Sti Media: The Source

A case study called "Easybum"

Reading through a magazine here in Japan, and it has case studies on building services. One of them was called "Easybum". What do you think this service is about?

Just another wacky example of putting together english words into japanese to sound "hip"... pretty funny stuff if you ask me.

*don't go thinking dirty* it's not like that.

A 200 dollar web camera!

me: Yes.. I bought a 200 dollar web camera.

them: Are you nuts?

me: No... I don't think so

them: Are you rich or something??

me: Nope..

them: Then what the hell you need a 200 dollar webcam for??!

Me: Well, here's the story. the management for the building I live in have decided that they need to change all the drain/sewage pipes (the pipes that take the bad water out of the building) 2 weeks from now and it seems that every single apartment here has to have a whole one week worth of construction. This totally sucks because these people will be coming in and out of my apartment from 9 to 5 everyday from Monday to Saturday. Yes, you read that right.. in Japan doing construction on Saturday is normal, which means there will be people in my house while I'm still wandering around in my boxers making coffee or something. It's not so bad otherwise because I'm not home during the day, so I don't have to put up with anything, unlike most people living in this building who have to go without a shower and toilet (anything that uses water) during that time.

Though, I don't trust these people because I won't be here to watch what they're doing. Not only that there was a special on TV the other day about how a guy would pretend to be part of a large construction crew working on a building. He'd wander around taking casts of the keys and then come back in a few months to help himself to stuff from the rooms he got keys of.. I'm already nervous about people coming into my house while I'm not here and a show like that just put me over the edge, SO! here's the reason a bought an expensive webcam.

I plan on making a security style app with Flash/FCS so I can watch these people from anywhere on the net. I think FCS is extremely ideal for this because for example, say you have a cam setup and you want it to watch your room. Though thanks to high pricing of bandwidth and license or hosting of FCS, you most certainly don't want to be publishing full time. So you connect up with the "watcher" side of the app and make a call to the webcam side of the app to turn itself on and publish at whatever rate you choose. Maybe keep it at a low level of FPS to conserve bandwidth, but when you really want to know what's going on, you remotely turn up the FPS or quality. Also if somebody has broken into your house or whatever it is you are watching, while you are calling the police you can send a call across for it to start recording the video too so you can use it later in court. That would be a first I think. "Crime fighting with FCS". Anyways, back to my problem. There isn't a free line of sight that I can get the area where they are working in, so I had to somehow have the camera move, or get one with a huge line of sight. But at the same time I also wanted to setup another camera in my "office" room so I will know if anybody wandered in without permission. This means I need not only another camera (I already have one connected to my comp) but I need one that meets my needs. Hence the expensive camera.

them: ah.. I see. Isn't that being a bit paranoid and untrusting?

me: Umm.. no. I don't see it that way really, it's just a small step to better security.

them: So what's so special about the camera that makes it so expensive?

me: It's so cool! It's the Logitech Q-cam Orbit. It follows your face automatically and has a 180 degree swivel with a 60 tilt so that it can pretty much follow anything that doesn't go completely above or behind it. I've played with it a bit so far and it does quite well in following along as long as you don't zip around too fast. I wish I could control it from afar though.. there must be a way.

My biggest worry though was that it might not work with Flash (there seem to be quite a few people having trouble with some cams), but there wasn't any problems and it showed up crystal clear. Here's a pic of it in case you haven't seen one in the stores. I'm not sure if these are available around the world, but they have been out in Japan for quite a few months I think. I've included in the central usb memory I got so you can get a perspective on how big the cam is.

I'm actually looking forward to building the app, even though it'll be a bit tough because there are a lot of things to think of. One thing that runs through my mind is what happens if for some reason the network goes down and then comes back up. In this case I thought "If Central had true network awareness I'd have my killer Central app!!" but it doesn't, so I have to rely on polling for the connection status or something. It should be fun, and when I get closer to finishing up I'll try to post some screenshots.

So, how do you feel about somebody tramping in and out of your house for a week while you're not there? Would you take any steps to increase security in your house, or at the very least, the rooms you don't want people in? Or trust in the superintendent of the building and the construction company to keep security high?

Working with peoples memories

This is just something that was running through my mind last night, so I thought I'd put it up to see if any of you have had the same experience.

I've had the privilege of working on quite a few video projects in the past year or so and I'm working on a new one this week for a client who wants to give, as a wedding gift, the video that she took of her friend's wedding. They had the wedding in Hawaii and of course had a local pro video editing company come in and take some vid and edit it up to a DVD (which I personally didn't find very pro-like.. but that's just my opinion) but the stuff I have is what the client took. The more "personal" side of things that the pro's weren't around for. The job is to take about an hour of this home video and scrunch it into about 15 mins with some specially selected songs from the client. It's not an easy job as there are so many places that can't be "used" as well as I'd like to (video shake, bad lighting etc..) but I really enjoy working with video so that's not biggy to me. The one dif I see with the "pro" DVD and what this video is going to be is that the look and feel that is coming across is much more personal and close up with the main characters, bride, groom and family. It's got the comments during the lunch and dinner before the big day, the look of each family member while they get the normal butterflies we all get before such a big day. It fades into the wedding day, and there are all these feelings just written all over everybody's face as the bride gets out of the limo at the church, father walks her up the aisle, he's nervous and you can see he's doing his best not to shed a tear in front of all because he's giving his beautiful daughter away to another man. It pans off again to the happy couple at the alter, the mother dabbing her eyes in the background, clapping, happiness, sunlight and then off for the photoshoot where this happy young couple get captured in time in a variety of places while the rest look on in pride and happiness. It's nothing like a presentation vid I did a while back for Disney where you just have to line up some neat graphics with vid and music.... these are peoples memories. Touching and hearstring-pulling memories. More than once I choke back a slight sniffle in happiness for this couple as they share the start of their new life together. *sniff* *sniff*.. getting all mushy just thinking about it again. Way off topic, but I had to get it out. Thanks for reading :)

Electric Rain blog is live!

Yes folks, if you're interested in Swift3D then this is the blog for you. The famous Rainwriter, if you've read the manual and liked it, I think this blog is for you ;) Check it out here.

Some random thoughts on Flash Communication Server

Lately I've been doing some thinking on the support and community that FCS has at the moment. I don't really have my thoughts in any special order here so I'll just write them out as they come to me, hopefully some of you out there also have some thoughts on the same thing.

To start, I've noticed an increasing amount of interest in FCS yet at the same time a dwindling amount of participation? or interest in actually building FCS apps. One blogger mentioned that due to the extremely high cost of FCS, it's not tuned to the average Joe who just wants to get some live apps up on his/her site. I misunderstood the original post that maybe FCS was too difficult for beginners or people who are new to AS, and that it wouldn't be easy for these folks to get into these types of apps, but later found out that it was pricing that was the problem. Though I have never really sat down and compared pricing vs license issues / availability and ease of use I don't really consider FCS too overly priced but wish that the licensing was a bit different. The amount of connections is reasonable if you don't use vid too much, but if you are just trying to stream out vid or get a video conference going with a bunch of people, that's a different story. Anyways, to not get too off topic on this particular issue, I'm wondering what would cause a decrease in apps being put out. I have to say that I almost never stop messing with something in FCS every single day and can't imagine going back to MSN for daily in-house communication or corroboration with clients. Not only that, there are just so many "neat" things that you can do with FCS, and people generally are interested in that aspect (live data, vid/aud). It's just plain fun. So where's the bottleneck? Well for Japan (which is where most of my attention is), it's a major lack of information, books and material to study off of (in the local language of course). Since the components aren't translated over to Japanese, neither are the documents, which really really sucks to be honest. It makes me wish I was part of the FCS team here in Japan so I could whip some stuff out to boost the community up a bit. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be a priority here (though I really have no idea of what is a priority for MM Japan...) that's just the impression I and a lot of others have. How unfortunate, there are so many possibilities if only there wasn't such a large language barrier.

On another note, it's great to see an update come out for FCS, but what's with the continuous delay of v2? Is it a delay or will we never see it? There are more than a few people who are fuming that MM is keeping all the cool functionality for themselves (see: screensharing) so they can get their foot firmly planted in their own market before any of the developers who work with FCS can. I'm not sure if that is the true story, but again that is the impression that comes across I think. Of course MM did give it a shot in ver 1.5 to get screen sharing out, it just didn't work out. I'm sure we'll see it in v2 but... when is v2 coming out? I wish there was more info on the future of FCS, a roadmap or plan of what MM will do with it in the near and far future. Though because of Breeze I'm sure FCS itself isn't going to go anywhere... but what will it morph into? These are issues that I think every FCS developer is thinking about right now as we continue to invest more and more time and energy into it. What can we plan for, and should we continue to invest time and energy into FCS? Will it still be a "sellable" option to clients? How will pricing work in the future? As we can see with Flex, MM is trying harder to concentrate on it's "Enterprise" image, will FCS go up in price like Flex did and scare away the rest of the low budget companies? Will it be out of reach, or will we have better options? I think these are all important points for all FCS dev guys and gals out there.

So what can we do? What is possible in the hands of anybody but MM (as they seem to be busy with other projects)? Maybe I should ask, what is it that we would want to do? Why are there so many resources and new tutorials for flash, yet so few for FCS? Is it a feeling of movement in Flash that drives people to get out more resources? Do people have more trust in the fact that Flash will be around for time to come so they feel it's worth writing or teaching about? Is FCS missing that? Is it a limitation of what FCS can do? I have a feeling if MM drummed up more support and technotes or articles on FCS, the community would follow that lead in some way. Do we have to rely on the mothership to know where to go? Does MM feel this is a bit of a burden? "how come we always have to lead the pack? pick things up where they were left off and run with it" kind of idea? "you can lead a horse to water but...." or do they use it to control the implementation of certain apps and technology.

Those are a lot of thoughts for one post I think, and I have more, but thinking now that I should organize them a bit. I most certainly don't want to just lay questions out there, but also be able to provide some answers if possible.