Download Party

There will be a Ringlight Download Party this coming Wednesday, April 30th, at 7pm at Tech Night at Monkey Wrench Books (110 E. North Loop).

You can check out the full event info on the Ringlight news blog.

Lecture Series Complete, Here Are All The Links

The last installment of the lecture series was the best day ever. I had the chance to tell some funny stories from my life as a peer-to-peer hacker, and that was really fun for me. We have video and audio podcasts of the lecture, of course. I just want to make a small disclaimer about my last talk for people out there that are going to watch the video. These are anecdotes about the peer-to-peer revolution that I recited from my memories of the past ten years of hacking and hanging out. I did not employ the services of a professional fact checker. There will be inaccuracies, exaggerations, and things I made up because they sounded cool. The talk was meant to be entertaining and to give people a sense of the social history behind things they use every day. If you want an accurate portrayal of the chronology of events, check out the Wikipedia page.


Here are all the files from all the talks:

Lecture 1: Music, Television, and Film - Audio
Lecture 2: Online Communities - Audo, Video
Lecture 3: Peer-to-Peer - Audio, Video, Video of just my part, Slides
All lectures: Links to websites

In answer to the unspoken question that I have seen glinting in the eyes of so many members of the audience at these lectures: Yes, I am on Twitter.

A special thanks to Aimy for making my slides for me and Joseph for putting on this lecture series.

Final Lecture Tomorrow, Video of Lecture Two

The final lecture will be this Friday, April 7th. The same time and place, 6:30pm at the ACTLab (CMB Studio 4B). The topic will be the history and current state of Peer-to-Peer technology.

This is my area of expertise, so I've very excited! I hope you can make it.

Also, we have a video of lecture two.

Lecture Two Podcast and Links

The second installment of the 2008 ACTLab New Media Lecture Series went very well. There were many more people in the audience and this time the audio seemed to record properly. We have video too, but it won't be up for a while longer.

You can find all of the links for this lecture on my linkosaur.us page.
You can also download the audio podcast from Ringlight.
I'll let you know when the video is up.

Lecture One Podcast, Details on Lecture Two

The first installment of the lecture series was excellent. Unfortunately, while we are experienced in organizing and recording conferences, this was the first time that we tried to record a presentation while also presenting it! Some unexpected problems arose. First, there was no one to change the videotape so it ran out after an our. Second, there was no one working the mixing board so when halfway through the presentation I demonstrate Pandora, I forget to turn it off therefore covering the rest of the lecture with awesome music.

Anyway, despite its flawed nature, I decided to put the podcast up on Ringlight.

The next lecture will be this Friday, April 7th. The same time and place, 6:30pm at the ACTLab (CMB Studio 4B). The topic will be interesting new developments in Online Communities. I hope to see you there!

ACTLab Lecture Series: Music, TV and Film on the Internet

For those of you that reside in Austin, Texas, starting tomorrow (Friday) and for the next two Fridays following, I will be participating in the ACTLab Lecture Series. I will be giving tag team talks with my colleagues on what's going on in the world of the Internet.

This week the topic is:

Music, TV and Film on the Internet
Have you ever wondered how the media landscape washed into the Internet Sea? In this lecture/seminar we will look at the current state of MTF on the Internet and how technology is changing the way industry, consumers and content creators deal with distribution and consumption.

I will be covering the top ten things happening right now that you should know about.

Friday, April 4th, 6:30pm in the ACTLab, CMB Studio 4B on the UT campus on Dean Keaton and Guadalupe, across from Madam Mam's. There is a pay parking lot next to Madam Mam's and a garage behind that.

I hope to see you there!

For those of you not residing in Austin, Texas, I will put the videos of the talks on the ACTLab Ringlight share as they're available.

Adobe Flex - Flash Programming for Programmers!

One of the features that I was really excited about implementing in Ringlight was a Flash-based media player for browsing photos, videos, and audio files. I like the idea of being able to view all of my files from any computer with a web browser without having to download them first.

Unfortunately, Flash programming is not the most natural occupation for me. I find the concept of laying your code out on a timeline which trudges ever forward, causing variables to go in and out of scope based on the ticking of a clock... well, I don't like it very much. I don't particularly appreciate the Flash IDE or the fact that Flash source is in a binary file either. I don't mean to malign the art of the Flash programmer. I know you all have heroically found workarounds to all of these inconveniences and I salute your dedication. It's just not my cup of tea.

However, now we have Adobe's Flex. It fixes most of my problems with Flash programming because it's Flash programming designed for programmers. The entire source for a Flex project is in an XML file. While I am not one to jump on the XML-solves-everything wagon, it does mean that you can edit for Flash applications in a text editor, check them into source control, and cut-and-paste whole projects to your blogs and chats and such.

Additionally, the compiler is free and cross-platform. This means you can compile your Flash apps right on your server. No more compiling on your desktop, uploading to the server, testing, and repeat. There's even an Apache module which will automatically detect changes in the source and recompile apps for you on demand. Sweet.

This is not to say that Flex is without problems. Flex coding can be as frustrating as Flash programming sometimes. I recently had a terrible time trying to follow online tutorials for making a Flex image browser. They all suggested using the Loader class, but it had some issues with image scaling. However, the suggested workaround for image scaling involves accessing the raw bitmap data of the image. This operation is unfortunately blocked by Adobe's inane and pointless security model, which requires that to access the raw bitmap data of an image the site hosting the image must authorize it in their crossdomain.xml file. So you are totally free to write a Flex image gallery for Flickr photos, but if you want to scale them then that's not allowed! The workaround is to just use the Image class instead of Loader. You don't get the right events to have a fancy loading animation this way, but at least it works.

Check out my Flex image loader example code. It's not finished as the buttons don't work yet, but it does load images just fine.

All in all I'd say that Flex is a breath of fresh air in the world of Flash programming. If you're a programmer then I'd recommend that you try it out.