Software Free

A good blog post is in essence a question; purposefully opinionated, or better yet, outright wrong. It demands interaction.

The blogger's job is to provide the question, provoke debate, and invite the community at large to pool its immense knowledge and take the conversation further (which characteristic distinguishes the blogger from the journalist). The conversation is the reason why we prefer blogs. If it weren't for the dialog between writer and reader, we may as well just pick up a newspaper or listen to the damn radio.

This is how it was always supposed to be. But typically, either this does conversation not really happen at all, or else it is so slow and disjointed as to suck the life out of the whole process. Blogging platforms and the blogosphere as a whole have failed miserably at enabling effective conversation.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Windows only: Freeware PowerPoint plug-in iSpring converts your PowerPoint presentation to an interactive Flash video with the click of a button. Not only is iSpring a great way to make your...

On June 15th, the Great Turtle Race 2008 reached its conclusion, after 14 days of people from across the world cheering on their favorite turtles. Organized by TOPP, NOAA, and Drexel University, the Race is a Flash application that processes data from tagged leatherbacks into an animated "turtle race".

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...well, at least as far as I'm concerned:

Apple, continuing its reliance on open-source technologies, is using an open-source project called SproutCore to provide rich Internet applications like its new MobileMe service.

The idea is to use to keep Apple from being "locked into the browser plug-ins for...one particular standard."

Never heard of it, but if it offers a completely open alternative to the dreaded Flash, put me down for two of them....

Windows only: You're in Internet Explorer-only IT lockdown, so of course you're using portable Firefox—but you don't have rights to run the Flash installation program to hook up flashy web...

Talking of wisdom of crowds, here's one of my favourite sites, TheyWorkForYou, attempting to harness it in order to make politics more transparent:

Video speech matching

TheyWorkForYou has video of the House of Commons from the BBC, and the text of Hansard from Parliament. Now we need your help to match up the two.

We've written a little Flash app where you can (hopefully) match up the written speech being displayed to what's playing on the video. We'll then store your results and use them to put the video, timestamped to the right location, on the relevant page of TheyWorkForYou.

Web 2.0 at its best.

If you've been trying to watch YouTube videos or use the BBC's iPlayer site on your Asus EEE PC you might have noticed that it it is not possible to use these services in full screen mode. YouTube videos just play in a bigger window when you try to activate full screen. Trying to watch the videos when embedded on their webpages can be a little frustrating as it wastes available screen space (on what is quite a small screen anyway). Fortunately, this is quite easy to fix. The problem is that the version of Adobe Flash player that is supplied with the EEE does not support full screen mode. I found that the version installed on my machine was numbered 9.0.48.0 and the latest version, at the time of writing is 9.0.124.0. You can find out the version of Flash you have installed by typing about:plugins into the address bar of Firefox or Flock, or by visiting this link: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/.

...and I will infect the world:

Symantec has warned of a security hole in Adobe's Flash Player that is already being exploited by web sites to install trojans onto users' computers. Adobe is still analysing the bug and has not yet been able to release an update.

...

The malicious code only appears to be attacking Windows at present. ISC reports that it downloads the files ax.exe and setip.exe. However, the vulnerability probably affects Flash Player for other operating systems as well. It is therefore likely to be just a question of time before malware coders are distributing malicious code for Linux and Mac OS X.

Another reason to flee Flash.

I might as well turn this one loose while I'm at it. New Flash game in the sidebar, name of IQ Blocks. It looks like this:

The idea is that you click go, starting the timer and changing the pattern in the upper right, and then you have to click the squares in the big place on the lower left until it matches the pattern which will stop the timer. That's it. Try to contain your excitement.

Source code here. GNU GPL'd, graphics included.

OK, this is inspired by those IQ tests you get in school where they give you red-and-white blocks and a card with a pattern on it, and you use the blocks to assemble the pattern. But I have no idea if these blocks used in IQ tests have a name, if one company makes them, or what. Any teachers out there who can fill me in?

Around the time of the release of Ubuntu 7.10, I tried out the Gnash Flash player included in that release. Because Adobe’s Flash player can not be redistributed in the default Ubuntu installation, a choice of players are offered when you visit a page in Firefox with Flash content. There are three options in Ubuntu 8.04: Adobe Flash, Swfdec (new to this version), and Gnash.

I've been hedging around on this one because I wanted to beta-test in the side bar for a couple of days, but now that somebody's mentioned it: yes, I've had a new Flash game in the sidebar of this blog. Wa-a-ay down there on the right.

It's called "Drop A Block" and you play it by moving the arrow keys to move the paddle back and forth to collect and position blocks, and down arrow to drop the block into the rack below. Three-or-more of the same color in any direction makes those blocks disappear, and combos are possible. The concept is very similar to the arcade game Klax. There's no sound, saving of high scores, or even a way for the game to recognize when you're stuck. Hitting the little 'reset' button in the top left clears the board and makes the score 0 again.

ComputerWorld: Industry analysts and a professional developer examine the state of
Microsoft's 'Flash killer' multimedia development technology as it
enters its second year and discuss what it will take for it to succeed.

Complete Story

FLVto is a web app with three buttons, one input box, and one simple-but-great function of converting YouTube and other Flash-based videos to MP3 audio files. We've shared a reader-submitted...