Is it just my imagination or is Firefox 3 really lighting fast? My manager seems to notice that too.

And the memory usage so far never exceeded 100k (it’s been around 95k for my usage pattern). My Firefox usage pattern is consisting of opening quite a number of tabs (usually at least 10 tabs), I believe because of this Firefox 2 quite often crashes (memory usage can easily grow to 200k) but this hasn’t been the case with Firefox 3.

So far I am quite impressed.

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My experience with Eclipse has been generally good, but my computer at work is just not right and that I think has also affected Eclipse.

There already at least 5 occasions whereby Eclipse became non responsive for few minutes and when it actually came back, it wiped out the content of the currently opened file! Scary stuff huh?

I think I remember reading somewhere that Eclipse keeps history of files edited somewhere, looking quickly through the menus, couldn’t find it.

So googling around landed me to this post:

http://www.jamescooke.info/blog_archive/recovering-files-with-eclipse-sdk-history/

To cut the story short, go to this directory to find all your files (need to do some detective work though as the filenames are not kept):

cd ~/workspace
cd .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.history

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My job went to India (and all I got is this lousy book), that’s one of the books from the pragmatic programmer folks that I’ve been wanting to read.

And it would be quite relevant to my current work situation. I’ve been looking after a specific project since I joined the company. Even with the best effort from the team, the management thinks that the volume of the output is not meeting the business requirements. So outsourcing the part of the project to the Indian developers was seen as a very interesting proposition to the problem.

I will be the main technical contact for this project again, my task will be guiding these Indian developers so that they can be productive in a short amount of time and start delivering results that the business wants. But so far it hasn’t gone very well, we experienced delay after delay.

I guess I will have to wait and see whether this outsourcing solution can work for our benefit. This is a first time experiencing project that is outsourced, it will be an interesting thing for me to learn how the our team can cope with all the hurdles of outsourcing.

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I nearly lost my Flex’s registration code in an email that Adobe sent as Gmail classifies that email as spam. I don’t usually check my spam folder, but today I did, and I was fortunate to see that flex email amongst other spams..

Moral of the story, whilst Gmail spam filter is excellent, we still cannot trust it 100%.

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Following the instruction on Scott’s blog, I succeeded posting my first ever flash video. You can see it here: Jet’s video.

It took me about 2.5 hours to get everything working correctly. The first problem that I encountered was: Flowplayer didn’t display the flash video. It just gave me a blank screen.
Below is the code snippet that I use:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
data="http://tjandrawibawa.org/flowplayer/FlowPlayer.swf"
width="480" height="383" id="FlowPlayer">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"/>
  <param name="movie" value="http://tjandrawibawa.org/flowplayer/FlowPlayer.swf"/>
  <param name="quality" value="high"/>
  <param name="scale" value="noScale"/>
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
  <param name="flashvars" value="baseURL=http://tjandrawibawa.org/flowplayer/movies/&videoFile=ade_jet1.flv
    &autoPlay=false&loop=false&autoBuffering=false
    &amp"/>
</object>

Not sure why the above doesn’t work. Luckily I poked around the Flowplayer directory and found the HTML file that comes with Flowplayer. I simply use the file and replace the URLs and it worked.
Below is the HTML snippet that I use, I think the main difference between the two approaches is, below approach uses javascript to load the flash.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tjandrawibawa.org/flowplayer/swfobject.js"></script>
<div id="flowplayerholder">
	This will be replaced by the player.
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
var fo = new SWFObject("http://tjandrawibawa.org/flowplayer/FlowPlayer.swf", "FlowPlayer",
"468", "350", "7", "#ffffff", true);
// need this next line for local testing, it's optional if your swf is on the same domain as your html page
fo.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");
fo.addParam("loop", false);
fo.addVariable("config", "{ playList: [ {overlayId: 'play' },
{ url: 'http://tjandrawibawa.org/movies/ade_jet1.flv' } ], initialScale: 'scale' }");
fo.write("flowplayerholder");
// ]]>
</script>

Update: Dumped the HTML code produced by the Javascript function in the swfobject.js and this is the HTML code produced:

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://tjandrawibawa.org/flowplayer/FlowPlayer.swf" width="468" height="350"
id="FlowPlayer" allowScriptAccess="always" loop="false" flashvars="config={playList:[{overlayId:'play'},{url:'http://tjandrawibawa.org/movies/jet_teeth.flv'}],initialScale:'scale'}"/>

The other hurdle that I encountered was no sound on the flash file produced by FFmpeg. The source video that I have is a .MOV (Apple’s Quicktime?) file. For .MOV files, it turns out that I have to specifically tells FFmpeg to specify MP3 as the output audio codec for the output. On my FFmpeg installation, mp3 is not installed, so I have to re-compile FFmpeg. Found out how to do it from:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=651946.

And finally this is how I execute FFmpeg to produce the desired flash video:

ffmpeg -i DSCN2062.MOV -s 320x240 -r 15 -b 250 -acodec mp3 -ar 44100 -ab 48 -y ade_jet1.flv

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