hates the internet

Those who've known me for a while have no doubt heard me talking about a rich media framework a friend and I have been tinkering with for the last few years and the wait is over: I'll be showing off a rough alpha version at DemoCampGuelph.

Computers are what I do.  I spend quite a lot of my time dicking around with various things and, as I'm sure is true of almost everyone who happens across my little corner of the internet, over the years I've amassed quite a collection of code.

For the last week or so the day job's had me building a site platformed on Drupal. The powers that be were quite fond of JonDesign's SmoothGallery, which is unfortunately written in MooTools.  Naturally, this led to all manner of hell breaking loose.

Almost a year ago I became involved with a Web 2.0 startup called Fundfindr which aimed to be a social network of entrepreneurs, VCs and angels.

Many years ago, before there was an internet (at least publically), we had to exchange information by squealing odd sounding noises down phone wires. This data was usually displayed in a text-mode terminal emulator, so needless to say your options as an artist were severely limited.

Speak is an online communication environment which offers multiple concurrent isolated rooms, all of which are capable of real time two way audio, video and text chat. The system also supports pre-recorded audio or video content which can be made available to users in multiple rooms and has an in-depth logging and reporting system.

Panda is a canvas based rich media portal supporting multiple resolution image zooming, multiple bitrate Flash video and various audio formats.

One of the sweetest things about FLV is the way it handles it's cue points. With Windows Media you're limited to a command type and some command data, but with Flash each cue can contain an object with as many properties as needed. Seeing as my MetaData patches have found their way into trunk (revision 2288), I thought I'd do a quick writeup on how it works.

The project I’m working on now started life as a generic LAMP project with a Windows Media drop in. Now that Red5 is nearing its 1.0 release, I decided I should start evaluating moving to a Flash-based solution and, to use a cliche, there was no looking back.

Firewalls are a necessary evil in today's world and, although some corporate firewalls may be severely restricted, it's fairly trivial to get Red5 and your ActionScript project to work within their bounds.