Oscar Trelles

Ben Forta, ColdFusion superstar and Macromedia’s senior product evangelist, has finally started his very own blog just a few days ago, and promises to keep it as fresh as his busy schedule allows.

For instance, Ben will be the guest speaker at the next NYCFUG meeting, to be held on July 7th. CF junkies from the Big Apple are encourage to attend, but RSVP with anticipation, since I know there wasn’t enough space for all the people last time Ben was invited. This time, he will be offering a sneak preview into the next CF update.

Find here more information about the meeting and location.

Robert Hall has come with a PHP script that makes it possible for your site to ‘ping’ the Macromedia XML News Aggregator whenever new content is available, in order to include it immediately.

Movable Type has this functionality built-in, but if you use another blog technology (maybe your own) and it is PHP-based, this can be perfect for you. I will be implementing it in my site as soon as a get some time. I will get back to this subject with updates when I have it working (or not).

[via Mesh]

Mario Klingemann over at Quasimondo has posted a long and interesting rant about his personal experience with Shared Libraries in Flash MX.

What I particularly like about this specific article is Mario’s approach to get around the problem of using shared libraries, given the ‘streaming nature’ of Flash. Preloading solves almost anything regarding that matter, but to successfully develop libraries that can be easily updated and safely plugged into the dynamics of a complex Flash application, you definitely need to have some other things in consideration.

Head over to Mario’s posting to have a little more information on the topic.

Ok, this has nothing to do with Flash whatsoever, but I think it is worth sharing. So, I got this little personalized postcard in the mail, telling that they were trying to reach me with ‘Good News’, and asking me to me to call Toll free 1-800-449-3596. Well, I have a established personal rule that prevents me from responding to any communication that lacks a specific subject.

BUT, I am a very curious animal, and just to demonstrate how hanging out so much at Google isn’t that bad, and that answering Google it! to everything can be sometimes rewarding, this is what I got when asking Google about that toll free number:

WCP ripoff here’s a way out if they call you

I found this one when reading the last issue of Network Computing, they always have fun stuff on the last page. The list:

11. Your browser sets Google.com as your home by itself

1. You turn down a date because she only has three Google hits

There are supposed to be more of these here, but it seems like the link is broken. So, why don’t you add your own..

Today, Imagio Technology released FlashSeek, their new tool for text search within Flash movies. Targeted to webmasters and producers, FlashSeek allows sites editors and visitors to use simple word queries and familiar boolean expressions –like near, without, etc, to perform full text searches in Flash movies located in the server.

FlashSeek runs as an extension to the Microsoft Index Server family of products, so you will need to be running any combination of Microsoft’s operating systems and web servers to use it. The company provides some examples in their site, and even let you upload your own movies and test the tool.

Before receiving their press release, I expressed my concern about this being a Windows/ASP only tool, given my position. Their answer was that it would be possible to have FlashSeek running with PHP, eventually.

That’s right, on a day like this 25 years ago, my mother gave birth to her first child, a beautiful boy Winter had just started in Lima, maybe that’s why I like rain and cold.

This is the second birthday I celebrate here in New York. I haven’t been in Peru for almost 2 years now, so I hope everything goes ok with the trip I’m planning to make down there during my August vacations.

After years of having web authors and software developers going back and forth in the use of images in the GIF format, the patent that Unisys holds for the GIF and other LZW-based compression and decompression technologies expires today in the USA.

The following is an excerpt of what Unisys has to say in the subject, the complete document can be found here. Quote:

“After expiration of the U.S. LZW patent on June 20, 2003, liability for patent infringement will occur only if an infringing act with respect to a product or service (e.g., developing, selling, offering to sell, making, using, distributing, downloading, exporting and/or importing) occurs in a country where the LZW patent has not expired.”

Before, software developers had been required to sign a document like this one (CompuServe’s Official Gif License Agreement) to add support for the GIF compression format in their products.

However, Unisys holds patents valid for another year in other countries including Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy. No wonder this guys are still on.

Some more info about Unisys patents and LZW technologies is available here.

I haven’t post anything about this before, because I was unsure on the relevance of working with multiple monitors in a single workstation. Previously a ‘luxury’ reserved to video editors and producers, I thought having two or more display screens to extend your working space had to be a cool thing, but hardly a must have. Maybe because I happen to have two computers on my office desk (three when I bring my laptop along), I haven’t had the opportunity nor the need to extend any of my workstations’ desktops, although I have found myself trying to pass the mouse pointer between monitors, in some occasions

So, a couple of weeks ago, I got to buy some new computers for the company and upgrade some others. At the end, I had an extra monitor that happened to be the same brand, size and model than one of my desktop’s. Hmmmmm….. the company got me a Radeon 7500 and since then, I can tell that my productivity has increased in at least 15%. I didn’t know I was losing so much time maximizing and minimizing windows!

My new graphics tablet (an Intuos2) is finally here, it arrived to the office this afternoon and I’ve been playing with it since I got home. It feels a little odd trying to use the pen to control everything, since it works very different from the mouse. Mice are relative location pointing devices, while this pen takes the pointer to absolute positions in the screen, relative to the area of the tablet. Does it make any sense?

Other than that, its amazing how powerful a simple thing like can be. I kinda hope I had this thing before, it could have saved me lots of time when I needed to do very accurate photo edition, or free hand drawings. Oh well, it is finally going to be part of my daily companions.