If you have read my previous article on video streaming, you will have noted that most of the popular video broadcasting sites broadcast in Flash flv format. Of course, there are some freeware on the net which allows you to convert different video formats to flv… but nothing beats server side conversion to SWF format….
I mean.. just take a peek at you tube. Surely, you dun see them asking you to convert your video to FLV format before uploading to their side?
Well, needed to find out how this video streaming actually works… so had to do some research. Well, as usual, I consulted one of my favorite weskits, How Stuff Works. Yeap.. it is one of my favorite as it explains to you things in lay man terms… and we all know how difficult it is… to explain geeky stuff in non-geeky language.
Anyway, for those of you who are wondering, here is the link:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/streaming-video-and-audio5.htm
If you are familiar with Joomla, you might have heard of Expose. Well, if you would like to use it out-of-the-box, it will be great. Trouble is, sometimes you just need to do some touch-ups to fit into your Joomla template. And then you get into problems. Suddenly, you come face to face with a monstrous configuration file with no idea of where to start.
Well, being really desperate, I slowly dissected the file and got the following 8 sections, with 2 no idea sections.
You know… I never really appreciated Gmail until I got stuck in Pakistan. I had a server hosted in Singapore data center. Access to emails were always at a blazingly fast speed… that was until I got stuck in Pakistan for a couple of months (for business reasons)….
Then, it got really irritating. Due to the poor network problems, checking email became a chore. It was like lottery. 50% of the time you get your mails, the other 50% of the time… bad luck bro… .and so it remained until I discovered that Gmail allowed you to interface to POP accounts…
Basically Gmail can be used to both receive and send your emails! It can be the web-based front end to your traditional POP email accounts!
I never had any trouble with the WordPress Blog until recently. Needed to migrate the blog to localhost to do some quick skinning when I realise how problematic that could be. One of the problems with WordPress is that they tend to use full url links instead of relative links. As such, the simple direct transfer of files and database dump just will not do. Needed to do some direct tweaking on the database.
Thank god there were some helpful souls at:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/10/01/how-to-move-wordpress-blog-to-new-domain-or-location/
Hmmm… if you have been following my blog, you will realise that I am trying to set up an offshore development office in Pakistan. The problem with Pakistan is that their electronic gadgets are a far cry from what you see in Singapore. Tried to get a Skype certified webcam and failed terribly. BTW, it was reported that Skype worked closely with Logitech to develop some kind of high quality video. had to try it out to see if it just a scam …
http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2007/10/skype_and_logitech_announce_hi.html
That called for a certain amount of personal sacrifice in terms of both time and money… 
I popped over to Sim Lim and purchased the following:
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Was trying to try out some kind of cool Adobe AIR technology when I chanced on something really simple and nifty.
At the first thought, it did not sound like it was anything extraordinary. I mean… it just sounded like another stripped down browser of some sort.
I always had always wanted to play around with new technologies. I still remember 4 or 5 years back when I left Crimsonlogic to pursue my own entrepreneur dreams… Those days I was so young and idealistic. Full of self-confidence and armed with an indomitable can-do spirit.
My boss asked me what were my plans…. and I told him I was going to dabble in open source. He asked me how I was to earn the money to feed myself, I said I have a little savings…
Man.. what was I thinking?
Anyway, within a really short time, money started to run out and I had to move on to do something that actually put bread on the table. (yah… some times in moments like this… I wish that I got rich parents… ) Before long, I got so entrenched in doing small projects here and there, struggling for bread and butter issues that I was back where I started. Utterly busy and no time to really do what Iike.
Recently, finally have time to play around again. Just read my blog.
Yeap. This is my first technical article. And a not very impressive one at that. While my really cool friends like Chuen Yang is dabbling with Google Maps and its GWT’s impressive development framework, and Herryanto Siatono is busy enjoying himself with Ruby and Rails… here I go writing some out-dated stuff on PHP. PHP? Thought that was passe. Its a little like preaching to the current software community about the advantages of COBOL for financial applications.
But what to do? Small company mah… so have to think of solutions that are easy to develop (so that it is easily outsourceable) and cheap to deploy.
Easy to develop
When we talk about ease of development, I am limited to either PHP or .NET technology. Java is definitely not something that a fresh grad can just pick up from reading a book (even if he is incredibly smart, he will probably get bored off going through the stacks of xml configurations… and yes… those configurations are not accessed through a friendly IDE like Microsoft Visual Studio).
Ruby n Rails is an incredibly RAPID development tool. Problem is, after reading Herryanto Siatono’s blog, I find that the entry level is too high. It appeals to only top-notch programmers, and we all know top-notch programmers like to do super cool projects like http://bookjetty.com, http://searchhouse.sg. Where got time for simple functional database applications?
So I am left with ASP or PHP.
Cheap to Deploy
Well, this second point wipes out .NET as an alternative. Microsoft .NET only runs on Windows server and that almost doubles the hosting costs. Such costs becomes even more real when our infrastructure knowledge must span across both the Windows and Linux domains. Boy… give me a break. Just linux alone gives me a big headache….
So that leaves me with PHP.
