ericd v7 media temple

M4A Podcasts In Flash...

2007-08-23T14:33:00.000-04:00

Here is an example of my iTunes podcasts (just 3 right now) playing through the Flash Player. I am parsing my live RSS feedburner feed and pulling stuff out of that. Playing native .m4a files. I haven't dug into the metadata for chaptering information, etc. yet as I don't know if I need a policy file on my server to have the XML parse from feedburner (yet). I hope this works ;) You should see data and below will auto-play the 1st podcast (very short).

Install Adobe Flash Player.

I just tested this quickly and it seems to be working. I am not setting a buffer on this. But its working.

migration pains

2007-08-22T23:06:00.000-04:00

I am truly enjoying my new digs here at Media Temple, but after over 5 years on another server, I forgot about how much legacy data I had built up and in position in my previous location. Namely a whole ton of postings. Which means if you find an article link via Google, etc. chances are you're going to meet Mr. 404. My apologies. Years of posts vaporized because I forgot to migrate them. I need to create my special error pages too -- since there will probably be a bunch of them in short order.

My RSS URL hasn't changed, but its now ATOM. Adobe's AXNA isn't picking up the feed yet, I put in a request to have it updated and hopefully it will be approved/added to the list of aggregated feeds. If you use other means you should be okay.

My podcasts have to be updated and replaced. I probably need to feedburner them again -- if anyone cares. I might however just redo the whole thing and start from scratch. Well... probably not -- people (the handful out there) might just get fresh podcasts that are the old fare come alive on them.

Chances are I am missing something else, not sure. Hopefully not. I'll button things up in short order®

H.264 Playing in Flash Player...

2007-08-21T16:08:00.001-04:00

When the bits hit the net and people upgrade their beta Flash Player, below you should be able to see an H.264 with AAC playing below. Its a trailer from Apple's website, with nothing whatsoever done to it. Since I don't know when the player will be released (later today), and I didn't want to wait, I am posting this up now. Heh. Should work later. I'm not going to loop it. And I turned the volume down so its not too annoying.

Install Adobe Flash Player.

Update:
Its out people. Download the new beta player (9,0,60,184 installed) here at Adobe Labs & enjoy! I am testing this all over and its awesome. Awesome.

Ryan Stewart: Adobe Media Player

2007-08-21T14:18:00.000-04:00

Ryan's recent onAir post (among the many of the excited bloggers this fine day) hit me squarely between the eyes. Something I had forgotten about because it was only supporting FLV content... the Adobe Media Player.

We will now be able to sling .mov, .mp4, m4v, .m4a, and .3gp files directly into both the browser based player and Adobe AIR (as well as FLV and streamed H.264 -- licensing not withstanding). Wow. Thats even more icing on the Adobe Video cake. This is going to open a whole slew of different opportunities for designer/developers and also for the media-hungry populace.

We'll be able to use a main coding method for integration of these digital assets, instead of approaching different media sources... well... differently :) Audio and video, come on down. You're the next contestant on reinvigorating the web!

I already have a SWF ready to deploy that is encoded with H.264 and AAC. All I need is the new drop of the beta player and I can slap it online and watch it. All without a .flv extension to be seen (well... I could rename the H.264 with a .flv & it wouldn't matter since the player inspects the header and not the extension). Bring. It. On.

Adobe's Video Announcement & FL CS3 AIR

2007-08-21T08:36:00.001-04:00

Adobe's Video Announcement.
I am thrilled. Absolutely thrilled about Adobe's announcement. Reading Tinic's post (Tinic is a golden god), I am really excited about whats going to happen to both video and audio in the Flash Platform. Read Tinic's post for the details, and the announcement for generalities, but .h264 is coming to Flash -- which drives Blu-ray and HD-DVD. I imagine this is in response to Silverlight's major (to me anyway) differentiator to Flash: high definition video playback. Now that Flash is getting that, plus many other super nice things, we have super choices in delivering our media online and offline (remember AIR).

Flash CS3 AIR Update.
Well now, the new update to the Flash CS3 IDE brings with it an easy way to generate AIR applications. In a matter of seconds, using the IDE and the new commands, I was able to take a little something I was working on & turn it into an AIR application. I still prefer Flex Builder for this, but if you want to go older school and use the Flash IDE, you certainly can. Thanks to Grant Skinner and his hard work getting his panel going a while back, but the new way Adobe opened up is wonderful.

Whoa. You need to install Adobe Flash Player.

I think that I did find a bug when loading in a .css file into the AIR application from both local and online sources... the AIR application will crash. If anyone is interested, I can make that debug message available... its rather long. I haven't tried it from FB, but I think I've done it in the past and it worked correctly.

Hmm. I may twitter this and see if anyone else can repro. So in the AIR test file here, it did load css for the rollover states for the links, but I had to turn that off in order to prevent the application from crashing.

Update:
Instead of using Adobe's "AC_RunActiveContent.js" javascript file and seeing all that nasty object and embed garbage, use SWFObject, I used it here for this post.

Its as easy as this:
In your head: <script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>

Where you want your badge in the body of your page:
<div id="foo_flashcontent"> Install <a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayer">Adobe Flash Player</a>. </div>

After the div somewhere (end of page or inline following is fine):

Easy, breezy, beautiful SWFObject. Above I had to change one of the < symbols as SWFObject was actually parsing within the pre tag content.

Pupae to this I hope

2007-08-20T16:37:00.000-04:00

I have been fiddling a bit with some pixels and organizing some interactive content that I downloaded from my previous (but still active) hosting account server space. Its coming along a little slowly, but I am indeed making some headway here. It should be a week or two before I tip the SWF bucket into the Resources section. In the meantime I am modifying the client areas of the site to make the transition seamless using a completely different technology that was used before. I've been a bit quiet lately, and I don't know if the Adobe Aggro-machine will pick up the RSS here (ATOM) even yet.

Hockey Sticks: Nike Bauer Vapor XXX Lite?

2007-08-18T22:30:00.001-04:00

A co-worker got me thinking, and all that hockey gear in the basement is sitting there doing nothing. He plays at the Natick rink every Monday evening (pick up) and it sounds like a lot of fun. Always two goalies (everyone knows turning goals down, etc. sucks), so thats super cool. I just need to get my skates sharpened... and I know that the first couple times the bottom of my feet are going to knot up and kill me. Happens every time I start skating again after a hiatus.

Now about sticks... I have a few composite sticks in my basement, I even have an old aluminum Koho (I LOVE this stick... its extra long and I can whip the hell out of it)... but I wanted to get thoughts on sticks from anyone else who is playing.

I have my eye on the Nike Bauer Vapor XXX Lite Senior stick. Haven't decided on a blade yet... not that important to me right now. Is the stick generally too light if you don't have the softest hands? $100 for the shaft and another $28 for a blade is a lot if you aren't sure how its going to handle. I suppose someone @ pickup might have one I could screw around with (but would you honestly lend someone else a nicer stick like this one?) Your thoughts on a good forward's stick would be appreciated.

P.S. www.dve.com is gonna save my bacon this year since living in Boston means not much Steelers. I can't do the sports bar thing here since I'm a family man. At least not for a few years. So I can do my internet streaming radio thing on game day, hell... I'll listen to WDVE even when the Steelers are on national television.

Resource Area

2007-08-17T22:53:00.000-04:00

There is something that I've wanted to do for quite some time. Over the many years of having this blog I had slapped SWFs on the server root and linked to them. After the years, the mess was disgusting, and I FTP'd all that stuff back down locally and burned it all off onto DVDs. After the inertia of that stuff waned, I stopped putting experiments and stuff online as it took energy to get sources cleaned up & explained. And over time a lot of the work I do is proprietary which means there is a whole lot less of it to share.

There are tons of utility classes that I have authored, experiments using my own code (and other's code to learn it more in-depth), and some tutorials I wrote a while back. I started up a special section sub-domained to help me keep things more organized and tidy. Hell, it could have its own RSS feed if I wanted (but I don't). I have a lot of room and a lot of sources. So from time to time I'll be updating resources.ericd.net. It will be fun, and its also a little trip down memory lane for me. I used to pump out experiments almost as fast as Keith Peters... well... maybe 1/2 as fast. But thats still a lot of experimentation. Stay tuned is all I can say for now. Oh... and my "RSS" feed is now ATOM.

Flash Components with dynamic code (but none inside)

2007-08-17T20:58:00.000-04:00

I've spent some time the past two weeks developing something that I haven't seen or heard about before: a flash component that pulls the guts of its code from a remote SWF. Now, why would someone want to do this?

Traditionally when you create a component & generate your resulting .mxp installer file, you distribute it or make it available. Then when you need to update the component, you generally make another version of the component and use that. This works, but its not very elegant. A component that when compiled into a SWF and runs online using code pulled into the SWF itself gives you the ability to update the component without distributing a new component.

Bandwidth. Yes. That is a big concern... however you can count on caching the remote SWF when its loaded, and you can change the version number of the SWF to pull in to use the code from... passing in a flash vars variable in the object/embed, etc. There are a few ways this could work, but I think you get the idea here.

So with some Live Preview magic, and a few kinks that have been worked through, a system has been developed allowing for a component to live and breathe even after installed onto IDEs everywhere. Update a single SWF or make another version of it (containing all the major code), update flash vars if going that route, etc. The component could even check a small XML file to know which SWF to pull to use for its core code. To get around the flash vars thing. A hair more bandwidth. But it works and its pretty cool to see working.

Crap Software Awards

2007-08-17T10:59:00.000-04:00

Well, I figured there was a little of this going on, but I didn't think it was nearly as bad as an article suggests (that I just came across online). Basically this guy wrote some software that doesn't even properly execute. He sent it to a bunch of software download sites, and so far has won 16 awards for his application.

Link to Successful Software's article. Thanks for telling the world about this practice. Click-backs is pretty greedy, although hosting prices aren't cheap for sites that generate a lot of traffic and eat up a lot of bandwidth. Its still a lousy practive though and clouds the frontier of software one can trust. If it wins awards, one might assume that downloading and running it would be beneficial. However, now you have to pay special attention to the site offering the software, or else just ignore awards and look towards application comments from real-world users. I opt for that most of the time anyway.

Test Post

2007-08-16T13:49:00.000-04:00

Changing FTP configurations, etc. Simply a test.

(mt) goodness

2007-08-16T08:47:00.000-04:00

Well, the DNS has snaked its way here anyway and I am now seeing the (mt) hosted version of my site. Its been a pretty painless process, except that I had to convert some of my ASP technologies to PHP. That actually gave me an excuse to learn some PHP and truth be told, its pretty sweet. There is a ton of PHP code circulating the internets now and whenever I bump into something I am unsure of, Google is a few keystrokes away from delivering me an answer.

With all of the ample room (mt) gives me, I'll be able to further enhance the site:

More code releases
More code and interactive examples
More and better podcasting
The option to videocast (this was never an option for me before)
More robust client areas

Right now I can't exactly access my new host's images directory, so I am using the temporary URL for that and it works for now. Hopefully in a day or so everything will settle down and I'll be completely free from my previous ISP (host). Good times.

Test Code Posting

2007-07-06T15:53:00.000-04:00

I am testing the display of some code, since I am migrating CSS and other things, I'd like to try to ensure a sweet transition when the DNS changes take place. This is just a piece of larger code stuff.

package
{
 import flash.display.DisplayObject;
 import flash.events.Event;
 import flash.display.Sprite;
 import flash.geom.ColorTransform;
 import flash.events.MouseEvent;
 import flash.text.TextField;
 import flash.text.TextFieldAutoSize;
 
 // XML-Specific
 import flash.events.ErrorEvent;
 import flash.xml.XMLDocument;
 import flash.net.URLLoader;
 import flash.net.URLRequest;
 
 /**
 *  AS3.0 Class to provide user selection of various
 *  Flash-specific resource documentation/files.
 * 
 *  Author: Eric E. Dolecki
 *  Copyright: 2007, Eric E. Dolecki
 */
 public class Resources extends Sprite
 {
  private var BaseColor:Number = 0x414042;
  private var RollOverColor:Number = 0xCCC2C0;
  private var SelectedColor:Number = 0xF15B40;
  private var navArray;
  private var nCurrentSelection:Number = 0;
  public var sectionId = "";
  
  // XML-Specific
  private var urlLoader:URLLoader;
  public static var data:XML;
  
  public function Resources()
  {
   navArray = new Array();
   xmlLoader();
  };
 }
}

Flash on the iPhone...

2007-07-06T07:43:00.000-04:00

Okay, so here are rumors galore about the Flash Player coming to an iPhone sometime in the future. There are three things that I can see wrong with the player on the iPhone (and with some genius they could all be sorted).

Battery life. Someone needs to make a player that isn't Flashlite, but consumes a lot less CPU to do its rendering - taking advantage of the hardware more. I am sure the iPhone does this on its own already with all the speedy transitions. Give that to the Flash Player, and that would be a big help.
Edge sucks, so we'd have to worry a little about the size of most Flash content, how it gets cached and eats memory, and how it would perform on a slow connection (something most of us have simply forgotten about). A caching mechanism or something could possibly help.
The iPhone gesturing might get confused with Flash content underneath it that also sucks up mouse events? Probably not, but maybe. Depending on how the Flash was developed, it could make things weird, especially for full-screen Flash apps and websites. This is probably the easiest thing to fix.

PHP/mySQL

2007-07-01T11:59:00.000-04:00

Well, this isn't live but I have redone a bunch of things using PHP and mySQL instead of ASP and .mdb. I had to learn PHP and SQL on the fly, and it took a while to do some basic things, but I am LOVING PHP right now. It seems so much more powerful than ASP (at least for the things I am interested in).

Once this MediaTemple hosting gets its DNS switch, smoooooth sailing and back to podcasting and other things. Loving (mt).

Cancun Trip: Smashing

2007-07-01T00:49:00.000-04:00

I just returned home from Cancun with the family and we had a truly amazing time. We stayed at the Royal Sands, and they have the best pool setup I've seen in some time. I took a lot of photos I plan on uploading to Flickr soon, some of them turned out rather well if I say so myself.

While we were gone, the iPhone launched, so we missed a lot of the hustle and bustle of postings and general internet frenzy surrounding it, but I have seen since coming home that generally it launched well and the reviews are quite positive. Minus the Flash integration... I give it the boo in regards to that. I wonder if the "mouse" interaction spoiled things in how the touch screen is employed. Think about it.

Anyway, just a quick jaunt in the post editor and now I'm off to catch up on real-life things and hopefully get the new site in order for some DNS switches.

Hello (mt).

1st post via mediatemple hosting

2007-06-22T23:31:00.001-04:00

Very often we write state machines and when they are fairly basic implementations, they are easy to manage. When things get complex, we often write huge blocks of switch statements, etc. to provide state behaviors in our applications.

I never got around to writing my own state machine class, and I could have used one recently, so I did a little digging around. I found a site with a decent example of a state machine as a class.

Often finite state machines are implemented (in real projects and tutorials) as a mass of code in a single class, usually a giant switch statement hundreds or (in one instance I’ve seen) thousands of lines long. A simple switch statement is great for a simple agent with two or three states, but the more complex the agent gets, both in the number and complexity of the states, the more complex the code gets. Using a switch statement also offers very little opportunity to reuse code across different agents and different projects (other than by cutting and pasting).

The solution I’ve used in a number of projects is to implement each state as a separate class. The class will contain all the code necessary for entering, updating and exiting that state and nothing else. This way, the code for each state is separate and the agent code isn’t cluttered by it.

Pretty cool and a good jumping off point. With this little bit of stuff, when I get time, I'll probably whip up a fairly robust state machine class for use on different projects. Every single project I work on has to have some level of state, and lately they have been getting more complex. It will help greatly in having such a class available to handle stuff. Cheers Big Room Ventures Ltd.