Things 11 and 12

This week, the focus of discussion is on podcasting and YouTube. You can read more details of the thing 11 here and thing 12 here.

Podcasting is very useful to a lot of people, however it has never appealed to me personally. I think BBC podcasts are very easy to use and the website is very well designed. I also like audible although it is more of an audio book site. I have used iTunes as well as VLC media player (which I think easily is the best media player out there at the moment) for listening to podcasts. VLC is cross platform so it works on Linux as well. Amarok is also a good alternative to use on Linux for listening to podcasts. Most websites also provide a built-in player to play podcasts.

As I mentioned, I am not really attracted towards podcasts. A reason might be that I like reading things. Also reading can lead you towards other related and interesting stories which lacks in podcasts. At this moment, I have subscribed to “Evening Report: South Asian News” from BBC podcasts and “Going Linux” and “Coffee Break French” from podcastalley.

I have my doubts when it comes to the usability of podcasts within a library. Although a good medium for tutorials, I think video has a totally different effect than just audio. As a result, tutorials for using e.g. SOLO may be a lot more effective if created in an interactive video session involving the reader (e.g. by using Adobe Captivate) rather than just a plain podcast. I will still explore them and see if I can find them more useful over the course of 23 things learning experience.

Thing 12 focuses on YouTube. I have been using YouTube since yonks but officially registered in August 2006. It is one of the best entertainment sites in my opinion and I think I have seen pretty much everything there since it was created. I often listen to music using YouTube as well. YouTube Edu is something I haven’t explored much before but it looks quite useful for prospective students mainly. I was naturally attracted towards Carnegie Mellon University and University of California Berkeley because of their strong computer science departments. The Said Business School at University of Oxford has a strong presence as well.

I am fairly sure most of the 23 things participants would be familiar with YouTube in one way or another, but here are a couple of things you might not know and find useful.

1. Sometimes you would like to repeat a particular video without continuously clicking on play button at the end of a video. E.g. if a new song comes out which is catchy and I want to listen to it continuously, I would need to click play at the end of the video each time. A easy way to achieve this is by replacing “youtube.com” in the actual link to “youtuberepeat.com” and the video will repeat itself continuously. Please note that this feature may be disabled in some videos and also that it is not an official YouTube feature.

As an example, if you are listening to a song lets say “Bright Lights” by “Placebo” at the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7LQZaS2_dA

You can just change it to

http://www.youtuberepeat.com/watch?v=A7LQZaS2_dA

to listen to it repeatedly.

2. YouTube used to show a count of all the videos that you have seen (this will only be applicable if you have an account with YouTube and are logged in while watching videos). Recently though, they have disabled that feature giving the reason of technical difficulties (without any further explanation). A lot of people complained against it but didn’t even get a reply from Google about it. I think Google is at that stage now where they have such a monopoly over the Internet that they can afford pulling out a stunt like this. Anyway, although not available publically, you can still get the count through YouTube API. Simply stated, you can get the count by:

a) Going to the link: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/YOUR-USER-NAME-HERE?v=2

b) This will either open a feed or most probably ask you to save a file (depending on the capabilities of your browser).

c) In any case, open the file and then search for “videoWatchCount” in it. The number next to it would be the video count. In my case, it is 5091 at this moment. You can also see other people’s count in this way as well but please respect their privacy.

Hope this is useful.

VNC Installation on Ubuntu 9.10

If you are trying to install VNC on Ubuntu 9.10, then you might have faced several problems e.g. getting the error “No password configured for VNC auth” or seeing no GUI once you log in (especially when you don’t have physical access to the server).

I tried to install vnc4server and spent at least 3 hours on it without any success to get rid of both errors mentioned above. I tried configuring vncpasswd, xorg.conf, xstartup, and Xvnc files but all efforts failed with same errors.

At the end, I removed all vnc4server files

sudo apt-get remove vnc4server

and installed tightvncserver instead.

Here is what you need to do:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
sudo vncpasswd (make sure your password is less than or equal to 8 characters)
sudo vncserver

Once your server is up and running, install a vncviewer on your client machine, in my case a Windows XP machine. I used RealVNC in this instance. Type the IP address of the server with the port number it is listening on (most prob. on port 5902) and then connect (in the format IPAddress:Port).

The first time I tried to connect, everything looked perfect. The gnome session started properly. However, the keyboard mapping was very different from the right one. To get the keyboard mapping right, do the following (not the best way to do it but it works).

sudo mv /usr/bin/xmodmap /usr/bin/xmodmap.orig

After wasting a lot of time on vnc4server, this was the quickest and easiest way for me to get things running through VNC. Hope this helps you if you are in the same boat.

Things 9 and 10

Thing 9 is all about social bookmarking with a focus on delicious. I have never used delicious before to add my own bookmarks but have used it a lot of times to see what’s popular in social bookmarking world. I think delicious and digg are two powerful phenomenon in social bookmarking world. I personally do prefer delicious for its slightly open interface.

My first impressions of delicious are very good. I am surprised at the speed of it especially, how quickly it can retrieve all associated tags from everyone who has bookmarked a particular item. I am also very happy with the ease of using it, especially to add tags, to maintain tag bundles, to send bookmarks to other people, to add other people bookmarks in your bookmarks and to see trends. One thing I especially liked was that if you added a bookmark and realized that you have forgotten to add any tags, you can just re-add it with tags and delicious updates the previous bookmark rather than adding a brand new one. I liked this feature quite a lot.

I opted not to go with delicious bookmarklet. That is just a personal preference, I like my browsers to be open spaced with almost no clutter of bookmarks or toolbars. I have added 10 bookmarks already and added a widget in my blog (on the sidebar) so that it displays the latest five bookmarks from delicious. I have a feeling that I will be using delicious quite regularly now. Here is a screenshot of how my account looks like at this moment.

Thing 10 continues with delicious but this time focusing on libraries. I took a look at the libraries in Oxford that are using delicious. I was particularly impressed by History Faculty library’s bookmarks as they have organized it very properly with good tags and requirement for Oxford’s subscription in the titles. All other libraries have done a pretty good job as well, in particular the Language library bookmarks and Vere Harmsworth library bookmarks deserves definite mentions. I have added Sainsbury library, Vere Harmsworth library, and History Faculty library in my networks to start with, and delicious makes it quite easy to switch between your own bookmarks and your network bookmarks. Subscribing to RSS feeds (at both user and tag level) was a breeze as well.

The only disappointment so far has been the Delicious network explorer. Although fancy in its animation, its pretty much useless to work with if the number of users in someone’s network exceeds a particular amount, for me after 50 users was very difficult to operate with.

The development of Sainsbury library’s start page

Update: I have added a new section at the bottom of the post for mailto links and email templates.

Recently, I have been working on the Sainsbury library’s start page to make it as useful as possible for the library staff. The feedback has been very useful in this regard and I have done some changes which I wanted to share with all of you.

Some of you might be aware that Sainsbury library is using Netvibes as a start page platform. See my previous post on start pages for more information regarding why we chose Netvibes. I will start by sharing a screenshot of how our start page looks now.

You might notice a lot of tabs on the top of the page. All of these serve a separate purpose and most of them are self-explanatory. Q: and K: are library and staff’s shared and private network drives and I won’t be showing any of those tabs for privacy reasons. These tabs integrate windows folder interface inside them and you can go in folder hierarchy and access files just like in normal windows (in practice, this has been achieved by using drive letters as src attribute of an iframe. The facebook, twitter, and del.ico bookmarks tabs are quite clear in their purpose and here is how they all look.

Facebook:

Twitter:

Del.ico Bookmarks:

For facebook, we have used an iframe, for twitter an RSS feed widget, and del.ico has its own widget for Netvibes.

Meeting jogger is fairly straight forward in its explanation, it lets the staff members jot down the agenda for the next staff meeting. It is achieved by adding the essential Webnote widget from Netvibes. The same widget is used for “Notes” section on main page, and multiple times in “Useful Information” page as shown in the next image.

Useful Information:

You might have noticed no information in the “Phone extensions” part of the page. The information does exist there, but I have minimised the widget for privacy reasons again.

The reading lists page is basically for quick access to published online reading lists as well as local files on the server.

Reading lists:

So far I have just updated you with what we have been doing to make our start page as useful as possible. I have also very briefly described how we achieved each of the tasks. Lets talk about some different aspects now, mainly of the main page sections. You might have noticed that some of the links on the “Quick Links” section on the left side of the main page has a link called Email Library Team. These are just simple mailto: links, e.g, to mail me, you will add a link like Email Masud. Here is the code.

<a href="mailto:masud.khokhar@gmail.com">Email Masud</a>

This should open up your default mail client with my email in the address field and empty subject and message body fields. To email more than one person, you can add multiple email addresses separated by a ;.

The possibilities are not limited here. You can use the same syntax to send standard template emails. E.g. to mail a reader about a forgotten University card, you can use an email template like Lost University Card.

This should open up your default mail client with empty address field, subject field as “Lost University Card” and body message as “You forgot your University card today. Please come and collect it. Thank you. Library Staff”. The code is given below:

<a href="mailto:&subject=Lost University Card&body=Dear , %0A%0AYou forgot your University card today. Please come and collect it. Thank you. %0A%0ALibrary Staff">Lost University Card</a>

Note the use of %0A%0A, which basically provides you with two line breaks for better formatting.

You also might have noticed that on the main page, we have a “Program launcher” section which launches useful library applications for us. OLIS Advance is the one most of us in Oxford should be familiar with, TagApply is used to sensitise and de-sensitise books with RFID tags, Pcounter is used for print quotas, and Pcontrol is used to monitor printers and control them. Other libraries might have their own software for similar purposes.

One of the main goals for the library start page was to give one interface from where almost all of the tasks can be achieved. We don’t want people to wonder and look in different folders where these programs are installed. All they should do is open the library start page, and Voila! they have access to everything they want. Therefore, to fulfil this philosophy, I had to include this program launcher on the main page. Each link in the program launcher is linked to a Visual Basic Script (.vbs) file, which runs a small snippet of code to open up what you want. I am sharing two of the common snippets we use to empower our start page.

Launching OLIS Advance:

Dim oShell
Set oShell = WScript.CreateObject ("WScript.Shell")
oShell.run "C:\PROGRA~1\oulas\olwen\Programs\telnet\telnet.exe olis.ox.ac.uk @C:\PROGRA~1\oulas\olwen\Programs\Telnet\olis.ts"
Set oShell = Nothing

Copy this code, change the path to the one in your system, open notepad, paste the code, and save the file as olis.vbs. This should launch OLIS Advance. Please make sure that the path in the script is the same as where OLIS Advance is installed in your system. Furthermore, the system uses the DOS 8.3 names to access folders (you may have noticed “Program Files” being called as “PROGRA~1″. If you face difficulty with this, let me know the full path and I can generate an equivalent short path for you.

Mapping Network Drives:

Dim objNetwork
Set objNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
objNetwork.MapNetworkDrive "K:" , "\\servernamehere\sharenamehere"
objNetwork.MapNetworkDrive "Q:" , "\\servernamehere\sharenamehere"
set objNetwork = Nothing

This will map two network drives defined by server name and share name and give them drive names K: and Q:. After running this script, open My Computer and your drives should appear after a slight delay.

This seems like quite a long post for a library start page but I have tried to make this start page as good as possible. Hope this has been helpful to you in some way as well.

Update: mailto links and email templates

As mentioned before, the mailto links can be a good way to work with email templates. I have recently added another tab in our Netvibes start page for email templates and I am writing some code here for everyone’s benefit.

Things to remember: mailto links have a body section. This body can only be in plain text form. This means you won’t be able to include html or images in the body section of your email. You can add links in plain text form and most email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution can understand them and link them directly to the website they are referring to.

As an example, the template for a claimed return item can be:

<li><a href="mailto:&subject=Claimed Return&body=Dear ... , %0A%0ADespite a thorough search of the library we have been unable to find the item cited above.
%0A%0A
Please would you conduct a final search for it and also check that you have not returned it to any other libraries that you use.
If you are still unable to locate it please get in touch with us so that we may remove it from your account and record it as missing.
%0A%0A
Best wishes,%0A%0A--------------------------------------------------------------------%0ALibrary Staff%0ASainsbury Library, Said Business School, Park End Street,%0AOxford, OX1 1HP%0A%0AEmail:  library@sbs.ox.ac.uk%0ATel:      01865288880%0A%0AFollow us:%0ATwitter:      http://twitter.com/SainsburyLib%0A
Facebook:   http://www.facebook.com/SainsburyLibrary">Claimed Return</a></li>

and this is how it will look like in Outlook 2007:

Template for Lost BOD/Library card can be:

<li><a href="mailto:&subject=Lost BOD/Library Card&body=Dear ... , %0A%0AYou should contact the OULS Admissions Office if you have lost your University library card. Please see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/admissions/replacement for details.
%0A%0A
Best wishes,%0A%0A--------------------------------------------------------------------%0ALibrary Staff%0ASainsbury Library, Said Business School, Park End Street,%0AOxford, OX1 1HP%0A%0AEmail:  library@sbs.ox.ac.uk%0ATel:      01865288880%0A%0AFollow us:%0ATwitter:      http://twitter.com/SainsburyLib%0A
Facebook:   http://www.facebook.com/SainsburyLibrary">Lost BOD/Library Card</a></li>

and a template for not allowing renewals by email can be:

<li><a href="mailto:&subject=Email Renewal&body=Dear ... , %0A%0AUnfortunately the library is not able to renew books by e-mail.
%0A%0A
You can renew online at http://library.ox.ac.uk/ via patron functions using your library card barcode and your password.
 You may also renew by telephone or in person. %0A%0A
Please note that you will not be able to renew your books online if:%0A
- they are overdue;%0A
- you have already reached maximum renewals (7 times)%0A
- the item has been reserved by another reader;%0A
- you owe fines of £10 or more
%0A%0A
If you require further assistance please ring the library help desk on 01865 288880.
%0A%0A
Best wishes,%0A%0A--------------------------------------------------------------------%0ALibrary Staff%0ASainsbury Library, Said Business School, Park End Street,%0AOxford, OX1 1HP%0A%0AEmail:  library@sbs.ox.ac.uk%0ATel:      01865288880%0A%0AFollow us:%0ATwitter:      http://twitter.com/SainsburyLib%0A
Facebook:   http://www.facebook.com/SainsburyLibrary">Email Renewal</a></li>

and this is how it will look like in Outlook 2007:

The spaces are important before and after text as they are interpreted in the same way by your email client. Similarly, as mentioned before, links are in plain text but most email clients are intelligent enough to automatically link them to their respective websites.

Hope this has been useful.

Things 7 and 8

For a description of thing 7, please read here.

For a description of thing 8, please read here.

I already had a Yahoo account so creating one was not necessary. I also had a Flickr account, so didn’t need to create one either. However, I am not a regular flickr user. I use Picasa web albums from Google when I need to, but mainly I and Henna use our own website for photo streams, e.g. as shown on mine and henna’s website. I personally think Flickr is better than Picasa web albums though, primarily just on the basis of popularity and ease of finding relevant blog widgets (though Picasa has gone really popular recently).

To accomplish this task, I uploaded the snowman I and Henna made during the big freeze outside our house. I have added it to the ‘Random’ set, geo-tagged it, added tags, and gave it a caption. I changed the license permissions to Creative Commons. I then added it to the 23 things Oxford’s flickr group.

Let me add the snowman photo directly here from Picasa. With special plugins, you can add photos directly from Picasa (and Flickr) into your post without uploading it in your post, and the photo is displayed directly from photo sharing site. This is also very handy as the plugin integrates within your content management system (in my case, WordPress) and you don’t even have to go to the photo sharing site, you can browse your albums right directly in the ‘add post’ screen).

I have experience of different web photo albums, mainly Picasa web albums, Flickr, and Photobucket. Personally, I think Picasa web albums has a very simple interface and very easy to understand, Flickr is slightly more complicated but more powerful. I don’t think Photobucket is in the same league at all, but it is a good basic online storage for photos. Picasa and Flickr comes with very handy software which you can use to easily add all the information to the photos and easily upload them all.

From a web 2.0 aspect, the tagging and geo-tagging features stand out and helps in easily searching for photos using them. From libraries point of view, I would be very interested to see how different libraries are using tools like Flickr or Picasa.

Coming to thing 8 now. I have never used Picnik before and I have to admit, I was quite impressed. It’s a very nifty little website, providing you with an excellent interface, good connectivity to most online photo storage sites, and very easy to use. It is limited in its use, but for an online site, it seems like one of the best. I personally use Adobe Photoshop or Gimp for editing. Will this site change how I edit images, no chance. Will I use it again, definitely. That is because you don’t always have access to Photoshop or Gimp and sometimes you just need a quick edit for a photo, but an edit which should be better than one performed in Microsoft Paint. This site is perfect for such a situation. I am posting a couple of images, before and after usage of Picnik, nothing exciting though.

RSS address and FeedBurner

As some of you might have noticed, I lacked the self-satisfaction for a particular blog theme. However, I recently stumbled upon a theme which I absolutely loved and immediately bought it. This is my first paid theme so I am sure I will stay consistent with this one.

On another note, I realized that when you move blogs from one domain to another (as I moved from http://www.masudk.com/blog to http://www.masudk.com), the RSS feed addresses change for your blog. This is not useful as you will lose all the readers of your blog through RSS (and they will never realise that your blog has moved to another address unless they visit the old address in a web browser). To handle this problem, there are different solutions. The most common solution is a HTTP 301 redirect however not everyone would have access to create one on their blog. The next solution is to create an XML-level redirect, more details of which can be seen on the link given.

However, the solution I want to discuss is Google’s FeedBurner. This is something which you should do at the creation of your blog, with the assumption that all your readers will then subscribe to the feed address that you will provide after playing with FeedBurner as explained below.

You can give FeedBurner your existing RSS feed address and it will generate a new RSS feed address for you. Then you enter the FeedBurner’s feed address on your blog/website for readers to subscribe to. Because of this new feed address, if you change the address of your blog and hence have a new RSS feed address, all you need to do is change the RSS address in your FeedBurner. The RSS address to which readers are subscribed to remains the same. The easiest way to understand is to think of FeedBurner’s RSS address as a shopping basket. You can fill the basket by going to Sainsbury, Tesco, or Morrissons . It doesn’t matter to the end receiver where the basket has been filled from, as long as they are receiving the filled basket.

In addition to this, FeedBurner also provides you statistics about how many readers are reading your RSS feed, what items are popular, how many of them are clicking on your posts, etc. These can be very handy to know your audience.