MX Traveler

BumpTop Prototype - HoneyBrown.ca

This hit my mailbox, a demonstration of a new desktop interface paradigm, using a metaphor of piles. I need some time to digest the new information and to follow-up with some decent feedback but there's already some commentary at Adaptive Path.

Link: BumpTop Prototype - HoneyBrown.ca.

Link: You've Got Piles - Adaptive Path Blog.

Picking up a Webby with Prince

Last week the FabChannel team flew across the ocean to pick up a Webby Award, see the compilation here:(RSS readers, please follow the URL)

ABC's free web TV a success (and how to view the streams outside the US)

According to Reuters, the online episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief and Alias are a big hit. I think it's pretty genius to sell the same content twice to your advertisers, without adding extra value to the delivery chain (ok, you can skip through the stream by itself...but you could do that anyway if Tivo'd the show). Some interesting quotes from the article:

• Television shows were viewed more than 11 million times
• 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers vs typical ad recall of about 40 percent on television
• Disney would have no trouble attracting advertisers for shows offered on ABC.com
• The pilot program outperformed the results Disney had seen in its nine-month partnership with Apple
• Making the episodes available on online platforms is not decreasing the amount of traditional television viewing of those shows
• The company must now figure out how to set advertising
  rates for the online episodes

Link: Disney says ABC free web TV a hit with consumers - Reuters.com.

The hard problem with (Flash) Video

A few years ago, i blogged about Flash video and why i think would explode. I also mentioned some of the problems that i thought needed to be addressed by Macromedia. I received some feedback, aligned my thoughts with others and never really looked back at that posting.

Since I'm involved in a site that does video-on-demand and live web casting, i revisited that posting again. A little older and wiser and a bit more experienced, i suddenly realized i was talking about implementation problems that, yet have to be addressed by Adobe, but can be done very quickly. From a higher level, there are some really hard problems with video, and the sudden explosion of 'user-generated content' manifested through sites like You-Tube makes finding solutions for these problems even more urgent.

The root cause is that video is a linear story, from A to Z where you have to see part B before part C otherwise it's harder to grasp the big storyline. On top of that, it's all visual and audio based. No text. No Table of Content. No list of actors or Oscars. No mention of spoken language or dates. Nada.

The current solution is to add (lots of) meta-data to our videos ( i presume the proper Web 2.0 term would be 'tagging' ;) ) trying to give them context. IMDB in it's essence is one huge cloud of meta-data that can easily be linked to your stack of DVDs. "Give me all movies with Mel Gibson from the 90s please!" would only be one link away! However, this all requires human intervention, and while some people have no trouble spelling Mel Gibson, others do. And our experience from CDDB, freeDB and MusicBrainz tells us mistakes will happen, not to mention the whole debate over who actually _owns_ that data. Or if that data is even made accessible for machines.

And how do we link to that part in the movie where Mel Gibson jumps on his horse to chop of some soldiers arm? What's the format? And in what environment do we get to see that movie? In the browser? In Windows Media Player? What about Linux? What if i don't have the latest Windows version installed?

We have tapes full of memories. The wedding of your sister. Your son first steps. Your high school graduation. Because of better computers, faster broadband connections and user-friendly, cheaper software we can put these online with a single click of a button. And we do. On any given day, You-Tube users upload 35.000 new videos to the web. "Give me all movies that were recorded in Amsterdam this month" only returns me the videos which were uploaded and tagged with 'Amsterdam' 'June' '2006'. And even then it doesn't guarantee me the correct result...

The last couple of months, all of the big guns announced or actually went live with new video initiatives. We all love video and we want to share them with our friends, our family and who ever owns a computer with an internet connection. "Making the world's information universally accessible and useful." is Google's mantra. Given that we're still trying hard with static images makes me wonder if and when we solve the problems for moving images...

• The Application of Metadata Standards to Video Indexing
• Veotag
• The Myth Of Video Metadata Standards

 

Hacking FMS pt. 2: FPAD?

Patrick Simon from Adobe was so kind to help us out today on our Edge/Origin setup and replied to my email on the Flashcomm mailinglist. I'm republishing it here again for anyone setting up and using Edge/Origin clusters.

"What are FPAD messages and why are they showing up in my network logs?"

It's okay that you're seeing these FPAD messages. Flash Player 8
broadcasts them by default when you call nc.connect(). Saying this, if
you have not configured FPAD on the server, they're not doing any harm.
However, a best practice is to switch them off with nc.fpadZone = -1
before you establish the connection with nc.connect();

==============================
var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc.fpadZone = -1;

// the default is 0, to switch FPAD broadcasts off use -1
// then connect by

nc.connect();

// and you shouldn't see the fpad traffic in
// ethereal (or similar network scanners) anymore.

/*
other fpad settings that are available:
nc.fpadWait = 250; // in milliseconds
nc.fpadOnly = false; // boolean
nc.fpadPort = 67; // Target port to broadcast
nc.fpadInfo.ip = edgeip; // only available if proxy is detected
nc.fpadInfo.port = edgeport; // only available if proxy is detected.

The default behaviour is that the player broadcasts the FPAD message to
port 67 to the network with fpadZone=0. Change these before you call
nc.connect()
fpadZone = -1 disables this broadcasting mechanism. So if this isn't
required, it must be set to '-1' before call connection.

fpadOnly=true will only detect the proxy on the network and won't
connect to the server.

The fpadInfo object is available only when player detects the proxy on
the network. You can trace it in you function for the onStatus event
whether or not the proxy is available.

The Player then reconstructs the URL based on the value fpadInfo.ip and
fpadInfo.port.

If, for example, there is a poorly configured FMS, this information may
tell you why the connection is not working.

fpadPort can be changed to some other port if the target FMS proxies are
listening on different port other than 67.

fpadWait is timeout for detection. If the player doesn't get a response
back within this timeout from any FMS server on the network, it will
connect to FMS directly with the information you provide with
nc.connect(). For example, even if there is a FMS server available but
it is too slow to respond, the player still has a chance to connect
directly to the FMS Origin server.

*/
==============================

Wohba!: More Illusions of Color

I thought this was pretty neat, and a nice reminder i need to go back and study the masters who were true geniuses when it came to color theory :)

Watch for a few seconds ( around 10 will do ) to the cross on the image, and then rollover to see the image in color...be amazed when you discover it's actually a B&W image :-)

• Wohba!: More Illusions of Color
• Big Spanish Castle

Hacking FMS pt. 1: "Adobe Flash Proxy Auto-Discovery"

The new Flash Player contains spyware! Look at the image above, my Ethereal logs reveals the following when i'm watching Flash sites. Adobe is evil!!!

Achtung ! Jetzt Gehts Los...

About & Credits: Achtung ! Jetzt Gehts Los.

We won a Webby!!

This may be old news to some, but since the awards ceremony is coming up on Monday June 12, i just had to post it again. FabChannel.com won a Webby Award in the category 'music'!

On Sunday a team of us will be flying in across the big blue ocean to accept the award at the ceremony in Cipriani Wall Street, New York City. This is a tremendous accomplishment for the team, so congratulations!

I'll be looking forward to the infamous '5 word acceptance speech' from the CEO, Justin Kniest. We may also have a little surprise on Monday :-)

Press release after the jump.

Creative use of Flash IDE

Working with Flash all day, makes you sometimes forget how to bring the IDE to live. :-)

From deviantART: "... An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat.  The battlefield?  The Flash interface itself.A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find - the brush tool, the eraser tool - to get back at his tormentor. It's resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself.

-- This took three long months.. i think it's worth it...." Alan Becker