Ok – for the past week we’ve been having TERRIBLE speed issues within the Canton CT area – especially on upload. I pay for the business speed ($188 a month for just digital tv and cable) — and over Vonage I’ve been getting a terrible delay. Skype is the same way.

Right now I’m attempting to upload a 352meg video file to my server and it’s taking about 5 hours — did a quick test on comcast.speedtest.net:

That doesn’t seem right, does it?

Course on speedtest.net (and using a server back in the old neighborhood of Clifton NJ) we got this:

Gotta love this:

Another app created for Scribelabs and their customers – the Advertising Research Foundation. A sort of ‘iTunes in the sky’ this Flex app allowed authenticated subscribers to either stream and view ARF content or download to their iPod. Fun little example done in Flex and using custom TileList renderers…

More information can be read at scribelabs.com

Can’t write it as well as described on Scribelabs’ site: “Podium offers browser-based, live multistream broadcasting and videconferencing. Built on Adobe technologies and delivered via Flash Media Servers and CDNs such as Limelight Networks, Podium is used for small geographically dispersed meetings and large-scale event broadcasts.”

A Flash / Flash Media Server / CDN mashup that allows the virtual meetup to be streamed across the web in real time…for more information check out the pages at scribelabs:http://www.scribelabs.com/software/scribelive/

Hmm – this looks interesting:  advanced data vis components for Flex – Diagram, Timeline, Gauges and Maps with spark-like renderers (mxml).

IBM ILOG Elixir 3.0 beta | RIAgora.

I had been looking at the custom post types that were added in WP 2.9 and fleshed out in WP3, but they still don’t offer the sort of database control I’m hoping for with a book publisher’s website. I started to look at Flutter, but I think it’s not been updated in a while…

There’s a fork of Flutter called Magic Fields that seems to be updated for WP 2.9; so I’m attempting to use that for the initial setup, will report back how well it functions; but so far the ability to create custom post types with their own properties / image uploaders seems to be the thing I’m looking for…

I’ve not posted on a number of interesting tech developments of late (Adobe vs Apple) and what that means for third party iPhone / iPad compilers (appcelerator’s Titanium, Elips from openplug, Unity3d) — but I’ve been extremely busy working on a few websites utilizing Wordpress and writing some custom widgets and plugins utilizing the fantastic jQuery.

I’ve been blown away getting under the hood with Wordpress and jQuery – creating custom post types, smart widgets and who knows what madness — and it’s definitely something I’ll be doing a lot more. I had been looking at drupal for these two websites but it’s definitely way more granular than I needed for these two gigs.

I’ve got some Flex players I’m finishing up as well and a lot more data wrasslin’….

Don’t know how this escaped my attention, but my old buddy Tom Higgins of Unity (ex Macromedia Director ambassador) posted that Unity Tech signs a three-year deal with LEGO!.

Ah — it’s funny; having recently been playing with Quartz Composer again, I’m feeling the need to delve back into 3d world…

This is an interesting video — demonstrating how drupal can be used as the base system for iPhone/iPad/Android using Appcelerator Titanium — even if it’s painful to listen to the ‘I Got Drupal’ music video…

YouTube – iPhone, iPad, Android Apps using Drupal as base system.

The conference session can be found here from April 2010.

A few good videos by Doug Winnie showing the steps from inception, wireframing to handing off the UI to a developer:

All the episodes can be found here.

Whew; have been working on getting this site updated on a dev server, and finally got it up and running with fixes on the production server — just have would like to change the way the contact page works — there’s no real UI response that a message was sent… I’ll probably do a quick fix using the current mail scheme and then add cforms or something.

Great video from TED on the power of motivators –and specifically for those that need to think creatively; the old stick and carrot only works for tasks that require heads-down work…

Christian Cantrell showed an example of how to better control nested loops by labeling each of the loops… very cool, had no idea.

In my forays into mobile development and appcelerator.com’s Titanium for developing on iPhone and Android, I also found phonegap that allows a trifold approach for Android, iPhone and Blackberry.

Blackberry development on OSX isn’t quite supported as yet but Aziz Uysal has a great tutorial about getting the Blackberry SDK and simulator up and running on osx.

How To: Implement Facebook Connect on the iPhone in 5 minutes from Cat Lee on Vimeo.

Well, the newly fixed Macbook, after spending a week getting it nearly back to the same state, realizing I’ve lost a lot of music I was working on (some of it was *really* good), and getting a weeks worth of work done, has decided to freak out with the video display…

… strangely enough, it was fine all day; I left for an hour to go shopping and when I returned it was *not* in the same state as I left it. Got it to boot into the OS/desktop *once*; began to do some work, but then it did the weird every other pixel flakeout with the moire pattern…

I can debug and test, patch and peruse to my heart’s content, but if there’s no electricity there’s not much hope of anything happening… like a castle built upon the sand.

Today the power went out not just in my building, but seemingly my whole section of town since the traffic lights were out as well. With no power comes no responsibility it seems (and yes I’m looking forward to Kick Ass)… so right now I’ve gone to the local Barnes and Noble to piggy back on their working electricity and internet, hoping to see the two home computers come online on Skype to know when to go home..

….oh joy; school just called to tell me that the kids are being let out early, so I’m the one that gets to deal with my child’s withdraw of moving objects, tv, and video games. We might have to venture out into the world.

Update: power came back on, machines rebooted and signed into Skype.. got to watch the dog freak out.

I know that Dreamhost (my host provider) has supported Passenger for Rails apps running on Apache, but I’ve only gotten a taste of it lately, as I was setting up my development machine as a LAMP stack with Rails and now Passenger (including the MacOSX Passenger pane).

I’m actually quite astounded how quick it is to set up; see for yourself:

http://www.modrails.com/

Apple seems to be really pushing for developers… too bad I’m on the east coast…got this via linkedin:

Apple’s iPad and iPhone Software Engineering division is growing tremendously, so we will be having a job fair at the Apple campus in building 4 on Friday February 5 from 11am to 8pm.

We are currently hiring for:
- Software Engineers from embedded level up to UI (applications, frameworks, firmware)
- Wireless and cellular software development and test
- QA Engineers (black box, white box, test tool developers)
- Software Engineering Project Managers (telephony, multimedia, build, factory)
- Carrier Field Test Engineers
- Software Engineering Management

You can check out all iPhone Software Engineering job opportunities at www.apple.com/jobs/us /corporate.html and click on the iPhone Engineering Division.

Please send your resume to iphonejobs@apple.com and bring copies with you. The attire is business causal. We are growing a lot, so please also tell your friends. Thanks and we look forward to seeing you on Feb 5 to join us in pushing the evolution of mobile communications.

Dan Ryan
iPhone Software Recruiter
408.974.5859
dryan@apple.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielryan

Address:
Apple, Inc.
4 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Directions:
- 280 to DeAnza Blvd
- Turn left on Mariani Ave
- Turn left onto Infinite Loop
- Drive around to building 4 (4 Infinite Loop, the “back” side of Apple’s campus) and park
- Go in the lobby of building 4 and ask for the iPhone SW Job Fair

Well Adobe did have a few things to say regarding the abscence of Flash Player on the iPad demo — but then again Christopher Cantrell wrote an article detailing how to get the multiple resolution out of the Flash to iPhone export…

Had a bit of a thread with some facebook friends / geeks who are piping out about the iPad’s locked-down, non-flash nature…

I agree that it’s not really a ‘tablet’ and that it’s tied to the appstore; but it DOES have a keyboard and prop stand (how it recharges).

However I don’t see it so much as trying to fit in the netbook/tablet space so much as how it’s going to change the way we deal with the CONTENT so much.

First off I think — though there will ALWAYS be books – books will go the way cds/vinyl has done; I see this fitting in a place specifically for tech, or students; people who have an awful lot of books that they might be needing to access rather than cart around huge tomes at all times. Or the medical profession; one server on an internal network, and all your files can be accessed right there. YES I understand it can be done today; but one app store app to fit in that market and it’s golden.

I also see a space where there will be MUCH more self-published works; if iTunes sets up the same sort of schema for pdf as they have for music, more indie writers will put up pdf and people might be more willing to purchase something for $2 that they can read right there, rather than buy online and ship, or in a bookstore. Just a thought.

Even the pay as you go cellular is great – buy the cellular, never use it until you’re on vacation, pay for that month and .. it’s great.

Past all this, as a musician, I see this multitouch being a new way of working with electronic music/samples etc. On top of that, I think it’ll really bolster gaming and how one would interact with games.

Don’t get me wrong – there are things I think that are wrong with it, and that might change in the future. I don’t know what politically is going on with adobe/apple but lack of Flash is just some kind of gameplay. I can’t see that staying that way if apple really wants to make this the ‘best browsing experience’. Lack of usb ports are another issue… but it’s def more of an extension of a computer than a computer itself — at least for now. Perhaps devices might be made using the dock port… I think apple is also trying to come up with some firewire/usb/dva/rgb standard port.. so…that might come into play here.

Finally – as an artist, I think the multitouch is great for drawing on screen, but if they had only added pressure to some capacity then one wouldn’t have to buy a $3k cintiq wacom. I personally would ask some hardware developer to create a very simple bluetooth pen that would send pressure senstivity from the pen point to the tablet; the tablet itself could handle the tracking, and combined with the bluetooth data in the driver, give an artist a real experience. Any takers?

Great video demonstrating Flash Player on the Google Nexus Phone. Now I’ve got to look and see exactly what one can do in regards with Flash and Android.

Ah — something else I want to keep track of; from the same site I found the Adobe Air tuts sumup, some great examples of JQuery.

Numerous links to Adobe Air tutorials – getting started, best practices and how to’s — can be found here.

Really cool 3d interface for those blessed with a Mac, Snow Leopard and the latest Safari – all done via CSS and javascript…

More info can be found here.