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Cisco WebEx stuck at 98% when joining meeting using Mac client

I recently hit a problem on my MacBook Air when trying to use Cisco WebEx. The Mac is running OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

The WebEx client installed without an issue, but when I tried to join a meeting the connection would hang at 98%. I had to use Force Quit to kill the client.

The solution to the problem was to change the proxy settings in Network Preferences. I’m not using a proxy but WebEx seems to have difficulties with the default setting.

Open “System Preferences” then select the “Network” icon.

Now select your current network connection from the left-hand panel (in my case this was Wi-Fi). Click the “Advanced…” button on the lower right of the panel.

Click the “Proxies” tab and the proxy settings are on the left. I’m not using a proxy but the default setting is “Auto Proxy Discovery”. Untick that, click “OK” and then “Apply” and WebEx would connect without any further problem.

System PreferencesScreenSnapz001

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iPhoto mangles GPS EXIF data, even from an iPhone 3G

A while ago I started geo-tagging some of my photos (basically, adding GPS location data to the EXIF data in the image files).

I did the geo-tagging using the excellent HoudahGeo. Because of a limitation in iPhoto, you have to geo-tag your pictures before importing them into the iPhoto library, as it won’t re-read or change the location info it stores in the library database.

After importing to iPhoto, I would edit the photos and then upload them using Connected Flow‘s superb FlickrExport (the beta versions support uploading of location co-ordinates).

I found that, for some photos, the resulting location on the maps in Flickr was incorrect. More specifically, they were the wrong side of the Greenwich Meridian.

Further investigation showed that HoudahGeo and FlickrExport (and Flickr) were all blameless.
If I tagged a photo, examined it in OS X’s Preview the location showed correctly. If I imported the photo into iPhoto, the co-ordinates still showed up fine. When I exported the photo, using the File Export option, and examined the result in Preview, the location had changed.

This image demonstrates the issue, giving the correct co-ordinates before import into iPhoto, the correct co-ordinates inside iPhoto, but the wrong co-ordinates when subsequently exported from iPhoto using FlickrExport or File Export.

There’s a discussion about the problem in a Flickr group from a year or so ago, so I certainly wasn’t the first person to notice it.

I reported the problem to Apple, along with a link to the above image on 30th May.

On Friday, I was fortunate enough to receive a shiny new iPhone 3G. The phone has a built-in GPS (strictly speaking, a-GPS) and will geo-tag photos taken with the camera. The same switching of co-ordinates persists if you put the images through iPhoto, and quite a lot of other people have started to take notice, including a MacWorld article so I’m hoping Apple will finally fix this issue.

A work around if using FlickrExport is to re-tag all your pictures in FlickrExport before exporting them to Flickr, or if using HoudahGeo, to re-tag them after they’ve been edited and exported from iPhoto.

I don’t know whether Aperture has the same problem.

UPDATE: iPhoto 7.1.4 released 23rd July 2008 seems to fix the problem

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