I’ve had a couple of people complain that they’re not able to see pictures here and sometimes on the catcams. I suspected it was their firewall/virus program, but I wasn’t having any problems here, so I really didn’t know how to address the problem. I usually just came up with “sorry, I wish I could help you”.
Now, the laptop has Norton. It came with eighteen months of Norton. Brian’s computer has Norton. But my Dell and my Gateway both run TrendMicro’s PcCillan. And last week, I sat down to figure out why some people can’t view the pictures. I turned on the laptop and cruised over to the catcam page. And what did I see? A bunch of boxes with a red x in them. Hmm. And no live video on the streaming portion of the catcam pages.
I checked Brian’s computer. Same thing. Wonderful.
There are two separate issues here.
The streaming video doesn’t work
The pictures aren’t there
For the streaming video, I went over to the Surveyor Corp website, the site where I got my webcam software, software that’s old and isn’t supported any more. But I like it, I’ve got some other stuff that I tried out, even purchased, but I was familiar with the Webcam32. Us old people are like that, we like what’s familiar.
I searched their forums for help with the streaming not being visible and I realized that it’s probably a Micro$oft Windows problem. Because I vaguely remember having problems when I got this computer, the first one with Windows XP. But now I had to find out what I did to get the live cameras to show on this machine.
And I found it. I tested it out on the laptop and it worked like a dream. What you need to do if you can’t see the streaming cameras is download an older version of Java. Fortunately, Sun still has the version needed in its archives. Just click here to download it.
Now, for the other problem. It was pretty late by the time I’d gotten the streaming figured out, so I put off the unviewable pictures until I was fresh. Which was yesterday morning.
I spent over an hour looking for “how to” on the Symantec website. Their support is nonexistant. If I wanted real help, it would cost me $29.95 for one incident. Screw that. I was positive that the answer had to be out there, for free, somewhere. I did avail myself of the “send us a comment” link on the Symantec website. After spending all that time looking for the answer to my question (a question that I asked at least ten different ways with the same unsuccessful result each time) I was, needless to say, frustrated, annoyed and irritated. And I told them as much. I told them their support (and I quote) “sucked”. Pretty professional, huh? I didn’t feel any better, because I held back, I had much more colorful adjectives about their tech support quality that I felt best not to use.
Now, I’d figured out that Norton was the culprit, because when I disabled it, I could see the pictures. It was only when it was on, that I couldn’t. But I didn’t know what to set. The help files were no help and, as I’ve already mentioned, their website support was no support.
It seems that Norton likes to automatically prevent the viewing of images that are drawn from a site other than the one you’re looking at. Since this is a big portion of how advertisements are served up, it’s probably a good thing. But when you’ve got a webpage that pulls from a pool of images on another domain, it’s not a good thing. I didn’t take the time to check, but it would seem that if you post a picture on a forum that resides on a different website, you won’t be able to see it, unless you adjust your Norton settings.
Anyway, I did another bunch of Google searches, using slightly different terminology with each try. And I finally found it. On a newspaper website, for it’s comic section no less.
And here it is. There are instructions for all versions of Norton.
The sites of mine you’ll need to set are as follows:
- www.catcam.us
catcam.us (odd that it takes these as separate domains)
occasional.catcam.us
patio.catcam.us
office.catcam.us
weather.lisaviolet.com
lisaviolet.com
lisaviolet.net (where the family album is)
journal.lisaviolet.comAnd, hopefully, that will resolve the problem. It did for me.
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