Shadowbox not loading images or flash

Date: Saturday 29th August 2009
Time: 12:45
Category: Other
Views: 1,177
Comments: No comments

An excellent alternative to the Lightbox script is Shadowbox, because it enables the display of multiple formats, including Flash. We use it on our projects page.

The trouble is, you might find that it just isn’t loading images – or Flash content. Yet again this seems to be a side-effect of Adblock Plus. It seems like avoiding ads comes at a price! Just disable Adblock Plus in Firefox and the problem will go away.

We don’t have a work-around for this yet, so if you do, please comment.

Taylor Swift plays our game

Date: Wednesday 5th August 2009
Time: 00:26
Category: Other
Views: 300
Comments: No comments

We designed and programmed a Love Calculator for the BBC back in 2001. The algorithm inside it mimics a children’s playground game by sorting through the letters in names.

The game still pulls in traffic to the BBC’s site 8 years later, and here you can see none other than country/pop star Taylor Swift playing it live on air.

Image not loading with Drupal & Adblock Plus

Date: Saturday 25th July 2009
Time: 10:11
Category: Other
Views: 269
Comments: No comments

Problem

Hopefully this will help someone. If you are using Drupal and testing on Firefox, you might run into a problem whereby an image will load while you are logged into the CMS, but when you log out it’s a no show.

Cause

This issue is caused by a precise combination of software and versions. We were using Drupal 6.13, Firefox 3.0.12, and Adblock Plus 1.1. It might even also be related to Drupal modules such as Login Destination or Advanced Front Page.

Solution

To solve it you can either:

• Revert to the previous version of the Adblock Plus add-on, version 1.02.

or (recommended):

• Upgrade to the latest release of Firefox, version 3.5.1 (which it might not yet have auto-detected for you).

Either of these measures should solve this unusual problem.

Why is WinZip so slow?

Date: Friday 12th June 2009
Time: 16:04
Category: Other
Views: 1,924
Comments: No comments

You might have noticed Winzip has started to run very slowly ever since you installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 or started to use Windows Vista. It’ll crawl along, taking about a second to extract each each file in an archive. What is going on?

The explanation is on WinZip’s site. It’s to do with Windows’ Attachment Manager assigning security threat levels to files. This really isn’t acceptable though, because it will slow down your work so much.

The suggested solution is to “unblock” each file on a file for file basis, but this again is not ideal. We are not aware of a permanent solution to this issue (i.e. a way of turning off the hyper-vigilant Attachment Manager). A better solution is perhaps to turn to 7-Zip.

7-Zip is freeware which is faster than Winzip, integrates into the shell and can handle at least as many compression formats. We’re using it, and at the time of writing it seems to be the best solution for the problem with WinZip.

iTunes says “Preparing to Install” every time it starts

Date: Friday 10th April 2009
Time: 12:40
Category: Other
Views: 1,422
Comments: 4 Comments

Here at Orland Media we make full use of iTunes on Vista, having it either on random play or tuning into to any of several hundred radio stations throughout the world while working.

The above mentioned problem can sometimes occur on upgrading iTunes, and it doesn’t go away even on a reboot. The simple cure for it is to make a new shortcut pointing to the iTunes executable file, and dispose of the old shortcut.