Category Archives: Technology

accessing microsoft live meeting from a mac

Posted on by
Reply

I used my Mac to access a live meeting months ago. Everything was fine. Since then I upgraded my Java install and then it become difficult. Live Meeting has a test page so you can test compatibility in advance of the meeting. This blog post goes through what to do to get it working with Java 8. (Java 7 after a certain patch level has the same issues).

Go to the test page and click “join meeting.” You’ll get one or two pop-ups similar to the following with the error message “Application Blocked By Java Security” and the detail “For security, applications must now meet the requirements for the High or Very High security settings, or be part of the Exception Site List, to be allowed to run”. Note the location. The number could change. For me it was https://fwd125.livemeeting.com

safari1It would be nice if Microsoft – a large company – would sign their applet to make this unnecesary, but ok.

  1. System Preferences
  2. Java
  3. Security
  4. Click “edit site list”
  5. Try the URL you noted (https://fwd125.livemeeting.com in my example)
  6. Add

It now looks like:

safari2

At this point, restart your browser. If you just re-load the page, it will not pick up on the new settings. If you did it correctly, you will see one or two prompts of:

safari3

If you try this in Safari, it will hang forever with the screen:

safari4

According to this thread, you need a 64 bit browser to use Java now. (Thanks for the error message Oracle. Failing silently is the way to go. Ok done with the sarcasm.) Safari and Chrome are 32 bit. Switching to Firefox.

To start with, you get a misleading error about Firefox not being supported. Ignore it and click “enter meeting” anyway.

firefox4

Next you get to similar warnings to confirm you really want to run the applet. Click run twice:

firefox3

You may need to click the address bar to allow it to run the applet:

firefox2

At this point, you may get the blue hang screen we saw in Safari. This time, click the brick icon in the popup and allow.

firefox5

And finally – success:

firefox6

 

 

[first] keeping FIRST kids safe (the new youth protection program)

Posted on by
Reply

Keeping FIRST kids safe (largely about the new screening process)

This session was a short video followed by mostly Q&A.

For other posts about the 2014 FIRST conference, see the index page.  (written on my iPad; please excuse typos)

The video

  • about how to protect students from physical, mental and emotional abuse. It also covered physical safety and teamwork.
  • Good – reinforce coopertition and go
  • For small issues, Talk about a problem, redirect to something more appropriate, be specific, document (for yourself, in case a pattern
  • If bigger problem, email safety@usfirst.org

Youth Protection Program

  • Will be training materials online- not yet
  • Two key coaches must register

Screening

  • Free.  (FIRST covers the cost of)
  • Give full legal name, address, optional last 4 of social security number
  • They look at:  Sex offender registry, criminal records db
  • Takes 1.5 business days unless problem

Who is screened

  • If screened in past 2 years, don’t have to do it again.  Expires every 3 years
  • “All” coaches and event volunteers
  • Up to lead coaches whether need other mentors require youth protection clearance
  • Anyone who volunteers for events in VIMS will be screened.
  • Walk on volunteers will still be accepted and paired with someone who has been screened

My impressions:

I had heard about the youth protection program, but hadn’t read what it was. Since I was here, I figured I would hear it live.

windows 8.1 on virtualbox – a more permanent solution

Posted on by
Reply

In January, I installed the Windows 8.1 trial on VirtualBox.  The trial is good for 3 months.  I need a more permanent solution so I bought Windows 8.  I chose to buy a physical DVD so I have it in case I need to re-install it.  This turned out to be an “adventure” as Staples lost it the first time and there was some trouble picking it up.

This post assumes a tiny bit of experience with Windows 8.  If you don’t have any, see the trial post first.

Creating the VM from DVD – failed 64 bit attempt

The Windows 32 DVD didn’t stay in drive. 64 bit did though so I tried installing that.  In VirtualBox, you click the CD/DVD icon  and set storage to “host drive.”   After the Windows splash screen, I got “your PC needs to restart.”  So far so good.  Then I got

Error Code: 0x000000C4

Control command delete didn’t allow me to kill the virtual machine. I didn’t even have a cursor/pointer on my main Mac.  I had to press the power button on my Mac to get out of the virtual machine and close it.

I saw there were CPU requirements for 64 bit Windows and decided to try 32 bit again.  I’m doing anything powerful in Windows so I don’t need much memory.  The 32 bit DVD worked fine the second time.  A later found out there is an instruction you can give VirtualBox to load 64 bit Windows.

Creating the VM from DVD – successful 32 bit attempt

This went smoothly.  The gist of what went on:

  • Install now
  • Enter key from product key card
  • Choose custom: install windows only (advanced) – because not upgrading
  • Install Windows: “drive 0 unallocated space”
  • Started installing – showed % then blue windows splash for a few minutes then rebooted
  • Personalize screen – customize
  • Turn off shared info settings – don’t send data to MS
  • Prompted to sign into MS account.  I entered the wrong info (on purpose to see what would happen.)  I got prompted to create a local account.  Perfect.  Went with that.
  • Saw getting critical updates screen for a while since the DVD is older – the screen changes color as it downloads
  • Reboot again
  • Saw installing your apps – again the screen changes color as it goes

What I setup

  • view > switch to scale mode so don’t have to scroll up, down, left and right in Windows
  • Boot to desktop instead of Windows 8 screen.  This also allows shutting down by right clicking the windows icon at the bottom left.
  • I used solution 3 in this post to get rid of the black help box
  • in “tiles” went to command and pinned it to start menu and task bar so the DOS prompt is always handy.  I use it a lot in Windows to avoid having to use Windows while still being able to test Windows behavior in Java
  • Launched the control panel (which took a long time to load first time) so I could edit the PATH environment variable to add the path of javac

What I installed

  • JDK
  • The git app (because it is faster than setting up git manually) and login as me.  This gets the git shell quickly

Accessing the DVD drive

I wanted to run a DVD to see what it looked like and if there was anything beyond the PDF and Shockwave files.  (There wasn’t.)  To get VirtualBox to show me the d drive, I went to devices > host drive and chose my DVD drive.  Then the d drive turns into the real DVD drive instead of VirtualBox extensions.

As I was shutting down Virtual Box, I tried to eject the DVD from the Mac.  My Mac didn’t recognize the DVD.  I wound up having to wait until the Windows VM shut down (which took a while because Windows was busy patching.)  Then the Mac saw the DVD as if I had just stuck it in.

A nice aside

I learned you can drag a swf (Shockwave) file to the browser URL bar to open it.

Communicating with the VM

I’m still using my github system to communicate so repeating that from my trial post.

You can copy/paste from VirtualBox.  I decided to use github instead though as I already have the code I want to try on Windows in a private github repository.  Github has a Windows client.  I’ve never used it so decided to download to see what it is like.  It is only 41.2MB, but downloaded really slowly.   The app provided a UI to clone a repository in github which it automatically checks out into Documents/github/repo-name.  The UI is nice, but I wound up using the git bash shell provided with the application.  Which meant it really only saved me some setup.

Other options would have been Dropbox or just use the copy/paste functionality from VirtualBox.  (I really didn’t want to do that for whole files.)