[MOSS 2007 public facing site] access to MS Office documents in Document Library

I am less and less certain if this is a right product…
This is THE most incredible and discouraging experience that I ever had with this product, which I have been working on to maintain our public internet site.

First of all, MANY MANY MANY thanks to the author of this blog post.
http://www.theblackknightsings.com/RemoveLoginBoxWhenAnonymousUsersDownloadOfficeDocumentFromSharePointSite.aspx
# BTW, the design is very funny. I thought it was a genuine error screen at the beginning.

The explanation is very clear, and so is the code. So I went straight plugging it in to our production site.
# I have at least compiled the DLL myself, and did a bit of test though.

We know that this product i.e. SharePoint is now widely used, especially with intranets, sites for collaboration and so on, where you know the users, they are all authenticated. However, for public facing internet sites such as ours where majority of users are anonymous, there are points overlooked, including ones as obvious as this one. And we users by ourselves need to apply workarounds… Hope with the coming 2010, it comes as a WCM product fully ready for public sites.

A day with video files

Nothing to do with work. Some video stuff.

Many probably knows about .fll (FLV Flash Video) file. I have got some movie files where there are some annoying discrepancy between image and sound.

I was bored today so tried to do something with it.

There is this famous Avidemux freeware with which you could fix this discrepancy. The latest is 5.2. It appears not yet nicely support the H264 video format.

When it finds that your file is in the format, it popups:

H.264 detected. If the file is using B-frames as reference it can lead to a crash or stuttering. Avidemux can use another mode which is safe but YOU WILL LOSE FRAME ACCURACY. Do you want to use that mode?

I am not at all an expert in this area, do not know what this means exactly, so went on accepting use of the "safe" mode. That appears fine. However, if you do not do what you want at this first time you open the file and close it. The popup would never come again and as the consequence, you can not open the file, unless you go to its conf file (in XML) and manually clear the history. This was the first difficulty that I encountered.

The second thing is the sound. To adjust the sound so it goes nicely, side-by-side with the video, of course you want to see the video together with the sound in its preview mode. I use a mac at home by the way. And the latest mac version of the freeware does not seem to allow me to listen to the sound.

I went back to a previous version, 4.4. Its handling of the sound device seems ok. Good! But then it does not yet support the audio format of my files!!!

So finally what I did was the following. I open each of those files with the latest, 5.2, change the audio data format to mp3, then turn to the 4.4 and shift the starting point of the sound.

A nice holiday activity.

media="print" and proxy

Really strange thing happened.

One of our developer tried to do a print-friendly rendering of a page. That is, when you print the page, logo is removed, hyperlinks is followed by their URLs written etc. A usual stuff.

He did so using media="print" trick with CSS.

He made it work nicely with FireFox but not on IE. Still needs some improvement, to support various browsers. That's OK. Not my business.

The weird thing is that it behaves differently when you get the page, css everything via a proxy.

The simplest example. If I start Fiddler to see if all come from where they are supposed to, you see it already different in the print preview...

You would normally suspect that some element of the page such as a css file fails to come, due to some authentication/authorization issue for instance, when you go thru the proxy. But Fiddler reports none. The key, linked as media="print", css seems downloaded OK. If the elements are the same, whether or not via proxy, it should behave in the same way...

After almost one day of fruitless investigation, given up... Asked him to revise it, so it works OK with IE as well, and with or without a proxy.

Mmmm...