Archive for the ‘companies’ Category

Flash video not loading

Friday, May 25th, 2007

My colleagues have just found out that when loading a Flash video file into Flash, the URL must end with “.flv”.

Flash doesn’t check the type – if the URL does not end with “.flv” it won’t even request the file. This could lead to an endless battle between the Flash developer and the web developer because the static version would work and the online version wouldn’t. The Flash developer requests a static .flv file on the disk but when the web developer changes the request to a CMS based file the video doesn’t load.

So, when using a CMS what you’d do is add a “&ext=.flv” or even just “&.flv” to the CMS provided URL (eg. /loadContent.php?id=123) for it to load. You can do that in Flash or in the code that passes the video URL to the player.

Funny.

Update: While checking other sites that load dynamic .flv files I found out that it might just look if the “.flv” is in the URL. Still funny though.

More mix

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

I hear that other blogs are covering the mix pretty goood, so I’m not even going to try to compete. I don’t have much time to surf the web or open and more importantly read the feeds.

I’ll just mention a few things I find interesting. The first one would be the DLR or the possibility to run dynamic languages in the .net environment. They’re saying that Iroonpython is much faster than the defaul implementation because of the platform. I guess this should give hope to Ruby developers that one day Ruby’s gonna be fast. They even wrote a new JScript parser for it.

Sitting in the biSitting in the big Palazzo M room waiting for the last keynote also gives me time to comment on a few other things. It’s really hard to be thirsty or hungry around here. There’s free stuff everywhere – lots of it. The breakfast and lunch are full meals, not only quick bites or fingerfood, which is also great.

As I said in the previous post it is a bit cold though. The fiifth floor where I’m at now is ok, but the fourth where most of the sessions happen is less comfortable. It’s too cold for short sleeves but not cold enough that a sweater would be a perfect solution.

The conference staff is really friendly, not only the Microsoft but all the others as well. What is lacking is more charging stations which forces users to squat the hallways where you can plug yourself into the matrix directly.

Another thing I noticed was that a lot of people have tablet or tablet convertible portable computers. I find this very interesting since there aren’t really that many different models available. Also there aren’t may macs here, which was expected since that’s the competition. I sometimes feel a bit out of line with my linux powered Nokia N800.

More tomorrow. If you want to read more about the conference visit technorati and search for mix07. If you don’t like to read or want to ask something visit Spletne urice @ Kiberpipa on wednesday, May 9 2007.

Going to Vegas

Monday, April 30th, 2007

This is my trravel log written on airports on my N800. Any spelling errors might really be errors or are just the consequence of typing on a small onscreen keyboard with a pen.

Munich, 0810 CET: We successfully landed at Munich after a short flight from Ljubljana. It was a pleasant Adria airways flight with a croisant and juice (I don’t care much for cofffee or tea) for breakfast. It would have took even less time if it weren’t for the taxying around the Munich airport.

A fun thing happened when we arrived. I was among the first to leave the bus that drove us from the aircraft to the terminal. Since I was catching a connecting flight I was directed to a different ‘exit’. Other passangers didn’t know this and followed me. Fortunatly they were stopped before they went too far.

I’m currently waiting for my next flight towards Denver. It will be my first travel overseas, not counting London, and the first with significant jetlag issues. I’ll try the Meyer technique and try to sleep as if I was already in Vegas. We’ll see how that works. See you in Denver.

Denver, 1420 local time: I had so little time between flights I had to run, literally. We completed the boarding, taxied away and stood on the taxiway for some time. The pilot informed us that we’re overweight and we have to go back to unload some. More later..

Vegas, 1830 local time: I finally got to the conference registration, got my badge and the goodies. I need to fill in the gaps though. The Lufthansa flight to Denver was great. It was loooong but that aside it was a pleasant experience. I sat next to a lady from Krakow, now a US resident. I learned that if you have low blood preasure problems, you should drink coffee and cognac (but then add two glasses of water to your normal daily dosage which should, by the way, be your weight in kg divided by 30 in litres).

The Ted flight to Vegas was much scarier though. We were late (175lb overweight so we had to ditch a passanger from the waiting list), half of the movie was played without sound and the plane was shaking all the time. After getting the baggage I took a cab (and waited for it in the biggest queue ever) to TI, where I got my no-view room (pictures when I return).

And now I’m at Mix07 wearing a ‘business’ tag.

Nokia N800

Saturday, April 7th, 2007

It’s been a while since Markos called me from Stansted airport to let me know he can bring me the N800. I can’t thank him enough.

That said, I haven’t really tried it out as much as I would have wanted but decided to sum up my first thoughts anyways.

  1. The email client really sucks bigtime. Obviously it’s the same as on the 770. Not only that it doesn’t support folders and it jams all the incoming mail into one long list it’s also the only application that has been failing on me almost constantly. Fortunately a claws-mail was released recently and I’ll try to install it as soon as possible.
  2. The RSS client isn’t that great either. Don’t really care that much – I’m a NewsGator user so I could basically read the news online. I have the client set to a few news sites and that’s enough of information for when I’m away from the computer.
  3. I’ve had almost no reboots. The device is responsive most of the time and the performance is generally very good. The showcase is the preloaded video commercial for N93 that plays smoothly and looks amazing on the screen.
  4. I would have liked more applications for the new platform already. Some of the older applications, build for the 2006 OS will install on the 2007 version, but many won’t. And it’s really annoying to find a great app and then be disappointed when it doesn’t work.
  5. I still don’t have a working SSH client. I know there are tutorials, but it shouldn’t really be this hard to install one. The fact that I can use a shell does mean I can probably fight my way through a longer and more complicated install process. The question is do I want to and if I must, will I be happy about it.
  6. I found that openTTD (for OS 2006, doesn’t work on 2007 – maybe some day) and Doom are available for it!
  7. Why is there no software that can save pictures from the camera preinstalled?
  8. Creating a swap file on the internal memory card is a must. Spare as much as you can.

I’ve heard that ‘consumers’ are not really getting it and that it’s mostly geeks that have it. I haven’t seen the numbers but I’m inclined to belive this statement. I am a geek, but sometimes I really don’t want to be treated as one. I just wanted to enjoy the device. But it seems that you have to be a bit of a techie to be able to install some applications and be willing to put up with install errors and stuff. Another important issue is that the best resource for applications and help is so techie looking that even I don’t like it very much.

It does look like they’re getting better at this though. Maybe when they figure out that normal (as in non-geek) users really don’t want to be clicking yes to the notice that installing ‘this’ application might harm their device since it’s not provided by Nokia…

WPF/E competition

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Yesterday was a fine day that ended with a talk about the WindowsVista.si website (now offline). It’s made with WPF/E technology and is made to mimic the look & feel of the real Vista operating system. A great showcase of the technology.

There’s been much talk about WPF. The whole Windows Foundation Platform seems to be competition to the Adobe Apollo platform. They’re both made to create desktop applications. Apollo seems to be on top with the cross-platformness while Microsoft is putting its hopes on the size of the Windows developer community.

When we come ‘down’ to WPF/E (the E stands for Everywhere), the competitor everyone is talking about is Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. They both solve a lot of common problems – animation, multimedia, drawing – stuff that you can’t do in HTML. But when you look under the hood of WindowsVista.si you’ll find there’s a bunch of JavaScripts that seem to do all the magic. And the code looks much like when you’re working with the infamous <canvas> tag.

This was also confirmed by the developer of the page – due to the limitations of the current plugin and it’s work with XAML everything on the page is dynamically created with JavaScript and is not present in the source XAML file. Since there are no components available he actually wrote all the controls himself – tabview, scrolling, panes, menus, windows,…

Two things come to mind:

  1. Direct3D vs OpenGL battle that went on about a decade ago
  2. document.layer vs document.all and the time of the DynamicDuo

Seems like a good idea would be to write a library that will seamlessly switch between WPF/E, and Flash whether they’re present or not. Especially since the tag will obviouslly never be trully cross platform (at least for a while) and that WPF/E doesn’t yet have a plugin for all platforms & browsers. Then again – what’s wrong with Flash?

Dear Apple

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Coolness is like trust. It’s hard to earn and easy to lose.

Update: Others seem to have finally gotten why this is more than just an IP issue.