Q&A Session for Programming The Raspberry Pi

Session number:  841475134
Date:  Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Starting time:  7:03 AM

Message was edited by: Kevin Cole

I joined the webinar in plenty of time (almost half an hour in advance) but the webinar software seems distinctly flaky.  It complained I didn't have audio (untrue), and refused to show me anything other than a list of the speakers.  I tried dialling in to the 0800 number given, but although that got me audio it wasn't a lot of use without the pictures.

Altogether a pretty naff software solution.  Please don't use it again.

John

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Maybe, maybe not.. it didn't work in windows firefox 11 for me - logging in made an attempt to install a corrupted plugin or some from premierfarnell.webex.com or some such and iexplorer kept crashing at the same point.

It was bad timing for me anyway so I gave in in the hope of it being on youtube tomorrow

Why do you say that the 'plugin' was corrupted?

A lot of people (myself included) downloaded and ran it witout any problems?

I am sorry, but I do consider the software to be flaky either!

Hi everyone! I uploaded a temporary recording of the Webinar until e14 puts their better and official copy up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woSUVNovI70

Thank you for uploading that, as I found it interesting to go back to check out some of the 'slides' again.

Hopefully these will be made available for individual downloading by Element 14 in due course.

I guess that when the dtae of this 'webinar' was first decided, it was anticipated that the first batch would have already been shipped, and that some people would already have received one, which has not unfortunately been the case.

Let's hope that it will be not be too long now though before things start moving again.

A very interesting webinar, nevertheless, and thanks must be given to Element 14 for hosting it, and obviously to Eben for his presentation.

Unfortunately I didn't make it to the live showing (2 a.m my time), however I'm suprised about the reports of Webex failing. Webex are owned by Cisco and I have used it in another life for demonstrating medical pathology slides (2TB images) to researchers amd medical staff world wide - it always performed OK apart from the one hospital that was still on dial up and a weird exchange system.

What is confusing if Webex someone hasn't used Webex before is that it isn't always apparent which page you should be looking at and how if you've clicked on the list of participants by mistake how to get back to the actual event.

I have both Firefox and 11.0 and IE9 installed, and Webex does seem to work better with IE with those versions. There is also a Webex Player that some events require which can be downloaded and installed.

Although it's generalizing, all proprietary systems are doomed to be flakey, non-portable, and permanently giving people headaches.

Webex is a good example of this.  And, given Cisco's litigation-based "business plan" for Webex, it's not going to get any better in the future.  I would tend to recommend to Element 14 that they stick to open standards, even if it means a reduction in bullet points.  At least open standards reduce the headaches at the same time.

I have both Firefox and 11.0 and IE9 installed, and Webex does seem to work better with IE with those versions.

I think you may have put your finger on it there.  It looks like this is an application which is thoroughly tested for Windows, but whilst it provides token Linux support it's a bit touch-and-go whether it works or not.

I was using Debian Squeeze with Firefox.  I checked the hardware and software requirements in advance.  It said I would need Flash and the test for Flash worked fine.  (I use the official version.)  When I came to join the webinar however, it seemed to download a Java application instead.  This ran but refused to show the webinar.

It would be good if there were a way to test in advance whether the software is working.  It's really annoying to find out only once the thing has started that the software doesn't work, then spend half the time of the event hunting through the rather sketchy help to see if you can find anything.

I did find one knowledge-base article which said that the software wouldn't work on Windows 7 unless you had something plugged into your microphone port (huh, what?!)  I tried plugging a microphone in and restarting in case the same bug affects the Linux version but that didn't help.

Thank you to the person who put a copy on Youtube.  It was a gently informative talk.  Pity about the technology failure.

John

Thanks for that video link. Most kind.