Wolf's Plateau

Traian is going to the APS March meeting this Sunday, and I have been helping him to prepare the talks these days. We spent most of the afternoon yesterday trying to figure out why the movie clip in Microsoft PowerPoint won't show up on the projector's screen. Following my (somehow blind) suggestions, Traian upgraded his Windows Media Player to version 9, installed DirectX 9.0b, and a couple of other Windows updates as well, but none of them really works.

Quite disappointed, Traian tried one more time to play the clips in PowerPoint, and it magically worked! The previous problem of altered background color also vanished (the upgrade is not in vain after all). After quite some fiddling with the Media Player, it turned out we need to start Media Player first, and try to open some movie clips (which will actually fail, but more on this later), then start PowerPoint to make things work with the inserted movie. It's true that the old Office '97 Traian is using may not work well in this quite new environment, but this situation is still pretty ridiculous.

We also found it amusing that if we turn off the accelaration for Media Player, the movie shows correctly on the projector's screen; however things in PowerPoint doesn't work. And if we turn on the accelaration, the movie in Media Player doesn't show up on screen. This is absolute myth to me, yet an encoraging discovery -- because it means I may have found a way to show movie clips on Dr. Yakobson's Tablet PC. :-)