Been here since Tuesday, when we picked up Connie from a rather short surgery. Had to stay with her, help her get things at the house situated (including her cable Internet, which I’m using right now on her extremely thick Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop) because of her post-surgical stomach cramps.
In the morning, me and Mom are off to Evansville for the funeral, and will be back to WR on Sunday. Of course, time is of a rather strong essence, since I’ve already missed the first week of the fall quarter.
We’ve been watching the Foley thing splayed over the TV screen for the past few days. Crazy shit (just like everything in Washington these days), but after the first several hours of CNN going over the same story, I quickly got tired of it.
I’m digging the Tabular theme for LJ, btw. It has a very compact, orderly feel to it, compared to taking up the entire left-right expanse as usual.
And I guess the major cable networks are jumping on the IPTV bandwagon (Cartoon Network, Toonami, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon) these days. Maybe there’s a greater chance of returns from clickable ads positioned next to the videos and lesser restrictions on the content made available by these companies compared to the television with which we are so familiar (and so much disgusted). Let’s just hope that Williams Street doesn’t stick to a reliance upon ActiveX and WMP for the rendering of the page, as you’d see if you click on the aforementioned Toonami link (as of this writing); Nickelodeon, with its TurboNick initiative, obviously hasn’t (can’t say the same for a year, or maybe 6 months ago).
Anyway, we head out in the morning.
And we’re selling these decade (or two) old baseball cards which we have in two or three *thick* bags. Any takers, or should they just go straight to eBay?
And one more thing:
If the free software advocates desire to create an alternative or competitor to MacrAdobe Flash, they’re gonna need to know this:
For .SWF, there’s .SVG. For .AS (ActionScript), there’s Javascript.
So what can possibly compete against .FLV?
.FLV, embedded in .SWF for transport across the web, is the real format in which most flash-based videos are downloaded. It can contain MP3 files so that you can listen to the audio of the file without downloading it.
So what is needed for the FOSS crowd isn’t as much an alternative to Flash itself, but to Flash Video (.FLV), which allows you to watch those videos on YouTube or play those games on Newgrounds, among other myriad uses.
This would be useful for them since they need a lightweight embedded video format to encode those screencasts of their Linux desktops without having to use Macromedia’s Flash IDE *or* player (or having to reverse-engineer their way around Adobe’s BS restrictions).
Maybe OGM would be a good place to start? It’s cross-platform, and has no “native” player (although it is the only available-by-default video format for most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Debian). Plus, its already gained a name for itself on Bittorrent, where it has become a competitor to the dominant .AVI format.
Plus, it would be good if they could allow it to combine with SVG to contain not only MP3, but .AVI and .WMV files for server-to-client web transport.
I call this platform “Shine”, to differentiate from Adobe “Flash” or Microsoft’s “Sparkle”. It’ll be cross-platform, and will adhere as much as possible to XML standards as set by the W3C.
And, most of all, it will be free and open source.
Just a thought.
