Williamsport Web Developer Weblog

I got an invite to MSN Soapbox and I have uploaded 10 of my best videos. Soapbox is Microsoft’s attempt to clone YouTube. I don’t like the video buffering which appears right in the middle of the video image. Also the community aspects of Soapbox are not as well developed as YouTube because you cannot subscribe to users or add them as friends. I don’t see any regular video bloggers there as well.

Every time I upload a video it crashes Internet Explorer which is how I know the upload is done. You can search for Soapbox videos using MSN Video Search or Windows Live Search.

I have successfully installed phpBB 2.0.21 on the Car Accessories web site. It can be found at: http://www.caraccessories.com/forum/index.php. I also documented the steps involved:

1. Copy phpBB2 directory to web site root or target directory
2. Create MySQL database phpbb
3. Create database user phpbb
4. Assign phpbb database privileges to phpbb user
5. Browse to /phpBB2/install/install.php
6. Select MySQL 4.x/5.x
7. Download config.php file
8. Replace config.php file in phpBB2 root directory
9. Delete install/ and contrib/ directories
10. Go to home page /phpBB2/index.php
11. Log in as Administrator

Next I will learn how to customize the phpBB design and add a link back to the web site.

I have finally finished reading Adobe Premiere Pro For Dummies by Keith Underdahl. I learned how to use the color correction effects which are very useful for improving the image quality of the footage I record using my Sony Handycam which does not handle low light situations very well. Adjusting the black / white balance often significantly improves the image quality.

I also learned about compositing; using a chroma key to make a background color disappear. In other words, blue screen special effects. I use my green blackboard as a green screen but it has to be strongly lit to remove any shadows which ruin the effect. The image matte effect is one of my favorite effects. It allows you to use an alpha mask to play video within a shape. I learned how to create a picture within a picture so I can have a smaller frame of video play within the full screen video.

Other subjects I studied include audio effects, titling, adding graphics, exporting frame stills, exporting movie options, and video transitions.

I plan to study Adobe After Effects next but I need to buy a book on that. I did buy a book on Cubase SX.

I spent most of this morning dealing with the YouTube web site which does a poor job communicating with its users. They don’t send out weekly or monthly newsletters. Their blog does not have a RSS feed. They do not have a message board where I can get my questions answered. Nobody knows what is going on with the site which leads to a lot of frustration and speculation. Several vloggers do angry videos demanding that problems be fixed.

This illustrates the importance of communicating with your clients or customers. You should let your web site visitors know that you are aware of problems with the site and tell them what you are doing to fix those problems. You should make it easy for web site visitors to find your blog and subscribe. You should send out a newsletter with news and information concerning your web site. And you need a message board where web site visitors can get answers to their questions. Message boards have the additional advantage of being indexed by the search engines and provide a good reason for people to return to the site, i.e. to check for a reply or read a forum thread.

After thinking about YouTube’s lack of communication I came up with several good ideas to address this problem with one of my clients, www.caraccessories.com. I added a blog category for the web site and posted a blog entry on their recent 1-800 number going down. Serveral customers thought their phone lines had been disconnected and this created a very bad impression. Nothing was done to communicate the real nature of the problem to the web site visitors.

Later on today I plan to install the phpBB 2 message board software on their site and start some forums where customers can get their questions answered or find information on the web site.

My clients can get some clue as to what I am learning or working on by reading this blog. I’ll have to make sure they all know about this blog.

I was very busy yesterday and worked from 9 AM to 5 AM the next day. I put my computer to work running a Web Position Gold ranking report and then went out to do some errands. I withdrew some cash using my bank’s ATM machine and bought a new 256 MB thumb drive because my old one is write protected and I can’t do anything about it. Thumb drives are getting to be pretty cheap. I paid less than $20 for a replacement at Wal-Mart. I have a script that copies some of my most frequently updated files to the thumb drive. I was unable to run that script until I had a new thumb drive.

I also bought a ten pack of DVD-R discs. I still have a few DVD+R discs but my other computers have older DVD-ROM drives and cannot read those type of discs. I had to make several attempts to burn a new DVD of Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Edition so I could finally install it on my DELL computer. Eventually I managed to burn it onto a DVD-R disc. I installed Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Edition, Visual Studio 2005, and the MSDN Library on my DELL which consumed a good portion of its 20 GB hard drive. I need to upgrade it to a bigger hard drive.

I also spent a lot of time documenting color correction in Adobe Premiere Pro. I am up to chapter 11 of Adobe Premiere Pro For Dummies by Keith Underdahl. My camcorder does not handle low light very well so it proved useful to know how to adjust the black/white balance. I was able to improve the look of several video clips. I did a video of an aromatherapy candle sold by Paul Robinett, a popular videographer on YouTube. I created most of the video in Windows Movie Maker but I color corrected a few clips in Adobe Premiere Pro and exported them.

I am making some progress with my multimedia production plans. I have discovered that I can make my recorded voice sound better by lowing the pitch by two semitones. Apparently this is a common problem because there are various VST plugins available specifically for correcting the pitch of a voice. The PreSonus Firebox came with Cubase LE and I was able to figure out how to process my audio with its pitch shift capabilities.

I am half way through my Adobe Premiere for Dummies book. It takes a long time to read because I have to try out various program features after I read about them. I have learned about editing clips and now I will learn about video effects.

A new version of the Firefox browser is now available. Firefox 2.0 has a close button on each tab making it less likely that you will accidentally close the wrong tab. The search box displays a drop down list of suggested search terms as you enter a word. It also shows a summary page of RSS feeds and lists various options for subscribing to the feed.

I mainly use Firefox for web sites like YouTube and Stickam that tend to crash Internet Explorer. Stickam crashes browsers so frequently that there is often a discussion on which browser is the best one to use. I also like the web developer tools extension for Firefox which is useful for troubleshooting web pages. The HTML Validator extension is also useful for web development.

Internet Explorer 7 is now available for Windows XP. I have switched from Windows 2000 Professional to Windows XP so I am using Internet Explorer 7 now. I have not noticed too many problems yet except for Macromedia Flash. I had to uninstall the Flash Player and reinstall it before I could watch videos on YouTube.

Internet Explorer 7 will make it easier for the general public to discover RSS feeds. This should make blogs and other forms of RSS feeds more popular. My web site already has the special meta tag that tells Internet Explorer 7 there are RSS feeds present on this web site. You should see the RSS icon light up when you visit this web site’s home page indicating that a feed was detected.

Today I received the 1 GB of RAM I purchased for my new DELL OptiPlex GX240. That gives it more memory than any other system I own. I used one of its 128 MB sticks of SDRAM in my old 500 MHz system to bring its RAM up to 512 MB.

I plan on some additional upgrades:

1. A 100 GB hard drive for the DELL which currently has only a 20 GB drive
2. A larger secondary hard drive for my current system
3. 512 MB of additional memory for my current system
4. An optical mouse for the old 500 MHz system

That will give me a decent spare computer and keep me in business. I’m selling an old 166 MHz computer with only 64 MB of RAM on eBay. I was running Windows 95 and Corel Linux on that system but it was my most obsolete computer so it is the one that has to go.

On Saturday I spent a lot of time experimenting and learning Cubase LE and Adobe Premiere Pro. With Cubase I concentrated on using the equalisers to adjust the sound of my recorded voice. I was able to get a slightly better sound but could not completely eliminate the peculiar sound of my recorded voice.

I also concentrated on audio effects in Adobe Premiere Pro. I discovered that it can normalize the gain of audio so very faint audio can be made audible by boosting the sound. That proved to be very useful because my voice recording was too low. Adobe Premiere Pro can also apply audio effects like a reverb which sounds similar to Cubase reverb. It has a plug-in directory for VST plug-ins which may offer some interesting possibilities. Theoretically I can install additional VST plug-ins such as used by software synthesizers to create a wide range of audio effects.

I also learned how to apply a video effect which appears to use Photoshop plug-ins. I may be able to install additional Photoshop plug-ins for additional video effects. I’m rather discouraged that I cannot make my voice sound decent but I am learning how to use some cool multimedia software.

Now that I’ve moved to Windows XP, I’m trying to use SQL Server 2005 rather than install SQL Server 2000. Unfortunately SQL Server 2005 makes some things more difficult. For example, exporting a SQL Server database to Access 2003 can generate many errors. I recently encountered numerous errors about unicode string conversion:

Error 0xc02020f6: Data Flow Task: Column “PlayerID” cannot convert between unicode and non-unicode string data types.
(SQL Server Import and Export Wizard)

I was unable to find much help online in solving this problem but eventually I figured out how to create an Integration Service Project to deal with the errors.

Open Visual Studio 2005 – create an Integration Service Project. Open a SSIS package saved from the failed SQL Server Import and Export Wizard.

• Drag Data Conversion item from toolbox.
• Delete connection between Source and Destination
• Connect Source to Data Conversion
• Connect Data Conversion to Destination
• Double click Data Conversion
• Check off Available Input Columns
• Change data type to "Unicode string [DT_WSTR]"
• Rename Output Alias which will be named Copy of
• Click OK button
• Double click Destination. Select Mappings.
• Select Data Conversion 1.Field from  Input Column

Data Flow

Data Conversion Transformation Editor

OLE DB Destination Editor – Mappings

On Thursday I developed a web service to get the New York Lotto numbers. My web service is getting the numbers from a RSS feed because it is easier to parse XML than it is to find data in HTML source code.

I reused the code from my Stickam ASPX page which uses the HttpWebRequest class of the System.Net namespace to make a request to a web server and get the response. I had the same problem with extra characters appearing at the end of the XML making it invalid so I fixed the StreamReader problem. Instead of reading a fixed number of bytes I read an entire line:


Dim Reader As StreamReader = New StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream(), System.Text.Encoding.UTF8)
Dim Writer As StringWriter = New StringWriter

Dim strLine As String
Do While Reader.Peek() >= 0
  strLine = Reader.ReadLine()
  Writer.WriteLine(strLine)
Loop


Yesterday I got the DELL Optiplex GX240 computer that I bought on eBay. This will replace my old computer which I use as a spare computer. When my good computer crashed I discovered that my old computer was too obsolete to meet my needs. It did not have enough hard drive space to install all the software I needed and it ran a web application too slowly. My old computer was just a 500 Mhz system with 384 MB of memory. The Dell is a 1.8 GHz system with 256 MB of memory. I’ve ordered 1 GB of memory for it. My good computer is a 2.66 GHz system with 512 MB of RAM.

I used the Dell to erase all the data from 6 old hard drives I’m selling on eBay. I need to sell my excess computer equipment to pay for these upgrades and to make room for the new computers.

My system crashed a few times with my USB thumb drive connected. The USB thumb drive was corrupted and now Windows XP and Windows 2000 insist the drive is write protected. I cannot copy any files to the USB thumb drive. I also cannot format it or run chkdsk on it. I keep getting this error message:

I see on a few message boards that many other people have experienced this problem and none of their solutions worked for me.

Yesterday I recorded some audio with my PreSonus Firebox and Cubase LE. I discovered that I need to hold the microphone closer to my mouth to increase the audio volume. Cubase was difficult to learn but I figured out how to apply a reverb effect to my voice which makes it sound like I’m talking in a big room. I still don’t like how my voice sounds when recorded but maybe I can figure out how to remix it in Cubase. Even if I can’t do anything to improve my voice recordings I can still use my little recording studio to do some cool audio effects.

I got my computer to boot up on Monday. It turns out the power switch cable became dislodged when I replaced the IDE cable. So whenever I pressed in the power switch the signal did not reach the motherboard. Boy do I feel stupid. I only figured this out after ordering a bare bones system and a back up computer which I didn’t really need.

Today I got a CMOS battery for my old computer but I will be replacing it with a better one I bought on eBay. I installed the hardware and software for my PreSonus Firebox and tested it. It works and sounds a lot better than a PC microphone although I was unable to get the audio loud enough.

I got a new hard drive delivered by UPS today. Car Accessories.com ordered it for me. http://www.caraccessories.com It is a 250 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM EIDE hard drive. I copied my Windows XP operating system onto this new drive using Drive Copy 4.0. Unfortuntately my system crashed twice after installing this new drive. I examined the Event Viewer error logs and Windows Help suggested replacing the IDE cable. I replaced the IDE cable with the new cable that came with the drive and now my system will not boot up at all. I tried reattaching the IDE cables various times but the system remains stone cold dead.

Car Accessories is ordering a bare bones system which they are going to ship to me. I’m also looking for a cheap back up system on eBay. I’m currently using my old computer which is only a 500 MHz system with 383 MB of RAM.

My hard drive is probably still good. I think the IDE controller is bad on the motherboard.

I am in the process of recovering from yesterday’s hard drive disaster. It is very upsetting to have another hard drive go bad when this already happened in July. I recovered most of my data and all client data. Today I am installing Visual Studio.NET 2003 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2005 on my Windows XP drive. I don’t think I’ll use SQL Server 2000 anymore. I am migrating to Windows XP because Adobe Premiere Pro only runs on Windows XP and my PreSonus Firebox also requires that operating system.

I’ve been too busy to do a lot of back ups. This hard drive disaster is yet another reminder to be better prepared. I have an old system to use as a back up but it is pretty old and needed a new CMOS battery which I ordered. I really should get a more current system to serve as a back up. It is also important to have all your software installed on your back up operating system drives or systems because it is very time consuming to install a lot of software.

But I would like to point out that it was my removable hard drive system which once again allowed me to recover from a major hard drive failure.

Unfortunately, the hard drive on my computer is going bad again. My computer froze shortly after I booted up this morning. When I rebooted I heard noises coming from the drive and got the blue screen of death. Fortunately, the drive is not completely unusable, just unreliable, and I was able to boot up and keep running long enough to back up my data.

I am migrating to Windows XP which I have on another removable hard drive. I was unable to get any work done today because I had to repeatedly boot up the bad drive and copy data off it. I also needed to install a lot of software on my Windows XP drive.

This is the second time my hard drive has gone bad in recent months. It could be due to the video capture and editing I’m doing. That causes a lot of hard drive fragmentation and stress to the drive. I really need to back up my data more often. I also need to update my backup system in case my computer becomes completely dead. I need to set up Internet access and install a lot of software on that backup system before it will be ready in a pinch.

Although it is fairly easily to get a single query string value, I recently found it was very difficult to get the entire querystring which I wanted to include in an error report. In order to store the querystring in a variable you need to create a NameValueCollection from the System.Collections.Specialized namespace:


<%@ Import Namespace="System.Collections.Specialized"%>
<script language="vb" runat="server">
Dim param As NameValueCollection
param = Request.QueryString


Then you will need two For loops (i.e. nested loops) to get the collection’s keys and values:


Dim i, j As Integer
Dim arr1() As String = param.AllKeys
For i = 0 To arr1.Length - 1
    Dim arr2() As String = param.GetValues(arr1(i))
    For j = 0 To arr2.Length - 1
        strQueryStringValue = strQueryStringValue & arr1(i) & "=" & arr2(j) & "&"
    Next
Next

This problem came up because I was trying to troubleshoot some code which I did not write. The previous developer gave a form the GET method and was passing a memo field in the querystring. This is bad programming because the querystring is not meant for lengthy amounts of text. There is a limit to the allowable length of a querystring. Many firewalls will truncate a querystring because lengthy querystrings are used to cause buffer overflows in web servers and browsers. Therefore I wanted to get the length of the entire querystring for my error report.

I don’t like how my voice sounds when recorded with a PC microphone so I ordered over $500 of audio equipment. I bought a PreSonus Firebox 6×10 FireWire Recording Interface, a Shure SM58 Dynamic Handheld Microphone, a Sony MDR7506 Large Diaphragm Foldable Headphones, and a CBI HiZ Microphone Cable.

Unfortunately my computer does not have any firewire ports so I cannot try it out yet. I thought my computer had firewire ports but they turned out to be USB ports. So I had to order a 3 Plus 1 Port Firewire PCI Card which has not arrived yet. If my recording studio allows me to record the natural sound of my voice I will be able to narrate my screen capture videos.