While trawling I found an interesting announcement, Adobe have acquired Scene7 - "a technology innovator in real-time rich media delivery services".
Scene7 offers solutions that include:
With a customer list that includes Land's End, Amazon, Harrods, Sears, JC Penny and Macys it's interesting to see where this will lead, read the announcement here:
Like many others I have an abundance of Joost invites right now.
Thursday 8 August: I had previously offered to give those invites away but since most folk are happy to take without thanks I've decided to remove the offer.
Manners people...
Thanks to Chris Velevitch for inviting me to speak to the Sydney Flash Platform User Group this week. I spoke about Flex forms and how they can interact with ColdFusion.
Everyone present was familiar with Flex and as I recall they all were also familiar with ColdFusion. As promised here are the files that I created for the presentation, you can download them by clicking on the following link.
In trying to be objective this afternoon I came across this amusing installation problem with Microsoft's new browser plug in Silverlight.
First things first. I thought that I'd attempt to do this as kosher as possible. On my work XP machine using IE7 I attempted to view some Silverlight content only to be prompted to download the plug in.
One thing that I did do that was irregular was to allow the plug in to install from the prompt rather than save local first. With my third click I allowed the installer to execute only to have it's progress stick at 54% for ages. At the end of the process that it ran I got an installation error message with a link to find out more, normally I would have assumed that all went wrong and possibly would have shrugged the shoulders and given up - but click on the link I did.
The browser opened, a url was called and the page displayed offered an explanation for the installation error. It was a classic, so good that I've taken a screen shot to save it for prosperity.
I was informed that I had an error 3010, and it's a good one:
Installation was completed successfully. However, a restart is required to complete the install. Please save your work and restart your computer to finish installation.
I wonder if a noob would have bothered to check what had gone wrong...
Click on the thumb below to see the screenshot on Flickr:
I dunno, I have a mental stumble everything I utter the name "Silverlight". This remark doesn't arise from any Adobe v. Microsoft issue for me - I just find it a difficult word.
It was probably workshopped to death, more than likely focus-grouped forever - it certainly rolls off the tongue better than WPF/e but it doesn't work for me - I reckon that it sounds like a beta!
Wow, I've got to say this is pretty cool and very easy. I got my copy of CS3 Web Premium today and am posting this directly to my blog from Contribute CS3.
This is my first post using Contribute CS3 - blogging was a feature added with Contribute 4. A number of popular hosted blogging sites are included, my site is on TypePad which is on the list so lucky me - one thing that I've always been aware of is that I'm not the best spellerer in the world and this now addresses that problem.
In the past I've usually created my posts in a text editor, done a spell check and then copied the post into the TypePad interface - this is a whole lot easier as Contribute CS3 connects to TypePad directly, gives me a WYSIWYG view of the post in place rather than the HTML form that you've usually got to fill in.
Spell check is there as is a lot of other tools, nice job Adobe - well done!!
Get a bit of frustration out right now, you've got yourself a chance to have a go at me and do some major damage with a hammer.
It's a bit dub, reggae, drum ‘n’ bass, hip-hop, latin, funk, african, ska, dancehall, ragga and jazz - but it's all Rastawookie! My brother-in-law Robert is drummer and one of the vocalists in the band and they're doing their album launch this Saturday 21 April at the Metro here in Sydney.
Sad news - Kurt Vonnegut, whose books gave me great pleasure and were a big distraction in my teenage years, died today of brain injuries suffered as a result of a fall.
His work was funny and unusual. In Galapagos, one of my favourites, he chose to display an asterix beside a character's name 5 pages before they were to die.
My MacBook Pro's network name is vonnegut, my phone's bluetooth name is kilgore.
Christine, a very big thank you from Down Under. You're the bestest Easter Bunny ever!
