Category: Tech

Disabling Controls on a Brightcove Video

At last, we figured out how to disable the playback controls on a Brightcove video. It was far from easy to figure out, but it IS possible to do in a few simple steps.

Why Disable Playback Controls?

Why would you want to turn off the play/pause options on a video and disable the scrubber at the bottom?

Well in my case, we often put up sales pages online and a) don’t want folks skipping to the end of the video and b) have tightly controlled timing of things like when the Add to Cart button pops up.

With other players (JW Player, FlowPlayer, EZS3, Easy Video Player and MORE) you can easily disable the controls. Continue reading “Disabling Controls on a Brightcove Video”

Unmerging Two Contacts on Android

AndroidOne day, I went to email a contact on my Android tablet, and as I started to type his email address, a different name came up. Oddly, I noticed that all of Chris’ email addresses were now showing up under Leo’s name (along with Leo’s email addresses).

Additionally, in the Google Voice call log and text history on my tablet, any calls or texts with Chris showed up as calls/texts with Leo.

This was not expected. In Gmail on the web, and in Gmail on my Android phone, both contacts were still distinct, but not on my tablet; they were merged together somehow… Continue reading “Unmerging Two Contacts on Android”

Google Docs – How to Find Documents Shared With Someone

Google DocsIn the old version of Google Docs, you could search for documents shared with someone. In the new version you can not. After much searching, I finally found a list of search codes you can use to search Google Docs and voila, you can indeed search for documents shared with people by using the “to:” prefix, i.e. to:bob@somewhere.com. Continue reading “Google Docs – How to Find Documents Shared With Someone”

Integrating Infusionsoft Links with WordPress

Wouldn’t it be cool if your landing pages that Infusionsoft tracking links and web form thank you page redirects go to could be personalized?

Until now, there wasn’t a WordPress plugin that let you do such a thing.

Infusionsoft allows you to create tracking links and include customer information such as their name and email address in the query string of the URL. Infusionsoft also allows your web forms to redirect to a thank you page on your site and include the web form data in the redirect link.

The challenge is that WordPress sites can SEE this data at the end of the URL , but can’t DO anything with it. So I wrote a plugin that can. Continue reading “Integrating Infusionsoft Links with WordPress”

Migrating from Movable Type to WordPress

Switching your blog from Moivable Type to WordPress can be a real challenge, especially if your URL structure has changed.

In my case, our blog posts were previously /blog/year/month/post_name_with_underscores.html and under WordPress were going to be simply /post-with-hyphens/

While there are many a fancy regex one can setup in their .htaccess file for 301 redirects, they often involve looping through a recursive regex to replace each individual underscore with a hypen, and then other regexes to do the rest of the work before finally redirecting.

There had to be a better way… Continue reading “Migrating from Movable Type to WordPress”

ClickBank Instant Notification Service in Perl

ClickBank is generous to provide code examples for many implementations of their Instant Notification Service, but… they don’t include Perl for some reason.

Here’s my Perl implementation.

use CGI;
use Digest::SHA1 qw(sha1_hex);
use Encode;

$q = new CGI;

sub ipnVerification() {
  my $secretkey = 'YOUR SECRET KEY';
  my $pop = "";

  foreach $field (sort($q->param))
  {
   unless ($field eq "cverify") {
      $pop .=  $q->param($field) . "|";
    }
  }
  $pop .= $secretkey;
  my $calcedVerify = sha1_hex(encode("utf8", $pop));
  $calcedVerify = uc(substr($calcedVerify,0,8));
  return ($calcedVerify eq $q->param("cverify"));
}

Enjoy!

Hiking Camelback in Phoenix

Summit of Camelback at InfusionCon 2011
Summit of Camelback at InfusionCon 2011

Last year at InfusionCon, Jon Goldman asked if I wanted to climb Camelback the next morning in time to catch the sun rise from the head.

I blurted out YES before he could finish giving me the details and the next morning we found ourselves heading out of the resort around 5am.

This year at InfusionCon, a group of us planned a Sunset climb up to the hump of the camel and got together quite a group for what proved to be a challenging, fun and gorgeous ascent. Continue reading “Hiking Camelback in Phoenix”

[Errno 32] Broken pipe in s3cmd

Broken Pipe in s3cmdI’ve been looking for a fast and easy way to deal with Amazon S3 from a Unix command line prompt, and came across s3cmd which seemed great, until it didn’t work.

After running s3cmd --configure to configure it and then running a test successfully, I tried to upload a file using  s3cmd put filename s3://bucket/filename and got an error, specifically [Errno 32] Broken pipe.

The program would continually throttle the upload speed and retry until it couldn’t get the file up at any speed, no matter how slow. Continue reading “[Errno 32] Broken pipe in s3cmd”

Extending the Battery Life of Verizon Android Phones

Android Low BatteryIf you have an android phone such as the Droid or Incredible, you know how horrible the battery life is. If you don’t touch the phone all day, you MIGHT make it to lunch time before needing to recharge it.

Thanks to Terry, I now have two backup batteries and a dedicated wall charger for spare batteries with an extra spare battery in my pocket at all times for when I’ll be away from a wall outlet for more than 4-6 hours. Sad, I know.

The good news is that I discovered a fantastic way to extend the battery life of your android phone on the Verizon network. Continue reading “Extending the Battery Life of Verizon Android Phones”

Reducing PDF File Sizes on OSX

ColorSync UtilitySometimes when I print a file to a PDF, the resulting file is HUGE. There’s no reason for a print-ready 1 page, mostly text page made in Microsoft Word to be 7 – 40 MB.

Fortunately, there’s a little-known, but super-effective solution to reduce the size of your PDF files dramatically.

Open ColorSync Utility (search for it using spotlight) and then drag your PDF file to the ColorSync Utility icon in your dock to open it. From there, you’ll see a drop down on the bottom left.

Choose Reduce File Size and click Apply. Save the file and note the drastically reduced file size. I’ve gone from 7MB to 500kb with two clicks and even better in some cases.

Goodbye bloated PDFs!