Getting every thing working...

The Cooliris program is not as straight forward as I had originally anticipated and has been a big issue during this project. Cooliris itself is a good application and very useful for browsing your facebook and other web hosted items, but the second you want to view your own items it becomes different, for a start, with Cooliris you can view your own items off your hard drive and set folders to view etc, however, the second you want to embed a wall you need to consider many other factors, which until recently I was unaware of.

Firstly, you cannot (And believe me I've tried) view your own data from an external hard drive or on your PC when embedding Cooliris into the web page. To have your own content you need to supply the embedded wall with RSS feeds, which call from a server. 

So I called a friend and we set about creating a server to host the files on, this also threw up another problem, will the gallery space have internet? And how can I deal with the problem if they cannot acquire an internet connection? The answer is simply no, I cannot make this piece work without constant internet connection, it needs to receive RSS feeds from the Server to work, and there is no other way around this. Anyway after a few e-mails I'm still unsure what’s going on with connection I just have to hope everything is ok.

Next problem this aired, the Home Hub at my house is broken, so I have been using an older model until I get a replacement from BT, the replacement will not allow me to port forward through port 80 (and this basically means I cannot host a server at my house) so the same friend agreed to host it at his and make a VNC connection between mine and his laptop so we can check, edit and control/fix any issues with the exhibition in real time.

Now, we have set up the server up at the friend’s house, currently going through a few bug checks with the network and hope that this all goes well, the next part is making sure Cooliris calls from the right directories and displays the media on screen.

This is the last push to make sure everything goes to plan, but with so much that can go wrong I can only keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.

I just can’t believe that the home hub broke so close to the deadline, seems fate is really unhappy with me finally finishing my MA, but I'm afraid fate will just have to try harder.