Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

AMFPHP Video Tutorials
Patrick Mineault posted some video tutorials with the release of AMFPHP 1.2 at AMFPHP.org. However, SourceForge‘s servers blow… I couldn’t even download them to mirror them on my servers, so had to wait for Patrick to mirror them on his server first. Anyway, they are now mirrored on one of my servers.

Additionally, I’ve put them in my CaptivatePlayer so you can watch them all at once with volume control.

AMFPHP Video Tutorials – (All 6)

or individually:
Nature Boy has the full mirror list here.
February 27, 2006
Pay For Anonymity

I just got an email from Register.com. I can pay them $9 bucks so my address and phone number isn’t easily accessible via WHOIS information even though ICANN decrees it so. There are a plethora of other places to find this information about me, even some have an actual accurate address, and those places provide this information freely. I’d bet most do not offer a hider’s fee like Register.com does.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how people’s data is on other people’s computers, not under their direct control, and that data is under different laws in regards to getting a warrant from authorities to access it. Granted, just about everything is up for grabs, but there is still some legislation to help it not get too out of hand. Not sure what the legislation is, I just “feel” like it’s there. Self delusion? Probably.

Someone wrote a blog entry last week on MXNA about how some such business was offering a service to parents to find out about what their children do online. They’d basically trawl blogs and MySpace, collect forum postings and other archived email list information, organize it, and send to parents.

The blogger countered with the idea that maybe someone would someday start offering services to hide your personal information from your parents. It’s feasible you could hire someone to lower the visibility of a lot of your online information, but never remove it. While there are millions yearning & yelling to be be heard, even you’re quiet musings can be found if you dig through the cacophony. I’m sure, though, much like security through obscurity, you could at least deter those not so determined.

Still, everything is saved somewhere, why try? I think I’ve tried for the most part to live by the mantra my dad taught me:

“You’re never sorry for something you didn’t say.”

I’ve only deleted 1 blog entry in my 6 years of blogging because I later would of preferred I had not said it. I didn’t regret it because I learned a valuable lesson, but I know it’s out there cached in a multitude of places.

Holding politicians and others in the public eye accountable for what they say has gotten easier with the advent & ubiquity of digital video & editing equipment. You can play back word for word what they said, in or out of context, and body check them on it. The same can be done using internet caching in blog comments (see comment #14).

Everything you do or say online is captured somewhere. I wonder at what point some of those places will start charging to erase data about you, and only you? This doesn’t mean the data itself is actually deleted, only access to the parts about you.

For example, if someone came to me, and told me they’d pay me $5 to remove all of their comments from my blog, I’d probably do so. However, it is conceivable I could delete those comments from being public, rebuild all of my blog entries that had that comment, and thus have no publicly facing pages that house that person’s comment. The comment would still exist where the rest of my blog data does, though, in my MySQL database. Do I charge extra? Do they have a right to have their data (their name & email address) removed from my database they freely and knowing gave it too?

If I go into a clothing store at the mall, can I pay the clothing store the next day to delete all security camera footage of me because I “had a bad hair day”? Assuming no crimes were committed that day, and they had no legal reasons to retain past footage, could they make money via charging me for such a service?

Would such services proliferate if many others started following the same model? Could I pay Target to remove video footage, Flickr to remove all of my photos and links, and Chattyfig to remove all archived emails? Am I truly paying for the illusion of anonymity? Once visible, can you ever truly disappear again? Will name identity changes become more prevalent in the future?

Online identities have been big business lately. Some have persona’s in forums and online games, some have ego’s based around them via XBox 360 badges, and some actually have totally different perceptions from the world at large online vs. off. What defines you and what you use to express yourself via your identity online defines internet & connectivity culture, and has ties to the presence sphere in the corporate world as well as Bluetooth devices.

If search engines are the bloodhounds to your digital scent, then multiple online identities are the solution to online anonymity. This cheapens the true depth of those identities, however, because you spend less emotional investment in them, and therefore less accuracy in how they portray you. You have less emotional attachment, and albeit less involvement.

Are there truly ghosts in the internet, or are they just digital superstition, an ideal for the paranoid?

February 27, 2006
Flex Enterprise Services: Airplane Chat

A few weeks ago, I opened the Chat example that comes with Flex Enterprise Services 2 to see how it works. Utilizing Flash Media Server (formerly known as Flash Communication Server) Remote Shared Objects requires low-level ActionScript. Since Flex is all about concise, high-level tags, I was curious how easy they had made it. Using the Chat example file as a basis, I tried to make a multiplayer airplane game where each person in the chat has an airplane avatar they can fly.

I’m sort of ambivalent towards their message implementation. Considering I haven’t read the documentation either, I’m sure I have missed a significant amount of information about the API and only used part of it. Glancing at the docs, this appears so. Additionally, I didn’t take advantage of the server at all; I just added 1 entry to the config and left. Flash Media Server has a lot you can do with the server to help you build multi-user applications, so I’m assuming the same for Flex Enterprise Services 2 as well.

I still feel from coding this that the API is just as low-level as writing pure ActionScript, only cleaner and AS3 compliant. This was only a 4 hour project, though, so I can’t really make any firm decisions on how I feel about it.

Bottom line, creating push based applications for most people will be f’ing cake. Using just 1 tag that allows you to bind various controls to data is pushed to the server is extremely powerful, and even those who barely use this feature will have immediate, and clearly visible benefits. For those of us creating games, I don’t know… more research & reading is needed.

Basically, install the server, open the flex-config.xml, copy the chat tags and name it “fly-jms”, and reboot the server. Either setup your Flex 2 project in the Flex server it installs, or write an ANT task to copy files there. Don’t forget, it installs in the Program Files > Adobe, not Macromedia, hehe!

Airplane Chat – Example | Source ZIP

February 25, 2006
Post NCFUG Flex 2 Meeting: Flex, Levels, and AJAX
Had some good discussions about various topics after the Nashville ColdFusion User’s Group meeting. Common themes were:
- Where can I learn more about Flex 2?
- What is the difference between the SDK, IDE, and Server?
- How does AJAX fit into this?
I answered these questions, and had good discussions afterwards. I think it’ll be beneficial to have these documented here.

Where can I learn more about Flex 2?

To learn more, download the Flex 2 bits from labs.macromedia.com. They have some docs included as well as some small samples and brief tutorials; enough for a beta.

Secondly, join the Flexcoders mailing list. Good group of diverse people from various backgrounds, both technically, and business wise which is very well managed and has a good Adobe presence.

What is the difference between the SDK, IDE, and Server?

Flex 2 is currently in public beta. Things are subject to change, but here’s how things stand currently.

The Flex SDK consists of the Flex compiler (mxmlc & compc), and the Flex Framework 2 (ActionScript & MXML UI framework components). This is free with no license restrictions on use, nor dependencies on anything else other than requiring the Flash Player 8.5, also free, to run on.

Flex Builder 2 is the IDE that Adobe is working on as a plug-in to Eclipse, as well as standalone version. This will be priced under $1000, and includes built-in debugging capabilities.

The Flex Enterprise Server is both a real-time messaging component as well as including the Flex Server (built-in proxying for Flash Player’s security sandbox, whitelisting, blacklisting of sites, named services, etc.).

I don’t know the specifics on what of FES you get if you already own Flex 1.5, nor how FES ties in price wise, but I believe if you already own Flex 1.5, you are in good shape.

If you want to create Rich Internet Applications using the Flash Platform and do not want to spend any money, you can use the Flex SDK.

If you want to do the above, and use an awesome IDE, you need to purchase Flex Builder 2 (which includes the above).

The Charting Components 2, Flex Server, Flex Enterprise Services, etc. I’m still fuzzy on.

How does AJAX fit into this?

This question keeps coming up in terms of hype, and I’m really glad because I like when people question the status quo, especially enterprise developers.

The context was, what is so good about it from a business standpoint when Flex 2 combined with ColdFusion clearly owns?

My response was basically paraphrasing what David Mendels had said in a similar email thread on the AJAX & RIA Email List run by Johnathan Boutelle.

Basically, with AJAX, for little time investment you make major gains. Flex 2 has more of a time investment dealing with the learning curve of existing teams, even with the familiar concepts.

Case in point, you have an existing website application. It’s large, been around for awhile, almost legacy, but you are looking to improve it. Your login screen refreshes the page to an error screen, or a success screen depending success of the operation.

You decide to change the form post to an AJAX call, set some progress text in a text field, and show a previously hidden DIV indicating an error happened and why. Suddenly, the login system has a more responsive interface, the login happens quicker (both success and failure), and you end up with a better experience vs. the “magic white flash surprise – is it a success or failure… let’s wait and see!”.

And you didn’t have to re-write your web application that already works. The cost of entering and improving existing apps with AJAX is extremely low. Even new applications can have post-backs as a fall back plan.

Flex 2, on the other hand requires you to re-create your existing application if you did the whole thing over. If you replaced just the login with Flex, there really wouldn’t be a point because you could do the same thing with HTML. You additionally can use existing libraries out there with short learn time, and small risk vs. learning MXML & ActionScript, and compiling the two.

So, bottom line, AJAX is very attractive in that respect because you take extensive amounts of already existing applications, and make them better. Not being locked into the same mindset of how web applications are built in the past allows you to apply even greater levels of AJAX innovation with newer web applications.

Obviously there are many merits of Flex 2 over AJAX, such as a runtime that allows companies to more quickly take advantage of newer features that their customers can use; 6 months for Flash Player auto-update to propagate to millions of machines vs. utilizing the Firefox 1.5 Canvas and hoping in the next 2 years, it’s prevalent enough to hit a decent user margin.

Still, it’s good to know why the hype is placed in context to Flex 2 and even better to see how the two can integrate enough so you can do less-risk implementations of Flex rather than full-blown application implementations like I do. A lot of creative room here.

…

I awoke at 2:45am to the sound of Bach. I drove from Nashville, Tennessee back to Atlanta, Georgia safely in 4 1/2 hours, but frikin’ tired. I’m only hitting my inbox today, so if you are on mailing lists, I’m just recuperating and coding and will be back in the mix tomorrow.
February 24, 2006