Drew's digital booze

More SilverLight News

2007-05-01T16:18:00Z

If you are a developer of any kind, I would strongly recommend you watch Scott Gu's interview on Channel9 that was posted today:

The SilverLight download will be around 4Mb and include a full CLR and support for programming in the .net language of your choice. Did I mention that it runs on Mac? Opera will also be supported.

This means that I can write C# that will run inside the browser on the client. Linq is supported on the server and the client. Threading is supported, etc, etc, etc.

Just watch the video!
:D

Save Internet Radio!

2007-04-27T17:47:00Z

If you're a developer like me, you probably like listening to music while you code. I frequently listen to internet radio sites like http://www.pandora.com while I do my work, but recently there's been some trouble brewing.

In case you hadn't heard, the Copyright Royalty Board, is basically trying to force independent radio broadcasters, including National Public Radio, to pay outrageous royalties to broadcast music over the internet. This fee is upwards of 250% of what traditional radio stations pay as royalties.

The net effect is that many (most) small webcasters will be forced to discontinue their service because they will not be able to pay the unfair fees required to continue operations.

Well, thanks to your help and the internet "we the people" have taken a stand against this arbitrary ruling. Last week more than 200,000 Pandora listeners alone contacted their congressional representatives! The entire fax infrastructure on Capitol Hill ground to a halt. Faxes had to be delivered manually - literally boxes full of them were delivered to every office in the Capitol building.

The result has been swift and dramatic: more than a million people have already joined the cause! There is now a bill just being introduced called the "Internet Radio Equality Act" to fix the problem and save Internet radio -and Pandora- from obliteration.

If you value listening to radio, please go over to http://www.savenetradio.org/ and contact your representative asking them to co-sponsor H.R. 2060, the Internet Radio Equality Act. It only takes a second and they have everything you need on the website.

I strongly believe that internet radio will slowly become the primary distribution channel for all radio stations in the future. Think about it. Do you listen to XM or Sirius Radio? It's one way digital radio (one step away from internet radio). Do you play video games? Listening to the "radio" inside of a game would be those internet radio channels. You ever heard of "HD Radio"? That's digital radio, almost internet radio.

So let's stand together and tell congress what we want done about this. Stand up and voice your opinion! Don't let the record industry lobbyists maintain control over what you hear on the radio any longer. The internet is about choice and they are trying to legislate that choice away from us. Now is the time to stand up and take action. There's only a few more days that we have to take this opportunity, so act now.

Cheers!
:D

Adobe CS3 at ground zero

2007-04-26T19:58:00Z

Well, I've been using CS3 for a couple of days now. Overall the experience is not bad. The documentation is adequate and I've been able to solve all of the problems I've run into so far.

I'm mainly working in Flash, doing RIAs (rich internet applications). The install base for Flash Player 9 is already above 80%, so there's no reason not to start developing with it, even though CS3's only been out for a week or two.

Our architecture allows us to use Flash on front ends that support it, but gracefully rolls back to XHTML when necessary. I've connected Flash to web services with little trouble and the ActionScript object model, although awkward, is functional.

I am a little disappointed at the lack of UI components for CS3 though. There were several Flash 8 components such as the TreeView, the MenuBar / Menu, etc. that were removed for some reason. Oh well. Adobe announced today that they were going to open source Flex, so I'm sure someone will add something comparable back in.

Drink Up!
:D