December 20, 2007
I can't stop watching my fish (part 2)
Quite off topic than the usual I thought I'd post up what has become of my new hobby of fish keeping. A while back in 2006 I posted up that I had got my first aquarium and set it up in my office. It's been a bit over a year now and I've now got 4 aquariums in total! It's crazy.
So without further ado, here are a few pics of them:
That first aquarium now has 2 angel fish in it that spawn every couple of weeks. Pretty much every time they end up eating the fry but this time I think I may give it a go to raise them artificially. You can't see it in the pic I think, but over on the right they have a batch of about 250 eggs.
All pictures can be clicked to view the bigger version:
Then there is a smaller aquarium with a female guppy that just pushed out about 20 fry.. crazy stuff. This tank also has 3 shrimp (freshwater ones) which are kind of cool to watch skitter around:
Then a slightly larger aquarium that has a fish called "German Ram" which are beautiful fish. The picture almost does them justice. I managed to get good close ups of the female and male. The male is more colourful:
And last but by far not least, the big 55 gallon aquarium:
A lot of people find aquariums a pain to deal with and too much trouble to do water changes and stuff. I don't find that at all, it's kind of like just having a bit extra to vaccum up or dust in the house. With lots of plants there is very little maintenance that goes on. The plants essentially take all the fish waste and convert it into nutrients which then in turn creates oxygen and so on. Fascinating in my mind because I'm so keen on learning about different ecosystems. I've considered a salt water aquarium but don't think I have the money or quite the patience for it. Fresh water is very easy as long as nothing drastic happens like changing out all the water or something.
Anyways, I thought they were good pics so I hope somebody else enjoys them :)
December 05, 2007
A practical look at the prerelease details of Flash Media Server 3
So, Adobe has gone and properly announced that the Flash Media Server 3 family of products will be released next month and have tossed in all kinds of tidbits of information about them. Let's take a good look at this and see what it means for developers and their clients.
As I had mentioned in my last couple of articles, there are already some items mentioned and the release date hasn't changed. We've got lots more details now so I'll see if I can't give a good overview of them and what they mean to you and your clients.. or you and your developers :)
Links to the information and other articles in case you haven't seen them (I'll add more as I find them or people let me know where they are):
My good friend Stefan's Flashcomguru post
Now that we have that done, let's move on.
First up I have to say that I'm very impressed with the new licensing scheme. This has been a thorn (a long dagger or sword maybe..) in the side of all developers for FMS in that it just was costing our clients too much to use FMS. Which of course slows down adoption of such a great technology. No more. The licensing limitations have all been taken away. No more bandwidth or connection limitations and no more edge/origin licensing scheme. To go with that, there is a new version of Flash Media Server called "Flash Media Streaming Server". The original is called "Flash Media Interactive Server". What does all this mean to you?
Without licensing limitations the overall cost vs benefit improves. Before if you wanted to have a small cluster of servers you would have to either write your own load balancing solution and pay only (only?) 4,500 dollars per pro license or buy into the extremely expensive edge/origin configuration. That started at 45,000 bucks or maybe less if you could get them to give you some kind of deal and that only got you one origin license and one edge license.. Not much use without at least two edge servers, which of course would be 60,000 dollars (30 for origin, 15 for each edge). Now, you can do the exact same thing with only 13,500 dollars. Not a bad price drop I think with even more functionality overall.
I wonder how all those clients that bought into the original edge/origin configuration are feeling about now...
Anyways, along side that there is the streaming server which is essentially only used for streaming video. It's a crippled version of the real thing and is only 995 dollars. Personally I probably wouldn't recommend this to any of our clients. I've yet to have a client come to us asking for only streaming video. I'm positive there are lots out there, and maybe this new version with reasonable pricing will get more in, but I'm still skeptical at this point. We'll see.
The one cool thing about the streaming video part that both can do, is to stream to mobile devices with the announced flash lite 3 player. That's pretty cool in itself actually. And of course the streaming of H.264 video. Very good.
The main differences between the two versions is that the streaming version does quite literally only video streaming. Keeping in mind though that you can stream live video. That's handy, then maybe use a socket server for the chat stuff and other live functionality? That would keep cost down for sure. There is no multiuser functionality or messaging ability built into it. I'd call it FMS 3 lite if it were up to me :) and priced it at $599 maybe.
The interactive version is where the power is at if you are into creating full on multiuser, big huge interactive, powerful, fun and exciting applications. Both versions have received the updates to improve performance and add on the RTMPE protocol which will require the flash player 9.0.4.something-or-other (the latest of the latest at the time of this article). This is nice because it's a 128 bit encrypted version of RTMP which will help those DRM woes and doesn't require a certificate. Along with the SWF validation functionality should help in beefing up security on FMS apps (just video streaming apps or more), I know that we can use this right now on a few projects.
In the interactive version we have a few nice extras like AMF3 support. Good for Flex apps and also that you'll be able to send bitmaps across the line. The smaller packets should help with latency and bandwidth issues.
All in all I'd have to say I'm pretty satisfied with the gains that FMS3 has made. Better licensing, better performance and the improved security features plus the option to edge/origin the servers is great. Cost for the original license itself hasn't changed, but because the licensing itself has changed we can see a good drop in price for those that need more servers and want to use the edge/origin configuration. Other than that you aren't necessarily getting anything at a reduced price, just more bang for your buck.