Nathan Colgate

mProjector 4 Windows Fixes

We’re a mac shop.  Anytime we have to go back to a PC, I’m not a fan.  These are notes for any future development, and if you can get use out of them: great.

Problem 1) We couldn’t get our mProjector apps to run on a PC.  They would compile, but not run.  And not even give the nice “Please go download adobe flash player” messages.  We were getting the full blown windows error.

Turns out: we had installed flash player from firefox.  This, apparently, is not the same thing as installing the flash player from internet explorer.  Once we did that, we could run the applications.

Problem 2) We certainly didn’t want our clients running into the same issues. Solution is to include flash player with the build, right?  Well, for some unknown reason, our app doesn’t like flash player 10.0.32.18 that comes bundled with mProjector. Opening this page in IE showed that we were running 10.1.53.64 (Note visiting that link in FF shows that were were running 10.0.32.18).  But why couldn’t we choose that from the drop down?

Turns out: This one took a call to ScreenTime’s Jim Roberts.  He pointed me in the direction of this folder on our PC:

C:\Program Files\mProjector 4\Flash Players\Win

Which has a bunch of .ocx files that correspond to the available flash players for inclusion in our projector.  He said I should find a newer .ocx file and see how it works.  With a little bit of searching I found this folder:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash

Which had a Flash10h.ocx file, which I copied to the mProjector flash players folder.  After restarting mProjector, I was able to choose Flash10h as a included player, and the app built and launched fine.

Problem 3) The app is freaking slow-as-molasses on a PC! It’s speedy in the browser, speedy on my Mac, but on this PC it’s moving at about 0.5 fps. 

Turns out: I hate this kind of stuff.  I’m throwing in the towel here. If you have any insight into what we can do to speed this application up, please let me know.

Rails 3 ActionMailer and Delayed Job

What I’d like to do:

message = Notifier.password_reset_instructions(self)
Delayed::Job.enqueue MailerJob.new(message)

What happens when I do:

TypeError in Public/password resetsController#create
can’t dump anonymous class Class
…
/lib/delayed/backend/base.rb:61:in `payload_object=’

Problem line 61:

self[‘handler’] = object.to_yaml

Console confirms:

> user = User.find(:first)
> message = Notifier.password_reset_instructions(user)
> message.to_yaml
TypeError: can’t dump anonymous class Class

How I fixed it. Note: all of my notifier methods take a user argument, so I thought this was a little cleaner than coming up with a new job class for every email method:

Delayed::Job.enqueue NotifierJob.new(:password_reset_instructions,user_id)

And my lib/notifier_job.rb file:

class NotifierJob < Struct.new(:notifier_method,:user_id)
  def perform
    user = User.find(user_id)
    Notifier.send(notifier_method,user).deliver
  end
end 

Hope that helps.

How to Rename a File on S3 with right_aws and Keep Permissions

Because this took way too much time to figure out:

s3=RightAws::S3Interface.new(S3SwfUpload::S3Config.access_key_id, S3SwfUpload::S3Config.secret_access_key)
old_name = "tmp/#{self.video_file_name}"
new_name = original_video_file_path
bucket = S3SwfUpload::S3Config.bucket
(1..5).each do |try|
  begin
    acl_prop = s3.get_acl(bucket, old_name)
    s3.rename(bucket, old_name, new_name)
    s3.put_acl(bucket, new_name, acl_prop[:object])
    break
  rescue Exception => e
    self.video_log += "Problem renaming file, trying again... #{e}\n"
    sleep 1
  end
end

Dealing with Exception Notifier and Rails 2.3.3

I installed Exception Notifier on one of our Apps running Rails 2.3.3 and kept running into this error:

Net::SMTPFatalError (555 5.5.2 Syntax error..

A little bit of insight provided this heads up:

But as of Rails 2.3.3, the from email address will get the angle brackets added, so it can only contain the address.

Rails 2.3.4 is/was supposed to fix that, and includes tests so it will be ensured in future versions.

A quick look at the Exception Notifier README and I tried this:

ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %("app.error@myapp.com)

Success!