Well I think they are wise, but who knows.  Merry Christmas everyone, I hope the holidays have been good to you. We here in NZ typically take a long break over Christmas to make the most of the stat holidays and summer. So I will be working on the mustang, working on Videmo, and chilling in the bean bag with a few cold ones playing my new Wii !!!! (browsing the web on the Wii and opera is pretty cool).

Anyway onto the 3 wise thoughts:

1. Buy good shoes. Not over the top price wise but that $10 pair from the bargin bin wont be good for your feet during the day. Im talking the pair that you wear to work here. The ones you wear everyday. I keep my cheapies for kicking round in.
2. Buy a good seat, or get your boss too. This one was one I learnt at Bluespark and all though I mocked it at first, having sat in an average seat the last few weeks my neck was paying the price. You only get one back and neck in this life.
3. Lastly continuing on the take care of your body theme of this post, Buy or get your boss to buy a good monitor. One that you can run at a decent res with a high Freq. I have noticed and since found that my eye sight degraded from 2 years of staring at a crappy monitor. I dont know what a good yard stick is to use at a base line but so far I think a 24inch Widecreen dell is the bees' knees.

So armed with these wise words go forth into the world and uhhhh doo stuff, with your feet in check, your neck still straight and eye sight to see where your going.

Peace and Happy new years. 

I sit here infront of my laptop bermused at the fact that I spend so much time on the computer. But what scares me more is that I just finished writing those little cards that you put on the Christmas presents, and man my handwriting has gone down hill. In fact its so far down the hill that it lost cellphone coverage long ago.

It seems that using a computer for everything from letter (email) writing to note taking has caused my hands to freak out when I start to write with a pen. and the worst thing. The other day I went to press the imaginary backspace key after writing a mistake on a christmas card.

What will become of the next gereation? 

FMS, then Red5, now WebOrb.

They all offer streaming video!!!

Its no big secret that I like C# and .net, so you can imagine how excited I was to see streaming flash video in a .Net based Flash remoting package. I am a film student believe it or not. I even have the Uni degree to back it up (good for a job at Mc D's). Thats where I came from. My first job was to help setup and create streaming media back in the 2000's. Back in the windows media days. Thank-god for flash video is all I can say.

So what does WebOrbs server have. Well until Adobe or ON2 open the codec WebOrb will be stuck using flash video 7 encoding. But is does live streaming. You can make the standard issue video conference apps. Or you could get creative and make a skype or VOIP client to work on the web, that uses the server to do some grunt work and just stream video and sound down the wire to flash.

It also has flex messaging. Whats this messaging business then? Well say for example you have a graph that shows sales of your clients website. To have this live data you would have to poll the server for data right? wrong! the Flex client can subscribe to the service. And just as after you subscribe to playboy you recieve a lovely parcell of data when there is one ready. In our example when ever there is a sale, the server will SEND the data to the subscribed clients. COOL! now this is all available in Flash Media Server. But im a c# boy on wednesdays so Im pimping WebOrb today.

The whole package is nicely errrrr packaged with a wicked management console. go check it out. C# aint that far away from AS3 in syntax.

Or for a more logical look at what the WebOrb server is all about check out a much better explaination on Ryan's Stewarts post. 

After years of MVC in AS2 (weee 3 letter acronyms) you find yourself wondering how applicable it is to flex. Well yeah it is but there are a whole lot of other patterns that we can generally make logical use of now in our flex apps.

I just finished reading "Advanced Actionscript 3 with design patterns" 

And I would seriously advise it to anyone stepping up from flash/AS2 into flex. Some of the patterns described are things that some people have been doing for years, but Im starting to see alot of oportunities for being a naughty monkey and breaking encapsulation in a flex form, and this book might just be a refresher and a reminder to you, or a good step in a new direction.

Either way I would put my 1NZc behind it in saying it wont hurt and probably make your life a bit easyier next time the client asks if he could just slip xyz functionality into his feature creepy specification . 

It oulines possible ways of using patterns to solve new problems that are becoming more and more common in Flex. Implementing standard Undo Redo features into flex applications in a smart managed (and encapsulated) way. Handeling more interfaces than strictly typed objects (which is an easy pitfall in AS3 and AS2)…making code alot more flexible and reusable. Object decoration …blahh blahhh blah….  Well done to Joey Lott and Danny Patterson for getting me to remember and think about other paterns than just MVC .

According to Gizmodo, the Iphone will be announced today (well yesterday for me but today for you US folk and Im really not holding my breath for this one). I am left wondering if Adobe made any real effort to get the Flash lite player in there? What better way to make major inroads than by getting the player in the hands of the expected millions of swave fashion freaks and Uber g33ks alike.

About 6 mnths ago Macromedia/Adobe had a huge focus on the light player and there was a large amount of press coverage. Now that seems to have died off a bit I am wondering if the new kid on the block Apollo has just stolen the attention or if things have really just slowed down in this area.

With my side project videmo (see link to the side in the menu) I have been watching things progress with interest. Flash video is the number one on the web……could it be pushed to phones too as mobile video seems to be starting to catch on? 

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