VLC Media Player Effects and Filters Not Showing Up

You just installed VLC media player, played a DVD using VLC, and you wanted to adjust the color. You then clicked Tools, then Effects and Filters. Surprised? The Effect and Filters window did not show up.

Where is it? If you positioned the VLC main window at the upper-left corner of the monitor, the Effect and Filters window is actually unreachable—it is at the left side of the VLC main window. If only you could reach it with your hand. . .

Position the main window at the right side of the screen. Click Tools > Effects and Filters; you may need to click this option twice—to close and reopen the Effects and Filters window—and there it is!

Ever thought of buying a wider monitor?

Lucid Lynx Inside Windows XP

Four months ago my hard disk died—it had three partitions. COD—head crash—a term used when the read-write head scratches on the surface of the hard disk, thereby causing hard disk failure.



I was not able to boot Windows XP. Fortunately, I had Ubuntu - Hardy Heron installed in a different partition inside Windows and I was able to access and copy all my XP files to an external hard drive. This Ubuntu had been there sitting unused, never crossed my mind that one day it would be of service.

So I bought a new 500GB hard drive and installed Windows XP; and then installed Lucid Lynx Ubuntu on an 80GB external hard drive.

This time I want to get serious on Ubuntu—I want to see how to configure it and how to install software on it. From now on, I will document my Ubuntu experience by posting them on this blog.

Tabs Do Not Load When I Open Firefox 3.6.3

Lately, I have noticed that when I open Firefox, the tabs do not load. I opened the Options window in Firefox’s Tools menu then to Privacy > Use custom settings for history and configured some settings making sure the Automatically start Firefox in a private browsing session check box is unchecked. My settings didn’t work.

The culprits, I found out running Firefox on Safe Mode, are two of my add-ons. Disabling either the WebMail Notifier 2.4 or Torbutton 3.6.2 or both of them allows Firefox to load its tabs when opened.

Are these add-ons really the cause of tabs not loading or there is something to be configured in the about:config settings?

How to Embed Multiple Calendars in Google Sites

You are probably here because you cannot embed multiple Google calendars in Google Sites. I will show you how I did it or how I found it.

An example of two Google calendars embedded into one can be viewed at Arnel Dy’s Math Webpage.

The iframe tag and origsrc="domainname.org_############### methods
There is a link in Google Calendar, (Settings > Calendars > yourCalendar > Customize the color, size, and other options) that directs you to Google Embeddable Calendar Helper. Copying and pasting the HTML provided in the Calendar Helper—after configuring the calendar’s settings—on your webpage’s HTML window (click the edit HTML button) will not work even though the preview displays your multiple calendars into one.

Also, copying a part of the HTML code provided at Google Embeddable Calendar Helper and then pasting them after origsrc=" somewhere in the page’s HTML will not work. This method returns an error when I tried this.

What works?
Steegle.com provides the best way to embed multiple calendars in Google Sites. A word of advice: Use Your Keyboard to Copy and Paste the HTML Code.

The title of the article at Steegle.com is: Google Sites - Embed Multiple Calendars (and other things)!

How to Create an Image Map in HTML

One day, after discussing coordinate geometry with my class, a student asked me about the application of coordinate geometry in HTML. She said she was having trouble finding the coordinates of a link in a clickable picture—the mouse pointer just wouldn’t turn into a hand! So I advised her to right-click the page and find that picture or image if there is a <map> tag in the HTML code.

The following day I gave her a sample on how to create an image map. I am reprinting it here with some modification.

What is an image map?
An image-map is an image with clickable areas. For example, in the image at the right, the head, the left shoulder, and the left fingers are clickable areas. These areas are called hotspots and acts as a hypertext link. Any time the user clicks on a hotspot, the hypertext link is activated. These links could activate an html file, mp3, video file, text file, or any other files.

Let’s create an image-map of the image at the right.

The syntax for a hotspot
The shape of a hotspot could be in the form of a rectangle, circle, or polygon. This hotspot’s area is defined by the <area> tag.

The syntax for a rectangular hotspot is:

<area shape="rect" coords="x₁, y₁, x₂, y₂" alt="text" href="URL" target="value" />

where x₁ and y₁ are the coordinates of the upper-left corner of the rectangle and x₂ and y₂ are the coordinates of the lower-right corner.

The syntax for a circular hotspot is:

<area shape="circle" coords="x_c, y_c, radius" alt="text" href="URL" target="value" />

where x_c and y_c is the center of the circle and radius is the radius of the circle.

The syntax for a polygonal hotspot is:

<area shape="poly" coords="x₁, y₁, x₂, y₂, x₃, y₃, . . ., x_n, y_n" alt="text" href="URL" target="value"/>

where x₁, y₁, x₂, y₂, x₃, y₃, x_n, and y_n are the coordinates of the vertices of the polygon.

The area element is always nested inside a <map> tag.

If the shape attribute has a value equal to default , the entire region of the image becomes the hotspot.

The value of the coordinates are in pixels and if the area has no associated link then use the nohref attribute instead of href.

Take note that the target attribute is optional.

Step 1: Define an image-map hotspots in the image
To determine the coordinates of a particular point in an image-map, open the image in Windows’ Paint. The coordinates can be obtained from the right portion of Paint’s status bar. Another way to determine the coordinates is by opening the image in an image editor like GIMP.

With the image example at the right, the coordinates for the rectangles as determined from GIMP are:

x₁ = 25, y₁ = 0, x₂ = 60, y₂ = 30

For the circle:

x_c = 23, y_c = 50

For the polygon:

x₁ = 58, y₁ = 35, x₂ = 80, y₂ = 45, x₃ = 65, y₃ = 60, x₄ = 68, y₄ = 55

Step 2: Plug in all the values in the HTML code
Plug in all the values in the HTML code and assume a radius of 7 pixels in the circular hotspot.

Make sure that the <area> tags are nested inside a <map> tag and the <img> tag is written before the <map> opening tag.

<html>
<body>

<img src="myimage.jpg" width="94" height="93" alt="myimage" usemap="#mybody" />

<map name="mybody">

<area shape="rect" coords="25, 0, 60, 30" alt="head" href="http://cnn.com/" target="_blank"/>

<area shape="circle" coords="23, 50, 7" alt="hand" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands" target="_blank" />

<area shape="poly" coords="55, 35, 80, 45, 85, 60, 65, 55" alt="shoulder"
href="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b58/kittymimi90/lovely/12-EdgeandRydiaFinalFantasyIV.jpg" target="_blank" />

</map>

</body>
</html>

Open Firefox in Chrome, IE8, Safari, and Avant

Google's Chrome opens sites faster than my default browser Firefox. For now I cannot leave Firefox for Chrome because of the availability of extensions (add-ons) for the former which the later lacks.

I only use Chrome when Firefox is having a noticeable difficulty loading pages. Although I have exported my Firefox bookmarks to Chrome, it is cumbersome to export them whenever a new site is bookmarked in Firefox.

I have discovered one way of viewing my Firefox bookmarks in Chrome: click and drag a bookmark into Chrome's page and the page will load in Chrome. A bookmark can be exported too into Chrome's bookmark toolbar by the click and drag method.

Likewise, the method above is possible if it is done the other way—from Chrome to Firefox. In fact, the exporting method can be done also from Firefox to IE 8 and vice versa but is not possible for the Opera browser.

Of course there are Chrome View and Safari View add-ons for Firefox but the fact that it can be done into IE8 (Avant and Safari, too) makes this method handy for those who uses more than one browser.

In Avant and Safari, bookmarks from Firefox can open into these two browsers but not the other way around.

The Pythagorean Triple Generator

For those who are interested in a Pythagorean Triple Generator you may fetch it from my geometry class website.

This program is written in Just BASIC language and it is free.