jPlayer: An HTML5 and JQuery based audio video player

Today while searching something else, I came across a really cool thing. A flash-less media player.. wow. jPlayer is the HTML 5 and JQuery based audio, video player which supports playlists and multiple media formats such as OGV and M4V for video and OGA and MP3 for audio. I tested jPlayer on my system and surprisingly its compatible with most browsers such as Firefox 3.6, Safari 5.0, IE 6.0, and Chrome 11.0 and it worked seamlessly. Pretty impressive!

The cool thing is that it offers full control of it for JQuery programmers. You can set seek media, set volume, change video/audio, load playlist, and do a hell of things that most of the paid/expensive media players do such as Longtail's JW Player. Its Javascript based so most of the frontend developers would love it.

Video player demo

Audio Player Demo

 Video playlist and audio playlist players

Download jPlayer | jPlayer Demos

How to send HTML email using Microsoft Outlook or Windows Live Mail

Few days ago, I had to send an html email with a fairly complex structure and with few images and backgrounds. I composed the html of it but when I was about to send it, I came to know that Microsoft Outlook, Express or Windows Live Mail (that’s what I use) doesn’t give any facility to this. It was quite surprising for me. I didn’t find any easy solution to it by searching on internet. Wise men say that create a way if you don’t find any.

As you may know, Windows Live Mail supports including HTML signatures and we can import external html files as well. This is what I incorporated.

Please follow the steps below:

Step 1: Compose the email

Compose the email in html. Read more information and guidelines on composing html emails here.

1. Create new html file and compose it according to your requirements
2. Save it as an html file on your computer (emailtemplate.html in our case)

This is how our email looks in design view. I used few <p>, <strong> , <img> and <table> tags for instance.

Step 2: Create new Signature

In your Windows Live Mail(Or Outlook)

1. Go to Tools > Options
2. Go to Signatures tab
3. Press New Button
4. Select File
5. And browse the HTML file that you just created.

Step 3:  Insert in your email

1. Compose new email
2. From Signatures drop down
3. Select the latest signature that you just created (HTML Email in our case)

Feel free to comment if you need more help!

Microsoft Launches Demo HTML5 website

Microsoft presents a demo website to be seen/tested on newly launched IE9 beta. Site uses cool transition effects, mouse over behaviors, media such as videos with Silverlight players, images(with preloaders), fade in/out effects. The site looks not that good on my Mozilla 3.6.10 however text is more Antialiased on IE9.

See it here: beautyoftheweb.com

Not sure when HTML5 is going to be a common practice in web design industry.

How to make a fast flying DNN site

Speed of DNN site has always been an issue however you can minimize the delays till some extent and this is true that a DNN site can run as fast as any other site built with PHP.

There are two major factors:

Dead sites
Yes, your site dies or sleeps if its not opened by a user for a certain time(in minutes of most of the servers). The IIS shuts down the process and cleans the memory in that case resulting a very long time on next first hit.

Rendering Time
The loading time of a page depends on the rendering time, design level things like CSS, image optimization, Cache settings, compression settings etc. Also, disabling the features that you don't need in a site will reduce the burden.

1. Skin should be fully CSS based

2. Use some other menu provider (Native navigations i.e; Nav, Solpart etc are slower)

3. It also depends what modules you're using in your site. Text/HTML is the fastest module.

4. For every new dnn project, we always optimize it according to Mitchel's most useful post in his blog: http://www.mitchelsellers.com/blogs/articletype/articleview/articleid/283/how-i-get-my-dotnetnuke-sites-to-run-so-fast.aspx

5. Also, there's a very good document about this topic found here DotNetNuke Performance Configuration Best Practices by Mitchel Sellers

6. Never let your application sleep.

I hope this helps!

Keep a DNN website alive for FREE

After a long time, I found something really great and free of cost and more than that it's one of the most demanded service/hack/whatever by the community. Mandeep's http://www.dnnmonitor.com now offers free ping service to keep your DNN website alive and in memory. It requires you to register only a free account and then let you add your websites and does the rest of good work itself. The website allows only the DNN websites currently. The best thing I guess is to give the url of your keepalive.aspx file. I've not yet seen the reports/graphs that they provide based on the hits to your website.

I remember the times when we used to use the desktop utilities like Renegade Mind's keep alive utility for DNN but the major drawback of it was, if the computer where its installed shuts down or goes out of internet connectivity then your site is gone again :S

I hope the service will remain free forever :p

ASP.net Tab Missing IIS Manager

That is a common problem when beta versions of Visual Studio
aren't fully uninstalled before the release version is installed, or when
Visual Studio's components are uninstalled in the wrong order.

Solution
FDBK21319#2: Remove Registry Entries that cause the problem
Thanks to Chris Adams:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forums/F...D=20592&INTID=6

To fix, check the following 3 regkeys :

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{7D23CCC6-A390-406E-AB67-2F8B7558F6F6}\InprocServer*32
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FD5CD8B1-6FE0-44F3-BBFB-65E3655B096E} \InprocServer32
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FEDB2179-2335-48F0-AA28-5CDA35A2B36D}\InprocServer*32

Under (expand) InProcServer32, look for the presence of a non-2.0.0.0 (example 2.0.36.0)
and remove it. It has a reference that causes this to break.

WARNING : don't fool with the registry if you are not proficient doing that.

Option B
You can work around the problem, if editing the registry doesn't fix it, by using
Denis Bauer's ASP.NET Version Switcher to switch ASP.NET versions.

http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/...onSwitcher.aspx

While it doesn't edit ASP.NET configuration files, at least it allows you
to pick the version of the framework will be used for specific websites.

Here's instructions on how to manually uninstall beta versions of Visual Studio 2005
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/s...ll/default.aspx

Or, you might want to use the VS 2005 beta cleanup tool.
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=47598


Source: http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread559064.html

Adding UNICODE data (Urdu/Arabic or RTL data) into Database

Problem:

Adding unicode data to the database produces weird question marks '????? ???? ??????' on output or displaying data.

Solution:

We can very easily correct this from the query analyzer using the "N" prefix, which instructs SQL server to treat this data as unicode. For example, the following code works perfectly.

sample query

update tblUrduArticles
set UrduDesc = N'بول کہ لب آزاد ھیں تیرے'
where ArticleID = 1296

I've checked it sql server 2000 successfully, hopefully it will work for you as well.

Regards

Imran Saami

Changing Ownership of Database objects

change ownership of a single object

EXEC sp_changeobjectowner 'authors', 'Muhammed'

 

Bulk Table Change Owner:

This will change the ownership of all tables found under a specified owner

DECLARE @oldOwner sysname, @newOwner sysname, @sql varchar(1000)
SELECT

@oldOwner = 'aspalliance'
, @newOwner = 'dbo'
, @sql = '

IF EXISTS (SELECT NULL FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
WHERE
QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA)+''.''+QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME) = ''?''
AND TABLE_SCHEMA = ''' + @oldOwner + '''
)

EXECUTE sp_changeobjectowner ''?'', ''' + @newOwner + ''''
EXECUTE sp_MSforeachtable @sql

 

 

Bulk Stored Procedure Change Owner

Since there's no direct iteration method for stored procedures so the code below will produce the queries for each stored procedure, copy the produced text and run it in query analyzer.

DECLARE @oldOwner sysname, @newOwner sysname

SELECT @oldOwner = 'aspalliance' , @newOwner = 'dbo'

select 'EXECUTE sp_changeobjectowner '''+QUOTENAME(a.SPECIFIC_SCHEMA)+'.'+QUOTENAME(a.ROUTINE_NAME)+''','''+@newOwner+''''
from
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES a
where
a.ROUTINE_TYPE = 'PROCEDURE'
AND a.SPECIFIC_SCHEMA = @oldOwner
AND
OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID(QUOTENAME(a.SPECIFIC_SCHEMA)+'.'+QUOTENAME(a.ROUTINE_NAME)), 'IsMSShipped') = 0

EXECUTE permission denied on object 'aspnet_CheckSchemaVersion'

Exception Details:

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: EXECUTE permission denied on object 'aspnet_CheckSchemaVersion', database 'g4ity_dbase4ity', owner 'dbo'.

OR

ANY kind of Execute Permission Denied on sql Server object.

Solution

• Goto properties of the dbo.aspnet_StoredProcedureName
• Open Permissions
• Allow your username for exec Permission

Overview

Whilst SQL Server 2000 has fixed database roles such as db_datareader and db_datawriter that allow a user read or write access respectively to all the table is a database, no such role exists for the execution of stored procedures (a db_executor role if you will). This article describes how to grant execute permission to all stored procedures in a database to a specific user or role in both SQL2000 and SQL2005

SQL2000

A common answer to the question posed by the title of this article is to run a query such as the one below in Query Analyzer and copy and paste the results into a query window and execute them. The query uses the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views to generate a list of GRANT statements for each procedure in the database.

Do one of the following

1. Goto properties of the dbo.aspnet_StoredProcedure Name Open PermissionsAnd Allow your username for exec Permission
   .
2. To change permissions on an individual object
   grant exec on [Owner].[ObjectName] TO UserName
   .
3. Simply run in sql Query Analyzer to change permissions on all objects in a database. It will generate a resultset with GRANT permission queries for all possible objects. copy it and paste in the query window of query analyzer and run it.
   SELECT 'grant exec on ' + QUOTENAME(ROUTINE_SCHEMA) + '.' +QUOTENAME(ROUTINE_NAME) + ' TO ' FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES
   WHERE OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID(ROUTINE_NAME),'IsMSShipped') = 0
   .
4. Run this code if you want to change permissions on objects under dbo's ownership. Run this code same as mentioned in part 2 above.
   SELECT 'grant exec on ' + QUOTENAME(ROUTINE_SCHEMA) + '.' +QUOTENAME(ROUTINE_NAME) + ' TO ' FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINESWHERE OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID(ROUTINE_NAME),'IsMSShipped') = 0 AND QUOTENAME(ROUTINE_SCHEMA)='[dbo]'

SQL2005

SQL Server 2005 improves on the current situation by making the EXECUTE permission grantable at the database scope. This means that we can issue a statement like the example below and this will GRANT execute permissions on all existing stored procedures and scalar functions AND all subsequently created ones. Thus it acts very much like the current fixed database roles such as db_datareader

/* CREATE A NEW ROLE */
CREATE ROLE db_executor
/* GRANT EXECUTE TO THE ROLE */
GRANT EXECUTE TO db_executor

DotNetNuke Error: URL blinks several times in status bar and doesn't browse the site :'(

PROBLEM:
The address blinks many times in the status bar and finally browser shows the 'Page Cannot be displayed' error and sometimes this blinking loop never ends.

EXPLANATION
It normally happens when you change the alias of the portal in 'portalalias' table.

SOLUTION :

1. Make sure the alias in the portalalias table is correct OR
2. Restart the site from IIS. If you don't have rights to do that u can just make a fake change in web.config and upload it again. The site will be restarted. 
3. If site is running on local host then simply kill the aspnet_wp.exe processe
4. Browse the site again,

IF problem persists, then get help from your host, there must be some issues in NS servers.

 Cheers