Sti Media: The Source

Long time no post on the blog, general updates here

Man oh man has it been a long time since I've even had time to get to this blog. It's really fallen to the side since I've been busy working on FMSGuru.com and about 2 billion other projects. Lots of really cool stuff coming down the pipes too.

The first thing I gotta mention is that there are just tons of tutorials now over on FMSGuru since I last posted here. If you are interesting in Flash Media Server and want to learn about it, I hate to toot my own horn (but if you don't do it, then who will?), then head on over. At this posting there are 23 video tutorials at a total of over 8 and a half hours of free training!! Not even Adobe offers that!

The forum is doing really well too, lots of new members with a total of 8 actual Adobe employees signed up and helping out here and there. It's great :)

Work has been crazy. We've been working on chat applications, MP3 players, FLV streaming and HTTP progressive players, widgets, high end conference applications and multiplayer games... geez, the list is endless. Makes for great material later on to teach. So much work in the FMS arena.. if you're looking for some work in this are, drop me a line. I could use some help.

August was a busy month work-wise combined with that I finally managed to take off for a week of vacation. No computer too! Went to a place called Tofino here in Canada on Vancouver Island. Beautiful place, I'll try to post up a few pics later. The west coast of Canada is a pretty cool place. My favourite part was actually checking out all the sea life on the beach! Felt like a little kid again..

We've got applications for sale now. A chat application and a video email application. The chat is a basic community chat app with the ability to private chat if invited or accepted invite. Video/audio/text kind of thing. Shouldn't be long before we have an update out for it to add in some cool features. No price increase either! At 99 bucks you can't go wrong. Video email app is pretty basic too, you get to record a video and email it off to a friend for a measly 49 bucks. Both apps come with all the source code for learning from. Pretty cool if you ask me :)

That's kind of the update for now. With the new FMS community site we've got up, the "ask an FMS guru" questions have pretty much stopped. So now I'll actually have to think of some other reason to write on this blog.. hrmm... anybody want to know what my hobbies are?

Putting all your eggs in one basket, is concentrating on one piece of software good?

I find myself seriously rethinking my business ideas, how to run things, and which direction to move in every 3 months to 6 months. As any reader of this blog would see, I've put most of my time and concentration into working with Flash Media Server. I've been using the darn thing since it came out as version 1(over 6 years ago?) and haven't stopped playing with it since. Work is very constant and I'd have to say that at times I just have too much work. It's crazy how so many companies are getting on the FMS bandwagon. It certainly helps that the licensing finally relaxed a bit.

This poses a question to me regularly though, should I be developing for FMS only? What about the other options out there that are used to stream just video, socket servers and of course the FMS-like server software like Wowza and Red5?

I'm sure this goes for just about any software really. Should you only use Photoshop? or get familiar with Illustrator too for print stuff, and if that's the case then what about Fireworks etc. Which can then actually move forward to using After Effects for clients that may want more than just still images (you can actually make some very cool still images with AE though..)

Or how about an ASP dev (which I do too) or ASP.net? Should they be aware of how PHP or CFM works? or should they be reasonably proficient in it too so that they can do other types of work?

When you do this you then have to take time away from the original software that you are really good at (in this case FMS) and study something new.

Self Investment.

I'm sure any entrepreneur will feel somewhat the same in that it's a real quandary of when and how to go and make a leap of faith to another technology or even to a subset of the current technology that you may be using. Flash and Flex are great examples actually. I've seen many a Flash dev kind of fight the "move to Flex" idea because it's something new to learn and takes time away from bringing home the bread.

But what can you do? If you don't move forward then you'll get left behind. But herein lies the question... which way is forward?

Which then of course leads me back to the original question of whether or not to use alternate software of what I'm already good at and is working rather well. Isn't there a saying that goes "if it aint broke then don't fix it"? But as well all know very well, that saying can't be applied to every circumstance.

Anyways, I'm definitely all for moving onward and upward and improving the toolset I have and adding to it. It's just that inner turmoil of being a jack of all trades or a king of one. Is it a choice of just one of those or can we have our cake and eat it?

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 :)

Two days used up with installation of Adobe's Master Collection CS3

I hate to rant but boy oh boy... Adobe's CS3 installer should be taken out back and be put out of it's misery I think.

These last two days I've been wrestling with installation of CS3 Master Collection. That's the package with everything in it.. it's a monster of an install. Over 20 gigs of stuff I think. Anyways, I found it amazingly slow to install (3 hours just to install) and wasn't much of a happy camper on my 5th try to get it to install successfully on my laptop.

Anyways, I thought I'd chronicle my efforts here in case somebody else has a problem and is looking to solve it.

First up, I have two computers here. One is a desktop and one is a laptop. Like a lot of developers I have my desktop as my main workhorse and the laptop runs around with me when I have to visit clients or work out of the office. Both are sufficient enough to run the apps CS3 Master Collection has. Don't believe the box where it says you need a certain resolution to make it work, my laptop has only 1024 x 768 and all apps seem to run fine (a bit cramped sometimes though).

So my trials:

1. Uninstall the Production Collection on both computers (I had this before the Master Collection)

2. Reboot

3. Try to install Master Collection, it fails on the first disc at 100%. Just sits there like a lump on a log doing nothing. Nothing... Did I mention it didn't do anything?

4. Force quit installer. Uninstall through program thingy that lets you uninstall stuff

5. Reboot

6. Run Adobe cleaner (somewhere on Adobe's site.. don't have link at the moment) but didn't press "no" at the end which seems counterintuitive to me.. but in essence it asks you if you want to just view a preview and not make changes. Oh well, so I didn't really run it, but I thought I had thinking "wow, that was fast".

Anyways...

7. Reboot

Have I mentioned how much I don't like rebooting?

8. Install again from disc 1

Everything went well (5 hours later of course). Go figure. So it seems you don't always have to run the cleaner. Maybe I was just lucky.. or just unlucky on the first try.

Laptop time:

1. Same as 1 above

2. Same as 2 above

3. Try to install. It makes it past the first disc to fail at 3.33% on the second disc. It just sits there failing silently.. crapola

4. Force quit

5. Uninstall from program thingy in windows

6. reboot

7. run cleaner from Adobe

8. reboot

9. I'll make this simple, I did steps 3 to 8 two more times with the same results.

Go to bed, it's now 1 in the morning.. bleh

Next morning:

10. Try one more time with the above, no luck. Finally call up Adobe, they ask me to do a bunch of weird things like reregister the MSI installer etc, says that all will be well and I get off the phone

11. reboot (getting a bit repetitive now isn't it). Oh yeah, I ran the cleaner too. On the advice of another person I also ran ccleaner (google it)

12. Try to install, it fails on the same spot. At this time it might be interesting to note that in the event viewer for windows it was telling me that it was having trouble extracting an amoeba PNG file and in turn the after effects something-or-other-installer was failing. This is in the event viewer by the way. Doesn't say anything in the installer

13. Call Adobe again, get a different person. They suggest copying the files to my hard drive. I mention that it's a laptop and I don't happen to have 50GB of free space to copy and then install the files. But they did give me an idea and I dragged out my trusty USB hard drive with 80GB of space on it.

I started to copy the files over while on hold while the person went to go get divine intervention before I exploded on the phone because I had just spent 2 days trying to get this stuff installed on two computers.

Here's the interesting part. The copy failed. It wouldn't copy over one of the cab files. A cab file is like a zip file, it's huge. 500MB of data actually. Obviously an important one because this is the one that was causing the installer to fail. Not really sure what to do at this time I hand copy over all the other files doing a compare to make sure I got them all. All that was left was this one very important 500MB cab file.

Now my idea at this point was to get Adobe to provide me a download link to this one file (not sure if they would have done it though) but while still on hold it came to me that I had the downloaded version of the Production Collection. So I looked around in there for this 500MB file that I needed and low and behold! There it was.

So I copied that over and copied over the rest of the discs to my portable hard drive. That took a while.

14. Install from portable HD. Now this here is a bit of tricky situation because the installer is expecting you to have discs and when copying I can tell you that it's a total pain in to even try to copy over the files to the right spots because the directories are all named the same. So I copied them into "disc1" "disc2" etc.

15. After it finishes up with disc1 it asks to put in disc to drive E... well, drive E is my USB hard drive.. hrmm

16. Move the directory from disc2 directory to disc1 directory, after renaming the same named directory in the disc1 directory. No go..

17. Move the directory to the folder I made in the hard drive. No go

18. Move the directory to the root of the hard drive. It goes. Weird.. I didn't run the installer from the root to begin with.

19. Repeat as needed number 18. All I did was move directories back and forth and pressed OK and all was well.

So that is the chronicles of my install. Adobe is going to be sending me some non faulty discs which is nice. I can't help but wonder how my desktop got installed properly then. There was no damage on the discs.

Well, hope that helps somebody. What a lot of typing.

Friday Joke

After taking a break of just generally slacking off surfing the net I ended up on fullasagoog going over some stuff that may be new to me. I came across a couple of posts on "friday joke" and thought that I've got a great one to add.

If you're Canadian you'll appreciate this more than others I think :D

Sitting together on a train, traveling through the Canadian Rockies were an American guy, a Canadian guy, a little old Greek lady, and a young blonde girl with large breasts. The train goes into a dark tunnel and a few seconds later there is the sound of a loud slap.

When the train emerges from the tunnel, the American has a bright red hand print on his cheek. No one speaks.

The old Greek lady thinks: The American guy must have groped the blonde in the dark and she slapped his cheek.

The blonde girl thinks: That American guy must have tried to grope me in the dark, but missed and fondled the old lady and she slapped his cheek.

The American thinks: The Canadian guy must have groped the blonde in the dark. She tried to slap him but missed and got me instead.

The Canadian thinks: I can't wait for another tunnel, just so I can smack the American again.

Did you know about Feed-Squirrel.com?

A couple of posts back I was commenting on how slow MXNA is for me. Nothing has really changed even though I did take some advice like looking at only categories or smart feeds. It still is fast only on the first page or two and then it just gets dog slow. So much that sometimes I can wander over to get a coffee, come back and it's still trying to read in some data. I'm really curious as to why the first two pages only are fast and the rest aren't.

Anyways, I was reminded of Feed Squirrel actually. Our blog is on there and we do have a banner link on our blog but I had completely forgotten. They are aggregating over 1200 feeds and the site is fast. Nice, I think I'll use it much more often to keep on things.

I thought I'd just toss that out there in case there are others that are feeling the pain of slow MXNA and want to get their blog fix and aren't sure where to go.

Does MXNA work for you?

I'm kind of curious as to how many people visit Adobe's MXNA blog aggregator. I mean, the actual page for it. My experience is that the first page loads really well, the second page a bit slower, the third is crazy slow and most of the time the fourth page and on never load.

Should I be viewing MXNA some other way? Like an RSS aggregator or something? Is it just the web version? Could it be a browser issue (doesn't seem to matter though if I use firefox or IE)?

Being that MXNA just never seems to work beyond the 20th to 30th entry (and there are a LOT of blogs being aggregated so new stuff goes by fast) I almost always just go to fullasagoog. But I can't tell the last time Geoff updated it with a new blog, it doesn't seem to get new blogs.. but I could be way off.

Anyways, any advice on the MXNA thingy would be great if you happen to have some. Thanks.

Building a boat in my spare time

Well, sometimes some people ask me what the heck I do when I'm not building tons of flash and FMS stuff. So I thought I'd post a few interesting things that I do that also tie into the flash and FMS stuff :D

One of the things I'm doing is helping a friend build a 26' wooden boat. It's a catboat actually. I've gone ahead and put up a blog about it and been posting in it for the last couple of months.

http://www.periwinklecatboat.com/index.cfm

This blog currently runs on Coldfusion 7 by way of Ray Camden's CFC Blog. Thanks Ray for making such a great blog program. It certainly serves it's purposes for what we need.

The video was all done with one of my video cameras, a Sony TRV-30, and then pulled into Premiere 2.0 where I added the title then off to After Effects 7 to add any effects and the captioning. I thought about doing the captioning with Flash, but decided a more graphic approach looked better. In the case that I wanted to put the videos on a DVD the captioning is now done too.

The video player is of course done with Photoshop and Flash. Unfortunately due to lack of connection count I can't put the FLV's on FMS, so that is progressive, works fine though.

Anyways, building a boat is a pretty cool thing to get into I think, but not something I might start from scratch myself.

So if you are interested in wooden boats and boat building or even what the heck I am up to in my spare time, then head on over and check it out. Lots of information and good fun.

I can't stop watching my fish...

I don't know what it is but I can't stop watching my fish..

Click the pic for the full rez version

Just recently while re-renovating my office I decided to add in an aquarium to sort of give the work area a bit of life to it. Up until now I've just been surrounded by books and book cases above me with books leering down at me saying "hurry up and read me!!" or something like that.

So, along with removing every bookcase in the room and tearing off the bookcase above me on the wall, in goes an aquarium. For any of you that have an aquarium I'm sure you already understand this but it's not easy to have a large aquarium just hanging around. First up is a strong desk to put it on. I managed to get the legs part for free from a friend, which are metal and very strong, there was no top. I ended up cutting up some 3/4 inch plywood into 2 equal size pieces to fit into the corner of my office and match up with not only the depth of the desk, but also the height.

To add onto that, an aquarium is a bit tough to manage but that in itself intrigues me because I like nature and ecology. I got a 29 gallon tank, two types of gravel for it (small and large gravel for the plants), 3 ornaments that you can see in the pic (a log, boat and ruins that has an air stone). Then over the last few days I've been stocking it with a few small fish (3 neon tetras and 3 blackskirt tetras) and live plants. I chose live plants because not only do they look better, but they are much better for the system. Being that it is a closed system, other than when water changes are made, it's tough to maintain safe levels of certain chemicals etc. The live plants will help along with that and to me just seem more natural.

All in all though, I just can't stop watching them play and swim around. I was talking to the guy at Petsmart, where I go to get most of my stuff, and he was mentioning too how theraputic it is to just relax and watch the tank. It's very relaxing and definitely the best addition have made to the office so far (even beats my new 23 inch apple monitor..). So maybe thats it.. I just need to relax a lot :)

If you have the space and a bit of time for the maintenance, I definitely recommend getting an aquarium. If it's your first time though, don't start small because they are actually harder to maintain.

Movie Review: Flyboys

I don't usually report here on movies (sometimes on books though..) but I enjoyed this movie and thought I'd toss it out there to recommend to others.

Flyboys, is a movie about World War I pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille and have just received one of the most influential planes of that war.

If you are an airplane buff or just plain like watching dogfights and aerobatics of the older planes then you'll like this movie. There's lots of CG going on, but you can tell when the real planes are flying and it's pretty cool.

Heading to Tokyo

I recently found that I will be relocating to Tokyo the end of the month. While I am not new to Japan, it is the first time I will be residing in Tokyo, so would love to have some people to get together and talk shop over coffee or a pint. If you are in the area and would like to get together or know any regularly scheduled meet-ups (design, flash, mobile, etc), please let me know.