This is what I got for my first order of business today…

In case the image is too small it reads:

We’re sorry…

… but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

To continue searching, please type the characters you see below:

I know I work fast but this is ridiculous. AVG is up-to-date and reports no infection and AntiMalware Bytes is running right now but I am 99.99% certain I am not infected with anything doing automated Google queries.

I was having problems with GoDady last night while uploading some Wordpress Updates to a client’s account but that seems to have been a GoDaddy problem. Of course CMA Acces high-speed Internet cable here in Angleton sux the big one and I recommend avoid the service if you can get DSL. The added speed of cable is substantially mitigated by the continual Connection Reset By Peer errors. In many cases wireless Internet is faster than CMA Access Cable Internet. Getting a reset error really fast is hardly worth it. And they charge twice as much for worse service.

As I thought, AntiMalware Bytes also reports nothing.

I hope this is a one-off and I don’t need to start worrying about entering captcha codes to use Google search. I get the codes wrong about 1 out of 3 times.

Writing a large complicated plugin for Wordpress is not a trivial thing. The required skillset  touches on just about everything there is to know about Wordpress and Internet technology in general. I’m sure after you get a few apps under your belt the process gets more straightforward.

Even though the core  concepts of Internet computing  are the same for Wordpress  as any other platform I’ve worked with in the past, the toolset, including the programming laguage, is entirely different. Not that I don’t like and enjoy writing code in PHP, it’s just new and I have not been nearly as productive with it as I would be with a language and development platform that I have used frequently over the past couple of decades. I’m starting to get fairly profecient now though.

I had to go back and tweak most of my completed code because of a change I made to the map handling on a page. I needed a better way to manage multiple maps on a page than the hodge-podge I had initially. The change allowed me to provide for better helper maps depending on the context of the click. The pages should have been set up that way in the first place but this has been a learning process.  Debugging the ripple effect has been time consuming.

The major functionality on the admin side of the plugin is complete, but the list of little things that need to be done to tidy up a plugin if you are serious about releasing it seems to never dwindle. For every couple of things that get ticked off the list another couple of things are added.

The only major functionality left to complete this intial beta release is to integrate a user interface for creating cache activity logs. I have to decide the best way to integrate the functionality. A few of my options are:

• use the Wordpress comment system
• use SimplePress Forum
• use BuddyPress forums

My first choice was Simple Press and I spent a few hours messing around with it but for the second time out of three installations of Simple Press I had problems getting it to work out of the box.  So then I looked into Buddy Press forums and it’s a nice option but having Buddy Press as a requirement to run a simple gecoache manager is overkill. Maybe the next generation will be Buddy Press or bbPress application.

The Wordpress comment system is probably the easiest and simplest solution.  I’ll make a decision today.

Every now and then you come across something really funny on the Internet, like this brilliant discussion of dns wildcards at 1and1.  Makes you wonder how many people out there are in this gig who don’t even have a clue. A lot I am thinking. I don’t know everything, and granted the dns stuff can get quite complex if you don’t fiddle around with it often, but I do at least have a clue.

I’ve looked into the dns thing with 1and1 before and know wildcards are not supported but everytime I need to add a new subdomain, I look around again to see if there is a trick I missed. As it is I have to create a subdomain  in the 1and1 control panel before I can activate a blog under a domain. For a few domains each with a few subdomains its not so big a problem but if you ever get a site going that builds to hundreds or thousands of users the dns entries can get quite cumbersome and the wildcard restriction is a deal changer.

I guess your options are to move your hosting account or use a different dns service that allows wildcards and point both your top level domain and a wildcard subdomain to  the proper place at your 1and1 site, say a WorpressMu installation, and let Wordpress handle the url rewrites. Big hassle. Probably better to move or upgrade to an account that allows wildcarding if you need that level of service. For $9.00 a month I guess I don’t have too many complaints with 1and1.

I started writing this post yesterday around six in the morning  when I became preoccupied with “the project” and the post wast left hanging with just the first paragraph so I’ll just start where I left off …

I’ve accumulated several weeks of legal tablet pages that need to be transcribed into the documentation files. Working at home, without a billable customer, can tend to make a guy slack off on the mounds of documentation that need to be maintained, which is at once the worst and most important part of any big project. It’s not so bad when you are getting paid for it.

Anyway, I’ve got about fifteen hand-written pages that need to be transcribed and inserted variously into the business plan and/or design document and I really  need to spend some time this morning getting the documentation up-to-date… yet it’s looking like the task may get put off another day.

It’s been three weeks since I last posted here, or anywhere else I think. I’ve been working on the new project daily since the last post and it seems when I get intensely preoccupied on something everything else takes a backseat. It’s how I’m wired. But today I have an update.

The new Wordpress plugin I am writing is not yet complete but it is getting close. I had a major hangup this past week that set me back several days. I was having much difficulty getting an ajax response from MySQL via the Wordpress framework. I am using a wrapper class called SACK (Simple Ajax Code Kit) that is included with Wordpress to handle the ajax requests and unfortunately I spent a day or so trying to understand SACK since I thought my problem was with how I had implemented the callback function or something. The good news I guess is that SACK works exactly as advertised and was not the problem. For simple ajax requests, I recommend SACK highly. Simple, yet versatile.

Loading a Google map with ajax came off without a hitch but when I tried to get a list of marker items from the database to overlay onto the map I was coming up blank. Sending an ajax request to a script on the server and getting results worked as expected but when I tried sending through the Wordpress wp_ajax_ action hook there was a glitch: The xml data simply would not come back and I had a dickens of a time pinpointing the problem spot in the process.

I tried many things and had to do some tricky debugging to see what was happening on the server when the ajax script was called. After writing some code that injected log  messages into a MySql table I determined that the ajax action was never executing at all. Why? Well, just be sure to send your cookie info with the ajax request. D’oh!

It took almost five days to finally solve the problem but that is all in the past. In the process I learned a lot about generating valid xml and how to properly call a Wordpress Ajax action hook, not to mention intimate knowledge of the SACK wrapper class and the XMLHttpRequest object which it wraps. All good stuff.

Which brings us to the current status update.  All that is left now are some functions to import and export map data,  styling the admin screens, adding a widget for publishing maps to the front end, cleaning up the code, and setting up a support page on the distribution site, GulfCoastGeocache.com, and the first beta version of the Private Geocache Manager plugin will be available for download and installation. I reckon the import and export will take the most time but certainly by the end of the week I will have a much better idea of when the code will be released.

The inital beta version of the plugin will be very simple compared to the planned final version but it will be sufficient to create, import, export and manage one or more lists of geographical markers, along with the appropriate map interfaces for creating and viewing overlays.

If you Google “Geo Services” the front result page is all about the oilfield industry. In five years, or less, the new retail/consumer model building around the new location based geo fad — Geocaching — will replace the oilfield on the front page. I think Geocahing is here to stay and that it will be bigger than we can imagine. Within five years every consumer phone will have GPS hardware built in and have a geocache app pre-installed.

For the past two out of three weeks, intermingled with all the time wasted on trying to post videos, I’ve been splitting time from the magazine project to work on another project. Usually I don’t do that since I am a one-man show over here at my vast publishing empire and I believe in focus. And I have no one to delegate to. So for the past few weeks I’ve been writing what will be a plugin for Wordpress. Actually, two plugins that are related. One will be free for any Wordpress user and the other will be included as part of a blog membership to a new Wordpress Mu site called Gulf Coast Geocache. A private venture, you could say.

I will be giving more details on the new project in a couple of weeks. Maybe longer, maybe sooner depending on how long it takes me to finish the alpha code. It’s such a good idea I want to have something up and running, even if just a Beta version (what’s good enough for Google is good enough for me,) before I mention what a good idea I think it would be to have something like what I’m building.

The new project is a totally new idea I had a couple of months ago and have turned over and around in my mind and finally got excited about a few weeks ago. Much of the design is finished; it just came spilling out as fast as my pen could write. I love it when that happens. The database structure is created and sitting in a Mu site. I’ve also made significant progress on the programming: The abstract classes to manage the database are finished; stubs for all the methods are finished; the base class is ready to handle the creation of the base object and read and write values to a form; the first part of the admin form is ready to be tested. As soon as I get the form handling done for the first admin section the rest of the sections on the form will be cookie cutter and should go quickly.

To test the form I have to hook into Wordpress as a plugin and see what it looks like. I’ve never done that before so I have to get a handle on a few things — like using all the Wordpress hooks — and probably do some debugging on all the code up to now… but after that it should be steady progress.

I’m hoping in two weeks we will have something to look at.

The longer term project will take much longer, like the magazine, but the infrastructure will be in place and I think it is a totally cool and awesome idea.

I guess I should take a sober look at the final product of the Crappie Fishing video. I know it has some shortcomings. I could keep messing around with it for days and weeks trying to make it better but at some point you have to put up what you have and move on to the next thing, correcting the mistakes as you go.

I do want to start off by saying these videos are not planned video productions. These are videos of some guys going fishing. Same with the duck hunting video from New Year’s eve. It’s several hours of live action clipped together into a 10 minute video. I wouldn’t mind doing some planned productions, but I don’t have that going on right now.

Here are the major problems that I’ll be working on improving in the next video:

First and obviously is the audio. I do have an excuse. Mr. Jimmy knocked on my door out of the blue and asked if I wanted to go kill the crappie. I asked when. He said right now, we got to meet out at the boat ramp right now. Of course. So I grabbed all my gear and jumped in the truck. Except I forgot the wireless mic sitting on the table, which I bought explicitly and specifically for such circumstances.

Second is the encoding. A good bit still to learn with all this codec bullshit. For one thing there are way too many formats. You can tell when the marketing and legal departments are in charge at a tech corporation.

The final 20% of the Crappie Fishing video was shot with a Nikon D90 which records in .avi format. You can’t just throw avi clips into a PowerDirector timeline with the .mpg clips from your camcorder. Oh, you can mix them, but a little warning pops up telling you mixing the formats is not a good idea but PowerDirector will convert the avi video and mash it in with the mpg files anyway.

Needless to say I wasn’t happy about the mash so I SavedAs a new PowerDirector project and took every thing out except for the avi files and burned a compatible — or so I thought — mpg file, which I then used in the Crappie Fishing video. You might have noticed at the change from the camcorder footage to the D90 footage the encoder inserted vertical black bars and the wide angle is scrunched in there. Pathetic. The raw avi file is some excellent 16:9 footage shot with a very nice Nikkor 16-85 wide angle lens attached to the D90 camera body. It has to look good in the final cut or what is the use in having it.

Finally, a lesson I seem to learn over and over again: Be sure to bring all the necessary gear. Had I brought two key pieces of gear neither of the problems I just discussed would have been an issue. As mentioned, I forgot the wireless mic on the table.

The other bit of important kit is my little AC power converter so I can plug the camera in and record continuously with the flip screen open. Without the power adapter you have to record through the eyepiece only or you will drain the battery in about 20 minutes, maybe an hour if you bought the longer-life battery. Even without using the flip screen you must judiciously monitor your juice or it wont make it through the outing.

Other than the audio the recording went smoothly. Even without a tripod and shooting through the eyepiece I had plenty of footage to work with. I really wanted some footage of a crappie actually hitting the bait but without the power converter I couldn’t just let the camera run. Other than that I still need more practice with the editing tools in PowerDirector. After a few more of these 10 minute videos I should be getting pretty good with the software. I need some standard custom intros and transition effects.

Since I don’t have very many videos at the moment and since they are only promoted in my blogs and since I have plenty of storage and bandwidth available on my hosted account, for now, I think I will host my own videos and worry about a 3rd party host when or if I need to.

When I compare the resources I get for about $8 a month from 1and1 to what I would get from, say, Screencast, it’s a no-brainer. Screencast wants $10/mo for 20GB storage and 200GB bandwidth. I get 250GB storage and 2,500GB transfer bandwidth from 1and1 in addition to all the other stuff like 50 MySQL databases, shopping cart, hundreds of email accounts, stats, subdomains, etc, etc. That’s an order of magnitude for 20% less per month. Go figure.

So all I need to do is embed a player with a link to my file stored at 1and1 and I have the same service provided by any other hosting company except for the social crap, and who needs that. I just want to store and serve my videos on my blogs. I get to pick the quality; I get to decide what is fair use; I get to manage the meta data; I retain all rights to all my content; and I don’t have to worry about my video account getting yanked by some moron working for Google.

Right off the bat I know I don’t want to maintain all the embed codes needed for each particular file type/player combo so I went looking around for a Wordpress plugin to automate the embeding. Of course there is at least fifty options available but for now I am going to give Anarchy Media Player a go. The Anarchy plugin converts a simple hyperlink to any supported media file, such as .mov, .mp4, etc, and injects the proper object embed code into the content. It does not get much easier than that. Anarchy also comes in a Wordpress Mu version so to activate the capability for all blogs simply drop the plugin file into the mu-plugins directory and that’s it.

Here is a sneak preview of my first self hosted video UPDATE: moved!

[Final video Re-posted at Gulf Coast Texas Blog]

Since I ain’t too crazy about the .wmv format and anarchy doesn’t seem to want to load a preview image for the .wmv player, I am going to re-encode for flash (.flv).  PowerDirector doesn’t support the flv format so first I have to encode as .wmv and then use a flash converter to make the flash video.  Yeah not much fun, huh?

later…

So, can anyone recommend a good flash converter? I’ve tried Eltima SWF Video Converter and it botched the conversion. Can’t recommend.  The video was playing twice as fast as the audio. I am sure it’s my fault, but too bad. Eltima SWF Converter  doesn’t support mpg or mov and obnoxously watermarks — if you could call that a watermark — the output if you don’t register. You got to give me a better experience with the free version if you want me to buy, or even register.

I also tried Any Video Converter which launches mplayer.exe on startup and immediately starts leaking memory until the program crashes. I did convert one video but I can’t seem to get it to convert to 16:9  format. Again, not a rewarding experience.

Jeez. I would really like to get a new video up some day.

The most recent candidate in the search for a new video sharing service was Screencast. I had high hopes going in, signing up for a free account almost immediately. The ability to store and serve my unre-compressed video while retaining full ownership of the content (read some of the Terms of Service for other free video hosts if you don’t understand what this means) even had me considering the premium account.

As a quick test I tried to upload the same Winter Tour video that I uploaded to YouTube yesterday. I wanted to see the results of YouTube’s harsh compression next to the alleged untouched file streamed from Screencast. Unfortunately the upload failed without giving me any information as to why. After several days of messing around with what I now consider to be the sleazy world of video hosting, it’s one strike and your out.

There’s got to be a better solution out there that doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars a month.

I’ve been looking around at some of the YouTube alternative video hosts because me and YouTube are not getting along. Bottom line, trying to upload a video at YouTube is the pits. You guys at Google have a gajillion dollars; show some pride.

I made two quick videos this past weekend and one feature (10 minutes on YouTube.) The first two were only 52 seconds and while they were successfully uploaded they both took multiple attempts over several hours to complete. The feature length is DVD quality and comes in at about 500 meg. Since Sunday I’ve tried at least five or six times to upload the video to YouTube and every time it’s like getting spit in the eye. Hey, Google, a freaking progress indicator would be nice so we aren’t sitting around like a dumbass wondering if the upload has crashed, or is the encoding just really, really slow today. Show some pride.

So I started looking around at some of the YouTube alternative video hosts. I signed up for Veoh, started the upload… and after about 2 hrs the upload crashed. At least they have a status bar and you can plainly see your upload has crashed. I downloaded Veoh’s PC-based download helper but I haven’t tried it yet. At least with a download manager you can start the transfer from where it crashed.

I’m not too crazy about Veoh’s TOS. Or any TOS for that matter. It’s best just to not read them because only an idiot would agree to 40 pages of legal mumbo-jumbo just to use a crappy piece of software.

I’ve been to a couple of the other more popular hosts, too, such as Viddler, and Vimeo but haven’t set up an account yet. I’m going to try to upload the video on each service, simple pass or fail test. nothing fancy over hear in TheGarage.

In the meantime my video languishes.

The whole deal makes you feel like you’ve been tricked into tongue-kissing a monkey or something.