And now for something …

Anyone who has used GoToMeeting to record a webinar will quickly find that the default GoToMeeting format is not a true WMV file (even though the extension is .wmv).  Instead, GTM uses a custom format, most likely because it’s more efficient to record in this format while you are conducting a web meeting.  Whatever the case, this is a real problem when trying to edit the webinar in another program such as Camtasia.  Often it will result in an error like

Error: No codec available to render this file.

or

The requested video codec is not installed on this system

There is an option in GoToMeeting to record in standard .WMV format, but chances are a) you didn’t know about it before you recorded your meeting and b) even if you did enable it, it takes a lot of time to convert the file, so you might not have the time (or patience) to convert it immediately after your meeting is over.

Geek Factor has some interesting solutions, here and here, but they don’t necessarily work.

Fortunately, there is a solution that worked for me — use an application from GoToMeeting called “g2mtranscoder” which allows you to convert the file from GTM format to standard WMV.    Here’s how I did it in Windows 7:

1. Navigate to your GoToMeeting program files folder.  Typically this will be in C:\Program Files\Citrix\GoToMeeting\320.
2. Copy your GoToMeeting recording to this directory.
3. Open the command line.  On Vista / Windows 7, click the Start button and in the search box type: cmd and press Enter; in Windows XP, click the Start button, select Run, and type: cmd and press Enter.
4. Type: cd C:\Program Files\Citrix\GoToMeeting\320\ and press Enter.  This should take you to the GTM directory.
5. Type: g2mtranscoder source=GoToMeetingRecording.wmv (replace with the name of your GTM video).

Hint: you can copy and paste into the command line window by clicking the C:\ icon from the command line window and selecting Edit > Paste.

Once the conversion has completed, simply open the file in Camtasia using File > Import Media, or use your favorite video editing software.

OK, so this issue has been driving me nuts for ages, and for some reason, I could never find a good answer.  The issue is that while some of my ICQ contacts show as online, most of them do not, even though I know they are available (and I can chat with them). Google served up some choice results today, however.  Turns out, most of the contacts simply had not authorized me to add them to my contact list, because I had never requested authorization.  In Miranda, the solution is to a) add the contact to your server list, and b) request authorization, which is accomplished by right-clicking on the contact from the list.

There could be other causes for this issue, but this is what worked for me.  Enjoy.

Unfortunately, my initial foray into using ScrewTurn wiki did not turn out so well. After I deployed it, it failed to function properly in production — among other things it would timeout on a regular basis and refuse to commit changes. It could have been issues with the production server or the configuration, but at this point I’ve given up.

I’m back to the old standby – Mediawiki. I’ve actually had good success running it on a Windows platform — although Apache is the best option, which does not always live nicely alongside IIS — and will continue down that path.

Coming soon: a brief Windows / Mediawiki setup guide.

I’ve been playing around with various wikis at work lately, and thus far have been very happy with MediaWiki. I’ve been running MediaWiki for about a month using Devside’s Web-Developer suite installed on a Windows 2003 Standard server. The nice thing about the Devside suite is that it allows you to easily install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on a Windows server with very little work and none of the headaches usually associated with Apache on Windows. It runs pretty well, and I’ve been happy with the customization and ease of use of MediaWiki.

However, I’ve found that a lot of the nice extensions that I’d like to use — namely better search and the ability to import from RoboHelp (RoboHelp is our main documentation source for customer facing in-program help) — require a Linux server. Not that I have a big problem with this, in fact it’s quite easily to install and run on a VM with VMware’s free server tool. You can even get a pre-built VM appliance with MediaWiki already installed and ready to go.

The main issue with all of this is that our development environment is 100% Microsoft, and my task at the moment is to set up a wiki for our development team (they’ve heard good things about the wiki I’ve built for our customer support team, and are getting jealous). Not wanting to create any maintenance headaches for them, I naturally started looking for a .NET based ASP solution. It was surprisingly hard to find, actually.

Eventually I came across ScrewTurn Wiki, which is a fairly new wiki app that has been getting some good feedback, and which is also open source. It claimed to be very easy to install, which is always nice. I like learning new things, but if I can keep the frustration level down that’s a plus.

So much for the install being easy! The first time I tried to install, I loaded the “one-click installer” on my Windows XP laptop running IIS 5, and couldn’t get the darn thing to run. I went through all the troubleshooting steps, but no dice. I kept hitting an error “Active Server Pages error ‘ASP 0201′
Invalid Default Script The default script language specified for this application is invalid.” After some searching I found this article from Classic ASP and tried all suggestions including resetting all permissions based on Microsoft’s guidelines. A few more hours of playing around later and I was still nowhere. I really didn’t need to reinstall Windows on my laptop just for a wiki!

I gave up on the laptop, and loaded up a brand spanking new VM running Windows XP SP2. I got further than before, but still received an error message. This time the problem was very possibly my rush to get this done quickly, and I decided to RTFM and even go through the video tutorial. Hmm, still not working. Turns out that there are a few gotchas to the install that the one-click WebSetup installer couldn’t handle (even though the documentation indicated that these steps were only required for a manual install):

1. Specify that you want to use the ASP.NET 2.0: right-click on the Virtual Directory you just created and select Properties in the context menu. Select the ASP.NET tab. If it’s not available, make sure you have .NET Framework 2.0 installed and retry this step. If it’s available, select in the ASP.NET version drop-down list the 2.0.50727 item.

2. Setup the Public directory: go to the physical path of the Virtual Directory that you have just created, and create a new directory inside it, for example C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\MyWiki\public. Right-click on it and select Properties from the context menu. Go to the Security tab, and select from the list of the accounts IIS_WPG (Windows 2003) or ASPNET (Windows XP); check the Modify option in the list below (in the Allow column) and click on OK. You have to specify the name of this directory in the PublicDirectory setting in the Web.config file (see the previous section).

3. Register the ASP.NET engine. To do that, open a command prompt and type %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -i then press enter.

4. Make  sure that the default page in IIS is set to default.aspx.  To do this, edit the virtual directory properties in IIS, click the Documents tab, and confirm that default.aspx is listed.  If not, add it.
After that, all was well and the wiki fired right up. More comments soon on how well this thing works!