Peter Elst

Earlier today we went to sign the agreement and left a deposit on the new Project Cocoon Multimedia apartments/office space in Colas Nagar, Pondicherry.

We’ve now got ourselves a nice three story building that gives us enough space to have client meetings, organize training events and even have freelance developers over to work on projects as needed.

We’ll be moving in next month but we’re already open for business! If you have any projects going, we’ve got in house expertise for Flash Platform development (ActionScript, Flash, Flex, AIR), mobile application development for iPhone and other platforms as well as graphic and print design.

Additionally, starting from June we will start to provide offshore development services and can be your central point of contact for quality assurance on off site teams.

 
Feel free to get in touch!

 

When Internationalized Domain Names became available last year, I jumped on the bandwagon and registered a couple. One of these is שָׁלוֹם.com (Shalom as written in Hebrew).

I’ve not done anything with it since and thought it would be a good way to raise money for Haiti disaster relief. I’m holding a blind auction, if you are interested in acquiring the domain name please drop me an email with your bid and contact details.

The auction closes on Thursday, January 28th at 8pm CET. I will contact the highest bidder and transfer the domain name ownership on receipt of payment.

Feel free to spread the word!

 

This is what Google suggested to me as search queries earlier today.

[update] I got some unite services working now from any browser, must have been a glitch earlier — feel free to leave a comment on my fridge :)

 
Opera announced that they would “reinvent the Web” today — having spent some time going through what was announced I’m not sure they managed to reinvent a whole lot.

So what happened? They announced a beta of Opera Unite, with what they call a “Web server on the Web browser”. Trying to make my way through the marketing speak the best description I found was in the FAQ: “share the content directly from your computer rather than loading it and sharing it through a third-party server”.

This is essentially P2P technology, a term many companies now seem to avoid like the plague for its association with illegal filesharing through bittorrent (which is a whole different issue). Opera has some services that you can install in their browser that run over a unite:// protocol (file sharing, a fridge message app, media player, photo sharing etc.). According to what I’ve read this is supposed to be accessible from any browser, though haven’t been able to get that to work — partly because the service seems to be overwhelmed.

That might sound a bit strange a P2P service getting overwhelmed, isn’t the whole point that it goes directly from one computer to the other? Well when you run a service like this it need to go through a server to resolve the connected clients so they can continue further data interaction directly between themselves rather than passing through the server. This is I assume also why you’re required to have an Opera account and sign in to that to run any of these services.

I really like the idea of what they’re doing, and P2P, client-to-client, UDP or a host of other names it gets advertised as is definitely the way forward. Not necessarily for services like they currently demo on Opera Unite but certainly for live audio/video streaming and other situations where bandwidth throughput is still a real issue.

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This is a post for my Dutch speaking readers about the new and improved FlashFocus.nl community site.

 
Wat betreft nederlandstalige Flash community websites is er weinig twijfel dat FlashFocus.nl aan de absolute top staat. In 2003 was Flashtival, een evenement van FlashFocus, trouwens een van de allereerste conferenties waar ik een lezing gaf.

Of je nu een beginnende of reeds gevorderde gebruiker bent van Adobe Flash Platform technologie is dit de plek om vragen te stellen en ideeën uit te wisselen. Ik ben echt onder de indruk over de inzet van de vrijwilligers van de vereniging FlashFocus om deze community site al zo lang actief te houden.

Dit weekend hebben ze hun nieuwe website gelanceerd met een vernieuwde design en een aantal nieuwe features. Ga zeker een kijkje nemen!

www.flashfocus.nl
 

Over the last few years I’ve had several projects where I had to interview people to get involved on Flash/Flex/ActionScript projects — typically what happens is the client wants some sort of assurance that “nothing bad will happen” and somehow there is this perception that only getting people on board that have passed a certification exam helps with this.

From my experience that is not the case and I have serious doubts about the whole concept of a couple dozen multiple choice questions to determine someone’s expertise in a particular product. At best it documents that they know the theory.

Is software certification worth something in the real-world and is it worth you spending your money on? I’ve seen a lot of qualified people rejected for projects because they didn’t have product certification and on the other hand you have people that did get certified and couldn’t script a simple animation without resorting to the documentation.

I would like to see this changed.
 
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If you live in Belgium chances are you will have heard about Mobile Vikings, a new MVNO on the market — one of their main objectives is to offer free mobile internet as part of their prepaid offer.

Now that might not sound very impressive but in Belgium mobile data tariffs are through the roof. The cheapest mobile data plans you can get are typically around the 10 Euro/month mark for a couple of 100MB. Mobile Vikings offers an ‘unlimited’ data plan (which is not quite unlimited, but rather has a fair use policy of 1GB). Truth be told that is probably more than enough for my mobile data use at the moment.

While considering to switch over and browsing their website I still had some questions and contacted the helpdesk for more information. I got a response within an hour or so and wanted to share what I was told about their offer:

Mobile Vikings uses a prepaid plan, every time you top up 15 Euro you get 30 days worth of:

• unlimited internet (1GB ‘fair use policy’)
• 1000 free SMS messages (national)

Since this is a prepaid plan the 15 Euro can be used as a balance to pay for voice and SMS in case you send more than 1000 text messages/month (which seems unlikely). Any remaining balance rolls over the next month, you are required to top up at least once every 6 months to make sure you keep your credit. Your mobile number stays active for 12 months after your last top up.

As you might expect the rates for voice calls are a bit more expensive than you typically get at 0,24 Euro/minute — though its the same price for landlines and national mobile numbers (any network). If you work it out you get 62,5 minutes worth of call time for your 15 Euro top up.

All in all this is quite an interesting offer for internet junkies like me, unfortunately since they partner with BASE the mobile data goes over GPRS/EDGE while 3G would obviously be a lot more appealing. Still, this is probably the best offer out there if you are primarily interested in mobile internet and I quite like the idea you’re not tied into an x month long contract.

If anyone is interested in joining Mobile Viking (Belgium only I’m sorry to say), I’ve got a couple of invitation codes left — just leave a comment.
 
www.mobilevikings.com

 

I came across a surprising issue with Google Analytics yesterday when a client contacted me, it appeared page hits were getting logged for dozens of pages that don’t exist on his website.

While I thought about the possibility of some PHP vulnerability or other security issue on the server, it occurred to me that obviously these pages had to exist somewhere for the Google Analytics tracking code to get executed.

I started doing a little detective work by Googling the file names of some non-existing pages that showed up in the stats. Soon enough I found one obscure enough to only come up with a few hits.

When checking the source code for that page the problem was obvious, the website was using the same Google Analytics tracking ID my client had on his website. It didn’t appear to be anything malicious, maybe them making a typo or some HTML code getting ripped from my clients site and reused without realizing the tracking code was still in there.

The consequence though is some completely messed up statistics — I am baffled Google doesn’t do a 404 check on pages that get tracked or even a referrer check to see if the domain corresponds with the domain the tracking ID was registered to.

It leaves my client having to filter out dozens of non-existing pages, even worse on pages that have the same path and filename. For those there seems to be no clear way of figuring out what hits came from one website and what page hits from the other.

 
In my honest opinion this is a pretty serious issue that needs to be addressed, if nothing else it leaves Google Analytics open to unscrupulous characters to spam your visitor stats.
 

Clo Willaerts, Marketing Manager at Sanoma Magazines and organizer of Brussels Girl Geek Dinners recently did a crowdsourced presentation on “Standing out in the blogosphere” and looks like I somehow made it in under the “Sharing and inspiring” header — very cool!

There’s some really excellent points in there that you’ll want to keep in mind when you start blogging. My advice, just have fun and write about what you’re passionate about and you’ll build yourself an audience.

Its official. I’m happy to say I’ve accepted a part-time position as a lecturer at the Technical University of West-Flanders where I’ll mainly be teaching Flash Platform technologies and helping to develop the Digital Design and Media aka Devine curriculum.

Its a great opportunity to work with a group of really passionate and talented people such as Koen de Weggheleire, Wouter Verweirder and several others.

As you might know Multi-Mania, Europe’s biggest free multimedia event, is one of their initiatives so look forward to getting involved in that as well.

There’s a really strong track record of excellence if you look at students coming from Multimedia and Communication Technology and I’m confident Devine is shaping up to be no different; arguably making this the best multimedia bachelor degree around.

Exciting times ahead!