Graham Robinson

The 2 W’s: Work and Weddings

// February 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Wedding, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

We’re definitely getting places with the wedding arranging and Amy and I have updated the wedding website with some more details. Passwords for a private area should be with you (who are on the list) will be with you soon.

On the work side we’re getting ready for the battle of lecture recording systems. Interestingly they are all very different. We tested out a Windows Media / Silverlight solution for the LLAS e-learning conference last friday (videos are here) and are also looking at a H.264 / Flash solutions too.

Typical…

// July 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Health, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

It’s a typical that just as I start writing down how well I do with the gym something happens that stops me going.

At the moment it is the Graduation ceremonies at the university. I’m streaming them with Cam3Media and it means I have to start work at normal and work through to 6.

At the moment I’m trying to start the ceremony at 4:45 and then try and catch 20 minutes between 5 and 5:30. Better than nothing I suppose.

Protected: Avenue post

// October 26th, 2008 // Enter your password to view comments. // Modern Languages, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

Last day at Humanities

// June 9th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Modern Languages, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

After working in Humanities at Avenue Campus in one way or another since 2003, tomorrow is my last day.

Another ISS person is down at Avenue, I’m going up to the main campus and hopefully everyone will miss me

It’s hard to work out which place is the best to be. They both have a lot of good points.

Avenue is quiet, air conditioned, independent (as managers are at highfield) and there is a very personal touch with everything with most people knowing me by name (and vice versa).

Highfield however has lots of things in it (Gym, shops, bars). Advice is closer and I’d meet more people within the team. Hopefully it would also be the first stage of better career progression.

But we’ll see how it goes. Nice drink tomorrow with some of the Avenue people, looking forward to it.

Allowed to learn?

// March 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

Everyone in IT got an email today saying that ISS aren’t allowed to have personal websites on www.soton.ac.uk/~username. I used to use mine for silly little things like practising php, hosting funny (but fully legal) files and putting large files that are too big to email for other people to download. Apparently this is too unprofessional for our new www.southampton.ac.uk brand, so it’s been taken away.

It made me think about (staff) learning at the university. If I look at my bookshelf in my office I can see

1. Programming Flash Communication Server [Paperback] by Reinhardt, Robert; Yang -  £23 – Bought by me
2. VBScript Pocket Reference [Paperback] by Childs, Matt – £10 – Bought by me
3. PHP and MySQL for dummies – £20 – bought by me
4. SQL (don’t know the details) – £15 – bought by me
5. ASP.NET all in one reference for dummies – £35 – bought by me

And most of my programming is done on Macromedia Studio 8, which I bought for £100 ish

The director of IT said that they don’t ‘spoon feed’ people to progress, but they don’t exactly give people opportunity either. Anyone looking to learn how to do HTML or PHP better go buy themselves a hosting package in the remaining 20 days of March. Or just don’t learn anything…

Flash player

// February 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

Some more uni work. Just a test

Protected: Working with ISS

// February 8th, 2008 // Enter your password to view comments. // iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

Update: Flash

// January 31st, 2008 // No Comments » // Modern Languages, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

A few posts ago I was talking about the work we’ve been doing with Flash and the D-Day that was coming up. Well this is the update to it.

Everyone was pretty happy with the result. We had a bunch of people connect from other universities and (more than I thought) bosses at ISS either had a look at the live stream or came down for the actual conference. I’ve also had to put together a flow chart for the institutions that have emailed the llas and asked how they did it as they want to do it too.

I’ve personally learnt a few lessons from it, the main one being sound. If you have a listen to the presentations (below or on the LLAS website) you can hear some distortion in the voices when they raise their voice. Of course we did all of the sound checks and everything sounded good, then they presented. Of course the voice of a presenter doing a sound check to one person and their voice when presenting to 100 is slightly different. Hell it’s a lot different. And because of the live encoding we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

Have a listen to it and see what you think, and maybe more importantly what you think of the Flash player; because that’s my work*

(I can’t seem to embed the video on this site, look at it here http://streaming.lang.soton.ac.uk/video/index.php?vidid=90a0d16&start=370)

* The bit that plays the video isn’t, that’s someone cleverer than me, but all the stuff around it is mine. Trouble is you can’t really see it as most of the application is security and this video doesn’t have much as it is public.

Countdown to power down

// January 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Funny, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

In about a hour the university data centre will go down taking the entire computer system with it. As it is my job to make sure everything works, and it purposefully won’t, then the rest of my week will be ‘interesting’.

And I love this ‘lolcatz’ no-war picture, so I’ll share it.

Christmas Actionscript

// December 29th, 2007 // No Comments » // Computing, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)

Have I been working over Christmas? Yes, but I’m actually quite enjoying it and it will only do me good in the long term.

I’ve been getting Flash to communicate with Flash Media Server 2 over the break and it’s not short work.

I’m very new to the server side coding of ActionScript. I’m armed with ‘Programming Flash Communications Server’, a very good O’Reilly book that is about 2 years out of date and Google. Shame there aren’t that many people who do this sort of thing so there is not much information.

The main thing I’m trying to do is security. Our system will have 3 levels of security – Internal only, passworded, none. None is easy as anyone can use the thing, internal and passworded are harder.

Flash can do a lot of checking of things, it can check to see if it is on the University network and whether you are logged into a site, the trouble is that anything tested on the client pc can be faked; so I need to get Flash to do the hard work and then get the server to check that the information is right. I think I’m on my way there now, but seeing as I’m on my 92nd version of the server application I should be.

I’ve managed to get Flash to check a PHP page and create a code that proves that they are internal and that they are allowed to view the video. Flash sends the time and key to the server, who then tries to create the same key with the same time stamp. If both the codes are the same then the server allows the video to stream.

The big plus side of using PHP is that we can get program information to appear inside the video, as apparently we have to show the title, broadcaster and date of broadcast with every video we send. We originally thought that academics would have to edit this into their video themselves so pulling it automatically would be a great way of making life easier.

It’s all hard to explain without a) going too technical b) going too simple or c) telling you how I made it so you can reverse my processes. But it is looking good.