Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category
The black box that is the Flash Player
This morning I read an interesting blog post by John Dowdell highlighting some things that bothered me in the last week or so (and talked about on twitter).
We’ve been seeing some sensationalist headlines on tech blogs like “Open Source JavaScript to Replace Flash?” without seemingly any understanding of the (all be it incredibly cool) project in question.
Gordon is Javascript code that parses SWF files, loops through the frames and outputs SVG that can be played back in modern browsers without the need for the Flash Player plugin — that means it works on browsers like the one on the iPhone. A fantastic proof of concept and it works really well considering the amount of heavy lifting it needs to do.
The problem here is, this is not a Javascript based Flash runtime as it gets advertised. Its parsing an SWF file and outputting SVG graphics. If you look at the list of supported SWF tags you’ll notice these are all SWF version 1 and 2 — meaning very basic functionality. Search for some tutorials on Flash 1 or 2 if you can still find them and see what that limits you to.
Not to diminish this great project, at this time its practically only useful for very simple banners or animations without any sound or user interaction. It is also – understandably so – heavy on the CPU. Now you get the kicker with uninformed comments like this:
“While the open source Gordon is available to all, it still doesn’t solve one of Flash’s biggest problems. These SWF files still hog the CPU. One demo, a simple vector graphic of a tiger, throws my desktop browser up to around 100% CPU usage”
To be very clear: it is *not* running the SWF file — its parsing it, converting it using Javascript and outputting SVG. Running that same SWF file on a native Flash Player, even on a smartphone would be a fraction of that in terms of CPU usage.
Then you get people saying projects like this highlight how the Flash Player has become obsolete and its proprietary format is harming the “open web”. Somebody hasn’t been paying attention since 1998. The SWF format is open and freely available (as are many other formats and protocols used in the Flash Player), that is in fact what makes projects like Gordon possible without resorting to reverse engineering.
There is literally nothing stopping anyone from developing an open source Flash Player, Adobe’s implementation isn’t fully open source mostly due to some technologies it licenses and can’t release (video codecs and text rendering). Saying the Flash Player is a black box or its future is in jeopardy because of its proprietary format is just factually wrong.
I do hope to see more people take up the challenge and start developing code that plays back SWF content, we can only benefit from that.
India’s new visa policy of terror
As many of you will know by now — I have been in the process of setting up a business in India with colleagues for the last few months and am now back in Belgium for the holidays.
While in Pondicherry in December there were rumors of a drastic change in Indian visa regulations and we went to the immigration office to find out about this. We returned with some peace of mind after speaking with the immigration officer that things weren’t quite as bad as they were made out to be. Now preparing for my return to India it turns out the situation is much, much worse and is effectively crippling our ability to run our business in India.
Where I was originally going to apply for a 1 year business visa, I was advised to apply for 6 months and will now be (hopefully) issued with a 3 month visa. To say the new visa guidelines are unclear and inconsistent is an understatement. My French colleagues have a condition on their business visa that requires them to leave the country every 30 days which doesn’t seem to be the case in Belgium, or at least is not published as one of the business visa conditions.
On leaving India your passport is stamped and you are not allowed to re-enter the country before two months without special approval from the Indian embassy in your home country. To get this special approval you will need to demonstrate that you left India for an emergency (e.g. death of a family member). There are several reports of people getting stopped on immigration for wanting to re-enter before two months of leaving the country while others have gone through without problem.
Calling the visa office helpdesk even they are unsure if this applies only when on the same multiple-entry visa, when on a new tourist visa or regardless even when you have a new different type of visa.
This is where the core of the problem lies — as a tourist or business person you pay to apply for a particular visa (non-refundable of course) and have no idea whatsoever what you will get back or what the conditions of your visa will be.
All this is being done reportedly to help against terrorism in response to the case of David Headley in particular and his involvement in the Mumbai attacks.
Nobody will argue against strict measures on who you allow into the country and by all means screen people before issuing them a visa, ask more supporting documentation to be submitted on applying for a visa or require them to register on arrival at an immigration office. Simply giving out shorter term visas with additional conditions but little to no background check is not a solution to this problem.
I seriously doubt this new visa policy will have a deterring effect to terrorist activity and hope it will be reviewed very soon. At the very least my advice would be for the government to release an official statement on the exact new guidelines and make sure they are enforced the same everywhere.
Speak up against the new India visa policy
When Tech Journalism goes bad
“Is QuickTime X The Missing Link For Flash On The iPhone?”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/15/the-missing-link-for-flash-on-the-iphone/
The author suggests that QuickTime X supporting FLV playback is somehow an indication that the Flash Player will come to the iPhone. While I’m sure that is what many of us would like to see happen it is one of the most ridiculous statements I’ve heard in a long time. This is not unlike saying that because your home entertainment system supports JPEG images it’ll soon run Photoshop (or because its a technology blog its authors will research what they publish for that matter).
Flash Video (FLV) is an open container format that can contain other codecs, such as H.264 and AAC for example. Since QuickTime supports playing back H.264 video, it is already able to play back FLV encoded with that particular codec.
What I find most disturbing is that the original article gets edited multiple times without a clear indication of exactly what the author has changed.
Jonathan Harris at Flash on the Beach
I’ve been doubting whether or not I should blog about this, seeing controversy seemed to me what he was after, and this post would only be adding to that.
Jonathan Harris’ session at Flash on the Beach blew me away with some of the most inspirational art projects I’ve seen to date, I was genuinely moved by the work he presented. At the same time this talk left me incredibly frustrated after hearing his perception of the Flash community and a message that seemed devoid of any sense of reality.
He started off by saying he was going to present a different session than was previously announced and he had “something important he wanted to say to the Flash community for a long time now…”. That line came back at regular intervals during his talk, seemingly building up to his big message. It almost felt to me as if he was after a “Michael Moore addressing the Republican National Convention” moment.
Photo taken by schobiwan
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Saving Twitter in Three Easy Steps
I don’t think I’m alone in seeing Twitter’s service deteriorate to the point where euthanasia seems like the only humane option.
Without any obvious intimate knowledge of how the service is architected, these are my three easy steps to hunt and kill the fail whale.
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Scotch on the Rocks review
… or a look at ColdFusion from a Flash/Flex developers perspective.
I just got back from four days in beautiful Edinburgh for an event I would likely not have attended were it not that I was invited to speak there.
Scotch on the Rocks is one of barely a handful of what I’d call real “community driven events” out there, while not as polished as other more commercial counterparts I had a sense that this is the place to be if you want to get a real feel of what is happening in the ColdFusion community and want to network with fellow European developers.
As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I’ve only had very limited exposure to ColdFusion and even that was year ago which made it all the more interesting to see what its current state of affairs is.
Podcasts exempt from doing research?
Yesterday, I download the latest MacBreak video and what do I see —
<rant>
This is probably the worst description of any product I’ve ever seen. First of all, Bordeaux is not Thermo — secondly there’s already quite a bit of information out on Thermo since the MAX conference last October.
Two minutes of research or just checking with someone at Adobe would’ve been welcome (they’re standing right outside the stand for goodness sake).
I’m sorry to see the LA Flash user group being mentioned here, sure as hell they’re not spreading that kind of misinformation. I don’t mind the occasional speculation on a podcast but if you’re at NAB, in a position to easily confirm with an Adobe representative, and then present this dribble as ‘breaking news’ you lose my vote.
http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak148
Telenet consumer malpractice
[update] Turns out it isn’t quite as bad as I thought — the pay as you go is 0,26 Eurocent or 0,0026 Euro vs 0,00099 Euro buying the extra monthly blocks. Still wish Telenet had better package options and did something about those ridiculous download limits.
The Adobe/Apple Relationship
Its no secret that, being in the business of developing software for creative professionals, Adobe has traditionally had a proportionately large chunk of Mac users. With Adobe acquiring Macromedia and going all out to extend its reach to web, desktop, mobile and beyond (hosted services seems to be their next big thing) it seems that the business relationship with Apple and others is not as straightforward as before.
I think its fair to say that on a number of fronts Adobe is becoming serious competition to the established companies, just look at the potential of word processing with something like Buzzword — despite its current limitations of being run in a browser (the desktop AIR version is coming soon) it is in my mind already the clear winner. Web development has always centered around user experience and bringing that skill set to the users machine is paving the way for an entirely new desktop experience.
Conference speaking arrangements
…or what is all the fuss about? If there’s one controversial topic in the community its speaker arrangements with regards to covering their expenses for conferences. In the last few years several people have been pretty vocal in expressing their opinion on the issue.
Just to put this into context, I’m not pointing the finger at any particular event or organizer nor am I suggesting that its in any way unethical for a conference to make a profit. I want to put some information out there for those of you that might be wondering how things are handled by various conferences.
