Archives
-
Twitter is all about Scoble? Twitter is about something else
It seems like a good post from the folks at Twitter has been interpreted by Scoble as being all about him. I gotta say, I'm just not seeing it. I'm also not sure why Scoble is throwing such a public tantrum about Twitter's down time.
-
Why Ariel is right about communities and doing what is right
There was some controversy surrounding Twitter's non-reaction to dealing with some allegedly harassing posts recently, with the noise being made by a user who is reasonably well known in certain tech circles. (The fact that she works for competitor Pownce I think is irrelevant, but some are making noise about it.)
-
$80 million Twitter
Twitter scores another $15 million, and it's worth around $80 million.
-
I'm late to the party: C# 3.0 rocks
I know this is lame, but whatever. In my day job we haven't jumped beyond .NET v2.0, which I think is reasonable. In my own part-time self-employment projects, I haven't really developed anything new either, at least not on the server side of things.
-
ReSharper 4.0 beta posted
-
Anatomy of an ASP.NET site for amusement park fanboys
This is a post I've meant to write for a very long time. Since 1998, my part-time job of sorts has been to maintain a number of community sites. One of those, started ten years ago, was Guide to The Point. "The Point" in this case is Cedar Point, an amusement park an hour west of Cleveland and about two hours from Detroit. It's home to more roller coasters than any other place on earth, and for people how grow up in the region, it's a summer ritual. In 2004, I joined forced with a friend doing another site, and we called it PointBuzz, inspired in name by my woefully neglected general coaster enthusiast site CoasterBuzz. These sites have become a business to a certain degree, since the ad revenue isn't exactly small coin. And if you can make money doing something you enjoy, why not?
-
Video, Flash and Silverlight
I've been having a good time messing around with video this week, even though I haven't been able to commit a lot of time to it. As I mentioned before, it's a little frustrating that I essentially have to relearn Final Cut Pro shortcuts and such over and over since I don't do it enough.
Being a former broadcaster with the salary of an in demand programmer has really allowed me to stay in the loop with video gear and own "real" HD gear. (I have a Panasonic HVX200, for which the major expense is the solid state media.) It's funny how I've thrown a lot of convention out the door with regards to how I edit, since you're not constrained by the "package" mentality of broadcast news. Especially when you're dealing with fanboy type content, you can go with nice long cuts of stuff they just want to see.
In any case, I've been a QuickTime fan for many years. Back in the day, this was because the Sorenson Pro codec was easily the best in terms of quality. Then H.264 came around, and I declared it as the future years ago, back when most computers didn't have the nuts to even play it back.
These days, the action has been in Flash, for the obvious reason that it's so universally available. The recent adoption for Flash to playback H.264 QT movies makes it a total slam dunk for me. The primary benefit is one of work flow. It's easy to export these from Final Cut Pro very quickly.
I've started to play with Flash, the authoring application, to try and hack out a slightly customized video player. As an IDE for writing code, it absolutely sucks. ActionScript is not terrible, but I kept hitting obstacles in trying to get moving. So many articles online are behind subscriptions, and the documentation isn't organized very well. I'd kill for Intellisense.
Silverlight v2 has a lot going for it, though I haven't had any time to mess with it. I've barely touched Silverlight v1.x. Assuming that adoption skyrockets with the Olympics, I can see moving toward it for a lot of different reasons. Aside from being .NET-centric, the server-side of things have a lot of appeal. I remember the demo for the media server at Mix where they showed how you don't have to stream out the entire file too far in advance when there's potential that part of the video may never be watched. That's awesome stuff. The price is right too (free).
The only big negative to Silverlight as a video platform, for me, is the work flow issue. I can't quickly and easily get the video there out of the tools I use, and these are tools that the bulk of people in the field are using.
When I stop to think about it though, I left broadcast about nine years ago, and it's still not quite where I thought it would be with regards to video on the Internet. I mean that in terms of quality, which is no longer a function of CPU power, just bandwidth. Hopefully the US can catch up in that regard. -
.NET is teh suX0rz!!11! (And Ars' editorial standards are on the decline)
I love Ars Technica, but I think they're slipping. While the articles they post in the legal realm are fascinating, when they get down to writing about bits, they get the most uninformed jackasses they can find. Check out this steaming pile of crap on why .NET is a failure, and count how many times you see the term "API" (take a drink every time!).