 Thomasso

Another week is over yet again. What and week although better than the last one, this one still bites. This post is little more than a update from last week’s drama regarding the switching and re-posting of employees into different departments at my work. Since that “phone call” I made last Friday, everything seems to be quite as far as the interaction between me and management goes. This quite period is normal whenever I inquire with the Human Resource managers about any problems occurring at the work place: they really take my inquires seriously. The “phone call” has already hit the top ten topics of conversation in the rumor-mill and the grape-vine got pretty hot while that rumor hit the wire. The short of it is–I only wondered why an employee could be moved from one department from another when there is a pay increase involved. Another words, could the employer take an employee without any competition and post them into a that higher-rate job position while the other job positions in that department have being filled with applicants who applied and won their competitions. The whole thing smells to me. My take on this is–I’m happy where I’m am and choose not to move because of the extremes in the other department. I do not wish to work in the Freezer-Cooler, even for a extra $0.25 to $1.00 per hour. They forgot that others want to work there. The managers only looked at those with the skills rather than those whom wished to advanced into that department and seek the skill–like training them is a bad thing? This is why I wonder about my employer and just how long this corporation is going to stay afloat in todays market economy?

The changes to the look and feel of the Blog are coming along nicely. My very own theme for Word Press. I just uploaded the CSS today with the new gif images and I’m quite happy with the look. It really jumps off the screen on my lap-top. The only problem I have right at the moment is on the MS- Internet Explorer browser: I can’t get the footer to show in IE while all the other browsers have no problems with that. Hummmm? Shity MS, why do people put up with it? Oh yeah, they paid for it…. he he ha ha ha ah he he…

Posted in Bitching about work, General, Nifty Plug-ins, Photographs | 4 Comments »

Graphics and Animations

November 12th, 2005 Thomasso

Today was a bit of a milestone as I finally got the art of POVRay and GIMP working together for me to produce GIF animated photos for the web. Alright, not a big deal for those who operate under a MS Windows operating system, but a victory on a LINUX system. Povray is a very powerful and free 3D graphics program that Ray Traces objects that you scrip into it. The complexity and ease of this GNU software package was daunting at first but once I spent some time with it, the easer it was to create with. GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is standard issue with almost every LINUX platform and works very similarly to Corel and Adobe’s packages. Putting these two together was an almost impossible task as tutorials and documentation files are scarce and poorly written. In a moment of truth, I woke up yesterday and the idea hit me as this great wave of inspiration followed through with a plan that I put to work immediately. The result worked. My first creation involved a short 21 frame animation in POVRay. Instead of rendering it to a MPEG of AVI file I dropped the frames into a directory as raw JEPG images. Next I converted all the images into GIMP format then renamed them to conform to GIMP’s GAP module which creates GIF animated images. On my very first try, as shown, success followed with more creative ideas and complex animations which are many times smaller than posting movie files of the same length.

Posted in General, Nifty Plug-ins, Photographs | Comments Off

No, You’re not Lost, I Just Upgraded!

February 26th, 2005 Thomasso

O kay, I have just done the bog upgrade and figured I should start back to the basics and work my way up again. I guess the look of the old layout sort of sucked. I could tell because everyone was telling that the blog was cool, but…. That was the indicator! When people are nice, that really means trouble and a change in needed. So here we are… Recently added: I just did a bunch of editing on the index page and it looks fairly straight forward. I Administration page is a little lame, but it works. So I’m slowly getting most of the plug ins back up again. I think there are a couple of them that I’m going to leave for good…. the new layout just does not need the clutter.

Previous entry from earlier on today: I think the first thing I must do is get the old favicon up, and start working the CSS to get these post looking good again. The drop case letters are off, yet I didn’t figure the old plugins would stay when I uploaded everything. At least that is one less thing I must do. Those plugins were a bitch sometimes to get working.

Oh, now I guess I need to worry about SPAM again because I just realized that my SPAM protection systems are gone. Holy crap! This could get ugly…..:(

So Here Is Word Press 1.5 StrayHorn!

Posted in Blog and Web Tech, Events, General, Nifty Plug-ins | 2 Comments »