Getting Drupal’s Access Control Module to Work Properly

After setting up some content types — some public, some internal. I installed the Access Control module, set up internal content not to be visible to anonymous users — but without any effect.

After some research, but without success, I realized the *Advanced* section at the bottom of the Access Control tab for each content type. And now the magic trick: Increase the weight and you are done. So I guess the build in access management was fighting the Access Control module, so it is up to you to make your favorite module stronger by giving it more weight. — I doubt this is intuitive. Additionally, it is for sure difficult to simply find the tiny little select box down there in a section, which is by default folded.

Problems With Logitech Communicator STX Webcam on Ubuntu 9.10 & Skype 2.1

Tough two weeks until I got them all play together nicely. Now they do. How come? Why did it take so long? There are many tutorials out there solving the problem by making Skype use Linux for Video version 1 drivers instead of version 2, which it does not seem to like. It boils down to the following lines:

Create a file in /usr/local/bin/skype and insert

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

finally, make it executable by sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/skype

Use this file to start Skype from now on. Done.

But not for me. Skype refused to eat it: “ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.”

Until I finally found this one here — and **** yes, I searched, read and tried a lot of nice forum entries.

Just to cut a long story short, here is why: all the other solutions work for 32bit Linux only – but hey, I do not have any potential of my laptop to waste – I am running Kubuntu 9.10 64bit. And with a minor tweak, the fix will work for you, too.

Get this. sudo apt-get install lib32v4l-0

And change /usr/local/bin/skype to LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

Its just about the “32″. **** **!

Thanks Eoin Murphy.

How to make Jquerymenu for Drupal Keeping its State on Page Reload

While setting up the website for my new project “Glocal” www.glocal-project.eu), I came across the problem of finding a proper menu module. Something easy to use, stable and efficient in the same time for the complex intranet structure (therefore, sorry, but you will not be able to see my solution there unless you are a project member). Something with a high usability in the end. Activemenu is still quite buggy and DHTML Menue requires a double click to actually open a page — unbearable in a non-doulbe-click environment like the Internet — who is supposed to guess, that this menu requires a double click?? Leaving me with JQuerymenu.

First impression: perfect! Open and close branches by clicking (+) or (-) — view page by clicking menu item label. Even the few styling issues could be fixed easily by using CSS. But as soon, as someone clicks a label, the menu collapses to its default status. It does not remember its last status after loading a different page with the same menu.

Is this it? All module have critical downsides like this? I was quite disappointed!

But I taught JQuerymenu to remember!

As it is quite some code, I will not post it here directly, but added it to the tracker page for this “feature request” or you can download the two updated files (jquerymenu.js and jquerymenu.module) here and replace the once in your /sites/all/modules/jquerymenu folder.

But please be careful, it should be considered an alpha version, there are quite some weaknesses (see tracker page). Any feedback or even improvements is very welcome!

fixing flex VideoDisplay CuePointManager

I was creating a Flex application to show slides and a presentation video of previously recorded presentations. Accordingly, each slide should appear at a certain point of time in the video – calls for cue points!

As all slides and there appearance are stored in a text file in my case, I started adding cue points with ActionScript. But as soon as the video can be controlled with a slider, allowing to shift for- and backwards, the event handler “cuePoint” was not triggered any more. Thus, the slides where not changed correctly as the user jumps ahead, as the cue points between the previous and the new position did not cause and cue point event.

Finally I wrote AdvCuePointManager, inheriting from CuePointManager, but which can deal with jumping back- and forward.

Copy it to “<your source folder>/net/svenbuschbeck/flex/video” and use it as follows:

<mx:VideoDisplay cuePointManagerClass="net.svenbuschbeck.flex.video.AdvCuePointManager" />