Simeon Says

I dont get to play much with fun media, but this is good news for all of us. The new updated flash player is available on labs and includes support for the H.264 video codec that is used in both HD DVD and Blue-ray discs.

What does that mean for us? Well it means in the very near future we will be able to experience HD video on the web like never before. Including full screen hardware accelerated video which requires nothing more than the flash player our users already have.

And just to make sure you know they are serious about this, the new beta player is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. In fact linux gets it as a tgz or as an rpm.

I got around to setting up Ruby on our new Centos 5 server today and ran into a snag. I ran:

yum install ruby

And went on to installing rubygems. However in installing rubygems I got an error that rdoc was not installed. Now I don’t remember ever having to install RDoc on my mac so I did a quick google search. Seems that RDoc is part of the standard ruby install but my package didnt have it. So I uninstalled my my rpm and went on about compiling from source. However when I went to install rubygems this time I got an error about zlib. After another quick google search I realized that I had not installed the other ruby packages. So I killed my compiled source for ruby and reinstalled from rpms this time running

yum install -y ruby
yum install -y ruby-devel ruby-docs ruby-ri ruby-irb ruby-rdoc

Then my rubygems package installed correctly and I am on my way.

So I just saw this article over on Engadget called Universal and Rhapsody launch DRM-free partnership “test” and my first thought was “Why?”. They already had a distribution channel set up with Apple through iTunes.

Now I understand that there are lots of reasons that Universal might want to do this. The first among them is to not let Apple bully them into paying whatever Apple wants. They may not want apple to dictate the show.

But here is the problem. Until I got an iPod and started using iTunes my music collection was probably 90% illegal. Due to a hard drive crash that collection went bye-bye and so my iTunes purchase and my old CD collection were all I have. But I remember as I was making my transition from illegal to legal music adoption that the program I used to get the music actually put the downloads in iTunes automatically. And really it was only the convenience of using one application (iTunes) that enabled me to go legit. The money was never really part of it. 99 cents for a song was not a big deal and I have payed it happily for several years.

Here is the rub if Universals music is not on iTunes, I am not going to be buying it. I am not setting up another account with some other company. And I am not alone in my decision that should they turn there back on us Apple Hardware Toting Geeks, I will download the music without their permission.

I know this is no considerate threat. And I am not worried about making this accusation because I am currently legit in my music consumption. But could they really be making enough money difference without Apple to justify the lost dollars associated with people not willing to switch? I can not believe this is true. And I am sorry for Universal should they drop their distribution through iTunes.

PS. All of this is assuming I wanted some song from a Universal artist, which I can not confirm nor deny.

Yesterday I gave my second presentation at 360|Flex in Seattle. The talk gave a very broad overview of Ruby as a language and then went on to give a demo of what the Rails framework brings to the table. We then moved on to take a look at generating a rails application and how we can adapt that to very easily be able to connect it to flex using HTTPService. We talked about RESTful interfaces, and the role ActiveResource plays in the upcoming versions of Rails. We then went on to talk about RemoteObject and the AMF method of communication. I demoed examples using both WebOrb for Rails, and RubyAMF. I talked about the strengths of both platforms and the differences between how they are set up.

All in all I am happy with the results of the presentation. I am very excited about Ruby and Rails (although more ruby than rails) and was really excited to give this presentation. I really wanted to bring my enthusiasm for the topic and share that with folks. I don’t feel like I was able to push my enthusiasm onto as many folks as I would have liked. I was really looking for people to have that “aa-ha!” moment when they realized how much time and effort these tools can save them.

At any rate, thanks for coming to the presentation and thanks to 360|Flex Conferences for letting rant about the things that get me excited. I am attaching a [swf of my presentation slides](http://blog.simb.net/files/FlexonRails.swf) and after the jump I am attaching my code for the HTTPService example. Both [WEBorb](http://www.themidnightcoders.com/weborb/rubyonrails/) and [RubyAFM](http://rubyamf.org) have better examples than I gave so look to their sites for more information.

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Today I gave the first of my 2 presentations here at 360Flex. After lunch today I had the pleasure to deliver a presentation on Deep Linking your flex applications. When I originally submitted this topic, we were embarking on a project at work that would have made for great examples. But the project got canceled. So the presentation I gave today was not at all like the one I had planned on giving at all. But the topic was well received. There were lots of questions, some I could answer and some that I could not. But we had a good group in the session and I think most of the questions got answered (even if not by me).

Anyhow I promised to post my slides for the presentation so you will find those [attached here](http://blog.simb.net/files/DeepLinking.swf). There is not a lot of content there but for the folks that missed the start of the presentation it will fill you in nicely.

Thanks for those who attended. Please feel free to post questions here and we can continue any discussions for the group.

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Last month when my boss wanted a new laptop we did lots of research and then he settled on an Apple MacBook. He was not ready to make the switch yet though, so we installed bootcamp and got Windows XP up and running. My boss spends a lot of time traveling and giving presentations, so powerpoint is probably the application he uses most on his mac. And while we were visiting yesterday we came across and idea. He already has a usb remote he uses when giving presentations, but how cool would it be if he could control powerpoint with his apple remote.

After just a little searching I found an application EventGhost which is an application which allows you to hijack the events of your system and redirect them to other things. With EventGhost I was able to add an HID device to the app. And then in the event window I could see the event that was fired when I pressed buttons on the remote. Next step was just to add a action for emulating left and right arrows on the keyboards. Then you just drag the event from the left window (HID.button2) on to the action you want fired (left arrow) and EventGhost will start to send the correct button presses for you.

Just like that he can now use his apple remote to guide his presentations in Windows XP in bootcamp on his MacBook.

So as an Open source advocate and a ruby developer I feel like I get asked a lot how I feel about using Ruby to develop for the CLR.

There are 2 parts to developing applications for me. The first is that I must be able to run the application where I want to. Any platform I choose. And the second one, is no less important, I must be able to develop those applications in the manner and platform that I choose.

Microsoft is working hard to make sure that the new applications run cross-platform ( at least windows and mac) and the mono project has actually one-upped MS by ensuring that they run apps on Linux better than they run on the Mac. However as the tools required to build these applications still require windows as the OS, these applications do not currently meet my needs. And as such are not something I am really concerned with. When Microsoft announces that I can build applications on Mac and Linux and deploy them to the platform of choice, then they may have one me back. But they have no reason to do that, and I have no expectations.

“But simeon, flex and air don’t run on Linux either!” I knew that was coming. But the truth is that they run on windows and mac now, and flex applications can run on Linux in the browser just fine. Adobe has announced that past the 1.0 AIR will be supported on Linux as well. So I know its in the plans. As for Flex Builder and the tools required? Well they already run on Windows Mac and [Linux](http://blog.simb.net/articles/2007/08/09/developing-flex-applications-on-linux) so they plan to and are already meeting my requirements.

If you have read my blog in the past you will know that I ran all Linux for a couple years before getting my mac. One of the reasons I got my mac was the tendency of Corporations to build software for it over *nix in general. I understand the reasoning for that and I don’t fault it. However since becoming a mac user, I have considered running Linux again on several occasions. But as i currently spend most of my days (and nights) writing Flex applications, that just doesn’t seem feasible. Back at the beginning of the year I had seen a Chinese blog post that outlined how to get it running, but I heard mixed reviews on the topic.

This morning over my poptart I read this post by [nickgs](http://www.nickgs.com/?p=41) about how he is now full time linux and that his big concern is that he cant do Flex development. And in the comments [daver refered to his post](http://blog.davr.org/2007/04/22/flex-builder-201-under-linux/) outlining the steps to get flex builder running on linux.

I thought this was great that there were some English instructions and that people are having good luck installing Flex Builder on Linux. I know that with beryl on Linux the eye candy factor of osx has been lessened a bit. So maybe I will end up back on Linux one day.

Today is my daughter Ana’s eight month birthday. I can’t believe its been 8 months, but beyond that I can’t imagine my days without her. My wife is much better at the sentimental stuff than I am and as such keeps a monthly log on her growth as a baby and as a person. But there are somethings that a daddy just has to say for himself and this is my soap box so prepare yourself.

As I said I am ever impressed with her growth over the last 8 months, but today in particular we had some very interesting pictures.

Here you will see Ana checking her email this morning. Yes its true, she does have her own email address and even her own domain. Although there is not currently anything displayed on her site, I wanted to make sure she could use her name in the future.

And of course every dad says his baby is the cutest. And I am not willing to get into a war over this, but I think its important to note that i am not the only one of this opinion. Sarah in my office always tells me she is the prettiest baby she has ever seen. And today as we went to get her 8 month photo taken, we found this surprise in The Picture People store.
Thats right folks. My pretty little girl was chosen to be one of the display models. And while I have realized a great opportunity in sharing my wonderful little girl with the world… I will forever be forced to accept that I (the dad who loves her) have posted naked pictures of my daughter on the Internet. Yes thats right, I didn’t even have to wait for her to be a teen on some terrible video, I started this terrible trend for her as a youth.

I am so happy being a dad, and I cherish every moment I get to share with her. And I thank you all for putting up with my rambling and my gushing while I commemorate another month where I did my daughter no physical bodily harm. Unfortunately there is no question as to the mental harm, she is my daughter after all, the damage has been done!

We are working on a little AIR application here at work. We are automating the clockin/out/break/lunch process and using a cute little AIR app to do it. But as building desktop applications is not as easy to deploy updates as a webpage, I wanted to make sure that before the first version went out we had the auto update feature working.

All in all I was pretty impressed by how this works. There are several steps that go towards this actually happening:
* Decided if the application needs updating.
* Download the updated AIR file.
* Use the updater.update() function to trigger the Runtime to install the application.

How these things actually happen is entirely up to your application is built. But ours looks like this:
* Application loads and gets version.txt from the server
* Uses version.txt’s value to verify if app needs to be upgraded
* Downloads the updated application
* On Download complete calls Updater.update() using our version and air file.

This process can actually end up being a bunch of code. And after having done this, I can see how this process could easily be abstracted into our own custom updater component. The good news for me is that I dont need to do that. [Clause](http://wahlers.com.br/claus/blog/automating-remote-software-updates-in-adobe-air-applications/) has created just such a component called [AIR Remote Updater](http://codeazur.com.br/lab/airremoteupdater/). And better yet, his version uses FZip to pull just the app.xml file from the AIR file on the server so you don’t have to keep a separate version file. How Cool!

So as I consider this to be right near the top priority of an AIR application I think you should get on over to Claus’s blog and give him a huge thanks. Because he just saved you a couple hours of work for each of your applications.