Mark Headrick's Blog » Twitter

How I got NASCAR RaceBuddy working in Firefox.

MarkRH — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:35:23 +0000

During the NASCAR Truck race on Friday, NASCAR.COM made TruckBuddy available. It was very similar to RaceBuddy they had last year during the TNT races. You get a choice of several live video feeds along with a mosaic feed of 4 video streams at once and a live chat feature.

Problem:

When I first tried it with Firefox (version 3.6 or 3.6.2), the video portion did not work and the live chat portion on the right side would not work properly either. It would let me attempt to login via Twitter and provided the typical Twitter Allow/Deny Connection authorization window; however, upon returning to the application it did nothing and acted like I had never logged in.

Solution:

I solved the video problem by disabling Adblock Plus on the NASCAR.COM site. Apparently, if the video advertisement does not play first, then nothing else will or at least problematically.

I solved the chat problem by enabling 3rd-party cookies which I have disabled by default (Tools -> Options -> Privacy). Upon further examination, I could disable 3rd-party cookies again if I gave exceptions to the following:

gigya.com
livechat.gigya.com
socialize.gigya.com

After the race was over, I re-enabled Adblock Plus for NASCAR.COM . Hopefully this helps anyone else trying to get RaceBuddy working with Firefox should they have it again.

Configured Winamp v5.57 and website to use new Now Playing plug-in.

MarkRH — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:52:05 +0000

After upgrading Winamp to its latest version (5.57), the Now Playing v2.1.2 plug-in I was using would cause Winamp to crash every time I closed Winamp which caused none of its settings to be saved. After some googling around I came across Brandon Fuller’s Now Playing: A Winamp Plugin which seemed to do what I needed. It would allow me to FTP a XML file containing information about the last X number of songs I played and would also let me send a HTTP post request to run a PHP script with the current song’s information contained within the $_POST variable. It calls this HTTP request a “ping”.

When this “ping” is sent, my PHP script parses the newly uploaded XML file to create the now playing images and song history (as seen on my Entertainment page), as well as a prepared Twitter message in a separate file should I choose to send a tweet out.

You can also send Twitter and Facebook updates using this plug-in. I’ve only tested it with Twitter and it seems to work; however, I use a separate PHP script to manually Tweet the song I’m currently listening to so I don’t fill my Twitter stream with song spam. I may enable it to send tweets out using my @mrheadrick_np account.

This plug-in does lack a couple things that the older one would do:

Send an album cover image along with the rest of the song’s information in a $_POST variable such as a folder.jpg located in the same directory as the song; however, it will send a link to an Amazon album image if the information matches (sometimes it doesn’t match correctly or just can’t find one). I am working on a mechanism to get around some of these pitfalls by uploading album images and having my script check for the existence of the local album image first.
Work with Shoutcast streams to extract out song information.

Even so, I will continue to use this plug-in for its compatibility and continuing support by the developer. It also seems to be a bit more reliable and stable than what I was using. Yes, I did purchase a license key.

How I got LongURL Mobile Expander 2.0.0 to Show Tooltips Again.

MarkRH — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:50:12 +0000

After updating to LongURL Mobile Expander v2.0.0 it stopped showing Tooltips with the destination when I would move the mouse over a short URL. I would also get “current domain is NULL” errors when browsing locally (I have a local copy of Apache installed for development). The problem existed in both Firefox 3.0.11 and 3.5.

I got it working after seeing a comment here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8636 so all the credit goes to Matthias Jansen.

Edit the file: C:\Documents and Settings\(user)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\(your profile)\extensions\{a7101e54-830c-4d33-a3ed-bedc17ec44da}\content\longurlmobileexpander.js

I am using Windows XP so your location might be different.

Around line 79, change

var current_domain = document.location.href.match(/^https?:\/\/(?:www\.)?([^\.]+\.[^\/]+)/i);

To:

var current_domain = document.location.href.match(/^https?:\/\/(?:www\.)?([^\.]+(\.[^\/]+)?)/i);

Update: I’ve been told here that the following change is also needed. Around line 89, change

if ((domain !== current_domain[1]) && (typeof(this.known_services[domain]) !== 'undefined')) {

To:

if ((current_domain != null) && (domain !== current_domain[1]) && (typeof(this.known_services[domain]) !== 'undefined')) {

After doing this and re-enabling the extension.. it started working. I can now see the tooltip pop-ups and it’s supposed to fix the current_domain is null problem. Hopefully this will help anyone else that ran into this issue.

My URL Shortening Service now has a preview mode.

MarkRH — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:24:32 +0000

My URL shortening service at http://mhurl.com, that I mainly use with my blog to create Short URLs for new posts to be tweeted about, now has a preview option you can enable that will show the destination URL, which you can then decide if you wish to click on or not rather than automatically being redirected to the destination. In order for this to work your browser must be set to accept cookies. If you are like me and have 3rd-party cookies disabled, that is fine.

Once you have it set, you can test it with this Short URL which should be created after I publish the post: http://mhurl.com/2.

Even though I will not send anyone to a questionable site, I understand many would want this ability.

Testing my own shortening service, post 1

MarkRH — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:36:26 +0000

Hopefully this works correctly on my production blog the first try LOL.

Publish!

Update: It Worked! http://mhurl.com/1 links to this post now. The Longurl.org website and DestroyTwitter Twitter client are able to preview the link without any problem. TweetDeck v0.26.1 and TwitterFox 1.8.1 are not able to.

I modified the WordPress Twitter-Tools plug-in to create the short-urls using my shortener before sending the tweet out about the post.