It’s been an interesting process, and we hope to release our library as an Open Source SDK as soon as possible but in the mean time, if you need the documentation and are struggling to find it on MSDN (like we did), its here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/reportservice2010.reportingservice2010.aspx

Hold out for our release, hopefully before the end of March 2011. If you’re interested in more information just leave a comment below!

P.S. That is the 2010 reference, which is what we’ll be coding for (i.e. ReportService2010.asmx?wsdl)

For now we just want to see if we can find enough members (say 10+) to warrant starting the group, but as an additional service to agencies in Kent, we’ve set up a Kent PHP Job board, that agencies can post available positions to for free! We’ll be vetting submissions to keep the jobs relevant!

1. Clear your browser cache

If unsure how to do this, please google “clear [browser name] cache”, where browser name is either “Internet Explorer”, “Firefox”, “Chrome”, etc.

2. Clear your flash cache

I didn’t know about this one, but if you browse to the Flash Settings Manager page, you can delete your Flash cache.

3. For good luck, close your browser and re-open it

Seems to have done to trick for me, now I can listen to albums and playlists without playback stopping anymore! Only thing is the issue seems to reproduce itself every now and again.

Token countdown:

So, to change the effect the volume keys have:

1. Press Alt+F2 to bring up the “Run” box.
2. Type in “gconf-editor” and press enter.
3. Select “Apps > gnome_settings_daemon“
4. On the right hand side you’ll have a single option named “volume_step“
5. Change the numerical value (6 by default) to a lower one (3 seems pretty good)

Simples!

After reinstalling gstreamer and rhythmbox a few times I turned to the Ubuntu Forums. The answer is in the following thread, but I missed it on first glance so thought I’d post it here: [ubuntu] rhythmbox 9.10 mp3

To save you reading through all the posts, to fix the problem after upgrading to 9.10 (not from a clean install), you need to delete your gstream preferences. Open up the terminal and type the following:

rm -rf ~/.gconf/system/gstreamer
rm -rf ~/.gstreamer-0.10

If you log off and back on again now, you should have mp3 playback in rhythmbox again. If that doesn’t work, take a look at the other suggestions in the ubuntu forum thread.

Anyway, one of the more difficult problems was getting 5.1 sound out of the sound card in Ubuntu. The motherboard has a built-in 5.1 sound card, the realtek ACL662. Some people have little trouble enabling surround sound but there seems to be an issue with this card. I managed to find a solution by merging a few ideas together.

Here are the steps I took:

1. By default, Ubuntu is only set to run 2 sound channels (left and right). To enable 6 channels (5.1) we need to edit the sound config file. Theres an excellent tutorial for doing that here. But put simply, edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and uncomment the line "; default-sample-channels = 2", changing it to "default-sample-channels = 6"
2. The most important part for this card. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and add "options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch-dig" to the end of the file.
3. Restart the machine.
4. Open sound preferences (System > Preferences > Sound)
5. Make sure that the ALSA mixer is selected.
6. Bring up the sound mixer.
7. Hopefully, the “Front, Center, Surround & LFE” sliders will be available. If not try to add them by clicking on Properties.
8. Make sure all sliders are on full.
9. Still on the mixer, go to the ‘Options’ tab and set ‘Channel mode’ to ’6ch’.
10. Ok everything and close the mixer.
11. To test, at the command line try "$ speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -l1 -twav"

Hopefully that’ll do it. If not, there are a tonne of other guides if you search for “Ubuntu 5.1 sound”. Checkout the forum post that helped me find this solution here, at the Ubuntu forums.

If options 7 and/or 9 aren’t available to you, I’d guess the fix hasn’t solved your problem.

I’d used the extigy on the mac before, and it certainly does detect it and play sound. Unfortunately I hadn’t paid much attention to the rear speakers. It turns out creative never released any drivers for the mac, so not only can I not get proper 5.1 surround sound, the CMSS feature won’t work either.

So that was a waste of time and money, considering I can get the same sound from a normal stereo cable. Apparently the newer macbooks (hopefully mine included) have optical audio out, but I’m not sure I want to buy the cable to find out?

As a “sort of” fix, I’m going to play music using parallels running Windows XP. I don’t think I’m ever going to get away from Windows for good.

There are a number of options available to do this:

1. Using a flash (swf) file to perform the upload
2. Using a java applet to perform the upload
3. Using an HTML file input box to create a hidden array of file input boxes

My issue with #3 is that you still have to individually select all the files in a folder before clicking upload. If you want to upload 50 files, thats 100 clicks and a case of RSI. So, I ignored #3 entirely.

Ideally,  I wanted solution #1, but I found a lot of answers to solution #3,  followed by #2. In the end I tried out four different solutions, all open source.

SWFUpload

By far my favourite, and the one we ended up using, this is the same tool wordpress use for their image upload plug

in. It is the most difficult to configure, but its got the most flexibility. SWFUpload uses a .swf file for the actual file uploads, which get posted to a script you specify in the setup. There are then a load of javascript callbacks that allow you to track the progress of files and update your page with the results. All in all, very impressed.

Check it out and download it here: http://www.swfupload.org

There are also demos at: http://demo.swfupload.org

UPDATE: I stumbled across a blog post with a tutorial for creating your own flash file, incase you don’t

want to use SWFUpload. It looks pretty simple, so check it out: Multiple File Upload Using Flash

jUpload

jUpload was the first tool I tried, but couldn’t get the Firefox Java plugin working on my desktop (ubuntu) and so gave up. I’m sure the tool would have done the job, but I’d have needed to compile it and more importantly, it looks ugly.

Check it out at: http://jupload.sourceforge.net

jQuery-transmit

Had this worked for me, I think it could have been pretty good. It works on the same principal as SWFUpload, but with seemingly less features. The fact that it used jQuery made me want to use it.

Check it out at: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-transmit/

jQuery multiple file upload plugin

This uses option #3 from the list above, and I couldn’t get it to work. It may have been something silly I was doing but, because it uses method #3, I didn’t spend too long trying to fix it.

If you’re still interested in trying it, check out: http://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/multiple-file-upload/

In conclusion, if you have the knowledge and patience to set up SWFUpload, it really pays off. Once the file manager is done I’ll put up a demo, I’m unashamedly impressed. For now I’ve got a screenshot. Ignore how ugly it is (and the garish colours), I haven’t given it to the designers yet!

SWFUpload concept demo