Note: off topic post coming up.

I've just come across a link that describes how to enable tethering on the iPhone 3G using the 3.0 software update that was released yesterday. Most of the guides I found seemed a bit complex and involved messing around in the Terminal - something that a lot of users find intimidating. But then I came across the following link (which you should access directly from your iPhone's web browser): http://help.benm.at/tethering.php
From the list that shows select your country (I chose UK), and your network provider (for most this would be O2). I installed the profile when prompted - do this at your own risk. Saying that, it's just a bunch of network profile settings so you can't really break anything much on your phone. But still, don't blame me, it's your phone.

Now that the network settings are updated you need to pair your phone with your computer via Bluetooth. To use the iPhone as a modem with a Mac, it must be running Mac OS X version 10.5.7 or later. I used my old Macbook Pro for this and the steps were as follows:

It's not often that I get to be mentioned - let alone featured - in a magazine. As they say though, when it rains it pours and this month I happen to be present on the cover of two magazines. While it may not be the Times it certainly got me and my family smiling.

First up was the UK based .net magazine which reported on the London Flash Camp Round Table discussion I participated in alongside Mike Jones, Bola Rotibi, James Whittaker, David Williamson and Andrew Shorten. The editors must have liked my comparison of Flash to a Swiss army knife as that's the line that made it onto the cover :)

It gets better. Streamingmedia.com have this year nominated me as being part of their 'Streaming Media Dream Team' which is their pick for 'the most influential, innovative, and important people in the European online video space'. I'm blown away by this and I feel very humbled seeing my name listed next to people such as Mark Zaleski (CEO, Dailymotion), Jon Gisby (Channel 4) and Daniel Ek (CEO & Co-founder, Spotify) plus a whole host of other major players. All I can say is: thank you Streamingmedia.com.

I've spent all week migrating a server full of clients (and my own websites) half way around the world. One site which I set up years ago and which offers free image hosting for messageboards contained 130,000 files... The FTP transfer took almost 48 hours.
But that's now behind me and the move for Flashcomguru.com should be complete - at least the site seems to be working for me. However I wanted to let you all know that the server has moved so that you can kindly let me know if you spot any dead links or otherwise broken applications.

I'm also planning a redesign for later in the year, but after this week's stress that has to wait for a bit. Enjoy the weekend everyone, I will try and do the same.

Definitely off topic, but I can't help myself. This morning I quickly created some new ringtones for my (i)phone. If you like Fonejacker you will like those. Otherwise you can fall back on the two CTU ringtones which I've thrown into the zip as well. Otherwise go and check out Fonejacker, he may grow on you. But remember: he likes his tomatoes, and he likes 'em FRESH!

To add these to your iPhone simply unzip and drag the .m4r files into iTunes. They should work with any standard iPhone. If you want to create your own iPhone ringdings you can do so easily using Garageband. Ok, back to work I go...

Adobe is discontinuing the development of FlashPaper, effectively killing the product. While always living life as a bit of niche product I found it extremely versatile and especially useful to convert Powerpoint documents to SWF. Many sites still rely on this capability for showing documents in a Flash friendly format.

There have always been doubts about the future of FlashPaper ever since the Macrodobe merger and this recent announcement confirms that those doubts were valid. Farewell FlashPaper, I'll most certainly miss you.

Off topic, but I need to raise a flag here. For days I've been having problems accessing Paypal.com via the Ebay checkout process (I buy *a lot* of stuff on Ebay). Connections continually time out while waiting for a response from Paypal.com. Googling the problem did not bring up any useful information which surprises me since I'm pretty sure that this issue is within Ebay's network and not a problem at my end. It has also been ongoing.

Check this visual traceroute for example which I ran via a server in the US, thereby eliminating my own internet connection as the source of the problem:

I've also run a traceroute paypal.com from my home machine with the same results: the last reachable hop is ge2-6-smf1-xr01.net.ebay.com (66.135.223.46), after that it goes dead. Needless to say is that the rest of the worldwide interweb seems fine for me.

What gets me is that this problem has been apparent for about a week or more. Did anyone else encounter this? They must have done.
What is Ebay up to - surely they must be aware of this? I've sent a message to Paypal and I'm in high anticipation now to receive a nice personalised automated robot reply, probably telling me to update my antivirus software or something else equally useless ('have you tried turning it off and back on again?')...
Google Checkout, where are you when I need you? Oh yes I remember, Ebay banned you, didn't they?

Off topic, but I'm sure still relevant to many readers. This morning I hopped over to Jay Charles's blog and read a post about a huge explosion at ThePlanet's Houston datacenter. ThePlanet is a large hosting provider of dedicated servers (maybe the biggest in the US?), and I run two servers there myself, one serving up the page you are currently reading.
Downtime for a popular website is of course a bad situation, but accidents do happen and not all the time is there someone to blame - they are simply that: accidents. When you face a service outage (my site and server were not affected) then all you can ask for is that the provider does everything in their power to restore availability to the sites and servers in question.
Which brings me to my point: having read this thread of posts by ThePlanet's staff, and listened to this message by their CEO made be realize the gravity of the situation (it was a miracle that nobody was killed or injured by the incident) I would like to highlight the excellent service the people involved have provided. I have been very happy with ThePlanet ever since I signed uo several years ago, but I think it takes a situation such as this to really show what a company is made of. Of course this incident puts things into perspective too: for one it shows how fragile this whole interweb thing really is, and secondly how very insignificant 'being online' can be.

In times when people are quick to criticize bad service it's important to highlight the good examples too. My hat's off to the staff at ThePlanet for putting things right as quickly as humanly possible, and for keeping their customers informed about the progress - even when there was little to report. It doesn't really matter exactly how long things take when you know that someone in Texas is working their backside off to get you back online.

Usually solutions are there to solve problems, yet I am having a hard time figuring out which problem Silverlight is trying to solve. My view point on Silverlight is that of an end user since I have not yet developed any Silverlight content. This is not down to a lack of interest either, after all it is a much hyped technology, but due to a lack of development tools on my chosen operating system, OSX.

As an end user I have yet to see anything that offers any benefit to me. Quite the opposite actually. When I recently asked about Silverlight demos on the streamingmedia list was pointed to Silverlight.net by a Microsoft employee. I walked away asking myself if this was the cutting edge of Silverlight deployments - surely not, since my experience was along the lines of
- Clicked on showcase
- Received error mesage:
"Silverlight error message, ErrorCode: 3002
ErrorType: ImageError
Messsage: AG_E_NOT_FOUND

- Clicked OK, same message
- Clicked OK, same message
- Clicked OK, same message... and I was out of there.

Today I browsed around itv.com and came across their TV catchup service (UK viewing only I believe). It looked remarkably like Flash, and admittedly I got a bit excited. Since ITV is one of my clients I know that they have a very open mind when it comes to technology, and are happy to use a mix of whatever does the job including Flash, Windows Media as well as Silverlight. Good thinking. Except this time it seems, since the 'Flash' player didn't do anything. I clicked play but it just went black. I tried a different video and again, nothing. Right click.. brings up Silverlight preferences.

That explains it then. I am kidding - I'm not blaming Silverlight for what may simply be a file access problem. But why Silverlight? Is it all down to being forced by Legal to use DRMed content? What else could be the reason? The user certainly does not benefit from this, or am I missing something?

Someone tell me, what itch is Silverlight trying to scratch? Surely even the best developer workflow in the world (at least so I've heard) cannot make up for a broken user experience. I'm holding my breath for the Olympics coverage.

PS: I was given a behind the scenes look at the live streaming at ITV recently. Expect some coverage on that in the next few weeks.

Yes you can, as I'm now on Twitter. Note that there's more off topic chit chat flying around than on my blog but I will try and post some useful info at times. Sometimes. Ok, rarely.

Twitter is a funny one, isn't it? I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep it up. Is it a total waste of time or useful communication tool?

It's amazing how unscrupulous (and naive) some folks are these days. What's the matter with Flvmagazine.com (no need to go there by the way, the site is rubbish) publishing content that's blatantly scraped off other websites? And not only that, but after stealing the content they don't even give credit to the original author.
Simon just spotted one of his tutorials on Flvmagazine's website. I had a little dig around - and now I wonder if Lee Brimelow knows that some of his content is also being pirated. Who else?

Flvmagazine (by Flvhosting.com) - the company which advertised on this site once and never paid their bill - should get a grip.

**** UPDATE ****
I have now resolved this issue.
After a whole night of debugging I found the issue (and it seems to be a bug):

I am running Flash CS3 on my machine and I needed to install Flash 8 as well (due to some legacy Remoting project which I could not get to work in CS3). It seemed that my problems started at around that time - so I uninstalled Flash 8 and the RTMP connections work fine again.

MAC 9,0,115,0

RMTP Default Success 1.2s
RMTP Port 1935 Success 1.3s
RMTP Port 80 Success 1.1s
RMTP Port 443 Success 1.2s
RMTPT (Tunneling) Default Success 3.1s
RMTPT (Tunneling) Port 80 Success 3.1s
RMTPT (Tunneling) Port 443 Success 3s
RMTPT (Tunneling) Port 1935 Success 3s
**** END UPDATE ****

Original problem:
I'm having a problem with my iMac running Leopard (no, they are not perfect). A few days ago I noticed problems (long delays) connecting to standard RTMP addresses while RTMPT (tunneling) would still work fine. All other internet traffic also works fine.
At first I suspected that this was a router problem but testing the same connection from my laptop (running Tiger) worked fine, and I tested from within the same network which (I believe) eliminates both my network as well as the router as a cause for this problem.

I'm running the port tester on this page and this is the result I'm getting.

MAC 9,0,115,0

RMTP Default Success 60.9s
RMTP Port 1935 Success 61s
RMTP Port 80 Success 61s
RMTP Port 443 Success 61.1s
RMTPT (Tunneling) Default Success 2.8s
RMTPT (Tunneling) Port 80 Success 2.8s
RMTPT (Tunneling) Port 443 Success 2.7s
RMTPT (Tunneling) Port 1935 Success 2.9s

As you can see, the RTMP connection gets established eventually but it takes over a minute. A friend of mine ran the same test and he connected within 1 second, eliminating my FMS server as a source of the issue too (plus as mentioned I connected fine from my laptop).
I've reinstalled the latest Flash Player but the problem persists.

Can somebody suggests ways to troubleshoot this? I always connect eventually via RTMP but it takes over a minute most times...

Goodness me, what is it with Microsoft that makes me like them so very little? Not a single day goes by in which I don't read about Silverlight and how it's apparently the next best thing since sliced bread. First it's 'Wait until Silverlight 1.0 is out', then it's 'yeah but Silverlight 1.1 is the real thing' and not so long after that 'Silverlight 2 is going to be flippin huge, everything before it was only half baked'.

I wish the talk could now stop and we could all get back to actually producing some real applications. Who could really be so naive and think that Silverlight is even marginally ready when even Microsoft's own properties are still pushing Flash video (and successfully so apart from the runtime errors I'm getting)? Seriously, let's cut the BS and let the technology speak for itself. I'm not particularly anti Silverlight either, I'll give any interesting technology a shot, but we still haven't seen anything from Silverlight that would benefit end users or is even remotely different from Flash applications that have been around for years. And yes, I really do care more about end users than about your latest codec or developer workflow. Someone explain to me what Silverlight brings to the table TODAY please? And no, I haven't given the Silverlight development environment a good spin - I wanted to but can't as I develop on a Mac...
Let the flames begin.

Please be advised that I delete any comments which thank me for my 'wonderful articles' or 'this great post' in order to justify a link back to some sad and pathetic site. It's clear that you are the biggest scum that has ever walked this earth yet you have enough time on your hands to actually go through the trouble and adding your comments manually, including captchas as your bots are obviously letting you down, just to get someone - anyone - to link to you. I feel sorry for you.
Well guess what, in case you haven't noticed your comments are deleted after about 5 minutes of pathetic existence and your IP banned - and no I don't care if you are clever enough to spoof your IP, it gets banned anyway just because it makes me feel better. And don't post a 'thank you for this great site' to 15 different articles within a time frame 5 minutes, it kind of makes the game far too easy for me. Why not return once a week instead? Another piece of free advice: this site has a predominantly English speaking audience (doh!) so that could explain the poor response rates you are currently witnessing...

Dang, had to get it off my chest. Saddos.

It's almost exactly four years ago to this day when I launched this site, Flashcomguru.com.
It started off as a rather small resource but grew steadily ever since. Flashcomguru.com rose from the ashes of Flashcomstudio.com, the first european Flash Communication Server hosting provider and a place where I posted my first ever tutorials.
Right now there are 3736 users registered in the forums and 341 people are subscribed to my mailing list, the Flash Media List. Not bad I think for such a niche subject matter. Thanks to everyone for their contributions and support over the years, let's see what the next four years will bring.

In response to Tink's post 'Are You Pushing Your Kids in the Wrong Direction?' my answer is no, they can make decisions for themselves very easily. Here we have prove of it, my eldest daughter Heidi busy extending mx.collections.ListCollectionView. As you can see she also recently made the switch from Vista to OSX without parental intervention :-)

A little off topic but still related to Flash video. I'm using a Plantronics headset for my audio/video chats over FMS and Skype. The headset is at least 3 years old and the ear pads are now wearing thin, so much that every time I put the headset on I end up with black particles around my ears :-)
I looked around the Plantronics website but could not find any replacement ear pads. In fact I didn't even expect to find them as the headset I own wasn't even showing on their site anymore but was replaced by a newer model. I didn't hold out much hope when I submitted a help request through their (admittedly slightly complicated) help system. To my surprise I received a reply less than 30 minutes later asking me for my postal address. I submitted that to them and less than another 30 minutes later I was sent a confirmation that a new set of ear pads was being sent out to me free of charge that same day.
Plantronics are setting a prime example of a great customer service ecperience. Needless to say I am very pleased and will definitely buy my next headset from Plantronics again (however the current one is still going strong after 3 years). I also use their little desktop switch to toggle between speakers and headset, which ranks amongst the best $20 (10GBP) I have ever spent.
I know we're often quick to criticize companies for bad service so I figured a positive mention for a company that 'gets it' is just as valid. Do you have any examples of great customer service? Post them in the comments.

Yeah ok, it's not quite like that but this post by Microsoft's Dan Fernandez is too good to be missed. Microsoft does not seem to be contend with threatening Open Source software but they are now going after their own, Microsoft style. The crime: Jamie Cansdale, a developer of a unit testing tool for Visual Studio .NET, has provided a free plugin for Visual Studio Express. MS alleges that Jamie is violating the product's EULA but does not seem prepared to tell him which part of the EULA that is...
I guess that's a bit like Adobe suing its own developers for adding functionality to Flash that isn't provided from the outset. I just can't get over the fact how dumb this is and exactly the opposite of what Adobe would do.
Jamie states in his blog: 'Less than a year ago I was still a hobbyist .NET developer. I created TestDriven.Net as a tool for myself and something that I hoped other .NET developers would find useful. I have no intention of selling out and giving in to this kind of petty bullying without a fight.'
I wish Jamie all the best in this David versus Goliath battle. May it turn into a PR suicide mission for Microsoft.

Warning, rant ahead... It's not very often that I get really annoyed at a piece of software but when it's as important as an operating system than I think it can be expected that it works borderline reliably
People that know me well will testify that you do not hear me swear very often but trust me that this changed dramatically since I upgraded XP to Vista and started to work - tried to work.
The fact of the matter is that Vista rubbish (I'm trying hard to keep my language moderate here). Or let me rephrase that: my install of Vista is rubbish.

Just a brief message to let you know that I'm still around. I've recently moved house and had one week earmarked to get settled. Unfortunately British Telecom alongside my ISP have not managed to reconnect my ADSL connection in what is now turning into the third week. Apparently my line will be up on friday which will bring the excercise close to a full three weeks turnaround. I can confirm: the internet does no longer work on dialup.
Three weeks! that's pretty ridiculous especially when you consider that I kept my phone number, moved 300 yards around the next corner and had my actual phone line reconnected before I had time to unpack the first box. But there you go, 'no point getting worked up' I tell myself. To be absolutely honest I would have been very surprised if there hadn't been a hitch and I finally know why moving house is apparently one of the most stressful things one can do and no, I won't be doing it again anytime soon -especially now that I have a nice view from my home office window, with fields beyond. For those of you who play golf, yes I will be incorporating a cup (flag is still pending approval by my wife) onto that green ;-)
More useful updates to follow soon, I promise.

Again a little off topic for the general subject matter of this site but as it's closely related to my business I think it deserves some attention.
I've jusy come back from reading Aral's blog and he's very annoyed with Vodafone as well as Abbey National Business, two companies that have given him nothing but grief - something I can very much relate to.
Aral pointed out that he didn't want others to call the 0870 number when canceling a Vodafone contract but use email instead. Well here's another option: check out www.saynoto0870.com, a site which lists geographical phone numbers for hundreds of UK companies. You can then ring those numbers rather than the expensive 0870 number. The site is a bit heavily laden with ads but still worth checking out.

You can combine this with the service from 1899.com, a company that offers a pre-dial number to make cheap calls. In fact so cheap that it almost looks like a scam: 0p/min (that's FREE!) for all UK landline calls and dirt cheap rates to most other countries.
I frequently call the USA and Germany and I can do that at 1p/minute to both landline and mobiles. All that's needed is a credit card registration at 1899.com and that's it. No need to change your phone provider, simply pre-dial 1899 and you're done.

I have used their services for over a year now and my phone bills have come down dramatically. I've changed to the cheapest BT line rental package and then make all my calls via 1899.com. They are actually cheaper than Skype's skypeout feature, cheaper than Vonage (who really are a scam for UK users when compared to the US prices) and cheaper than TalkTalk. Give 1899 a try, you won't regret it.

A little off topic post here but maybe it's helpful to some of you. I am often in a situation where I want/need to publish my email address on my website but doing so results in endless amounts of Spam due to email harvesters crawling the pages. What I do - and which seems to work pretty well - is to use Javascript to embed the email addres:
Once rendered by the browser this gets displayed like this:

The email harvesters don't seem to be able to evaluate the JavaScript expression and therefore can't grab my email address. Do you know of any simple yet effective solutions to the ever increasing Spam problem?

This is an off topic post considering the focus of this site but something that I will make an exception for.
You may have seen the recent image on Engadget showing the striking similarities between Apple's iPhone and the LG KE850. The term that comes to mind is 'inspired'...
So here's another copycat attempt inspiration and this time it's the Multi-touch UI. I really don't know who tought of it first - these kind of interface ideas have been floating around for a long time - and maybe Apple has hired Jeff Han, but if they didn't then I find this quite intriguing yet again, the similarities are quite obvious I think.
Steve Jobs talked about 200+ patents for the iPhone which he plans to defend, but I am starting to wonder to which features or design aspects they may relate to... surely it can't be the Multi-touch UI, can it?
I had Jeff's presentation video boomarked for over a year because I was so impressed by it and I hope Apple hasn't just ripped his ideas off. Check out Jeff Han's 'interface-free', touch-driven computer screen on TEDTalks.

UPDATE:
Actually Apple didn't hire him - as Adam L. Penenberg just pointed out to me. Apple has patents of its own. But you can learn more about Jeff by reading Adam's article.

Notice the question mark at the end of that headline... I'm not certain that this is going to happen but if you believe Bruce Chizen - and he should know, being Adobe's chief executive - then there is a distinct possibility that Adobe is backing up some of its traditional desktop products by online versions or services.
How else would you interpret a statement that outlines Adobe's plans to offer 'some of its more sophisticated software for photo and video editing over the Internet, financed by advertising'?
Surely he must mean Photoshop, Premiere and/or AfterEffects (maybe Flash or Flash Video related tools) when he says that (in a slightly unrelated article on Adobe's possible intend to sue Microsoft over Vista's PDF support).
Add to that the statement that 'it would be a shame if we could not fit this into our business model' and I predict that Adobe is already hard at work to make this a reality. I wonder how they will deliver this... it will surely be interesting and a logical next step for the company that believes so much in RIAs.

I'm not going to reiterate the news that's all over blogland this morning but want to clarify:
Contrary to some blog posts that I have come across, Adobe has NOT open sourced the Flash Player (they'd be mad if they did).
Instead the source for the AVM2 virtual machine (which is a core part of the Player) has been released to the Mozilla Foundation. This will have an impact on JavaScript rendering more than it will have on Flash content.
I recommend MXNA for more details on this story.

I promised to post a few more details on my BlogCFC upgrade.
The situation was as follows: I was running a really outdated version of BlogCFC (I guess it was version 2 or 3 at the most) and I had put off the upgrade for a long time because it scared me... I knew it would involve database changes (new columns and tables), additional pages and of course design changes on my end because the first thing I did back when I first installed BlogCFC was rip the layout to pieces, navigation from right to left, new headers and footers, tons of CSS changes and so on.

*Drum roll*
So I have finally done it and upgraded to BlogCFC version 5.something (I don't actually know which one exactly).
Some stuff went smoothly, other stuff didn't and to be honest I am too tired right now to write much more. I've kept a log of what I did to the blog (I used to run a really old version of BlogCFC) and what to watch out for. To be honest the CSS and layout changes I had to do far outweighed the blog itself. Add to that my forum which runs on ASP and you have a nightmare on your hands - not helped by the fact that I still run a gazillion of static pages.
Anyways, night night (yes I do go to bed early when I can and I love my sleep), more on the upgrade shortly (it's not finished yet).
Please post any problems here. There's bound to be stuff that I have overlooked. Thanks.
Oh and if nothing's broke and you simply like it then feel to post that too. It took me frikin' ages...

...when I wrote this. How time flies.
No such announcements at this year's MAX by the looks of it, in fact very little news on Flash Media Server in general. How is this possible when Flash video is reportedly amongst Adobe's top three priorities? There's still so much educating to be done in the field, many people are only now starting to accept that Flash video isn't going away but I see little effort by Adobe to market this technology in a big way. Why for example weren't they present at Streaming Media Europe?
I felt that they missed a huge opportunity there. At the same times other technology providers such as Vividas were directly pushing their products (a bit too heavily for my liking) while others such as Windows Media were indirectly present through large brands that showcased their implementations.
And Adobe's marketing team? Oh yeah I guess that was me... incognito.

I don't often blog about off topic subjects but this one got my attention. Apparently Apple has quite a bad reputation when it comes to reducing the use of toxic chemicals in their products, trailing behind other companies such as Dell, HP or Sony. yes, I am talking about the Apple you know, makers of the famous iPod, iMac, iBook etc.

It's a fact that electronic waste often ends up for recycling in developing countries and is handled by children. Why it may be a topic for another day to discuss child labour let's at least make sure that these children (and adults of course) don't have to handle toxic substances.

I like to think of myself of being a fairly environmentally conscious person. I recycle my waste as much as possible, dividing it to plastic, paper, metal, organic waste and non-recyclable materials. I try and walk when I can instead of using the car - or use public transport but oh boy that's easier said than done here in the UK. It annoys me greatly when producers make their products virtually non-recyclable right from the start.
I'm hoping to do my part in kicking Apple up its ar*e by blogging about this issue. Maybe you'll follow.
I dedicate this post to my late grandfather who was a keen Greenpeace supporter.

This is a great site: www.ie7.com

But may not be what you expect. Nice one to whoever set this up :-)

It was about time: today my new chair arrived, courtesy of ebay, and I already think that this was the best money I've spent in a long time. If you work from home like I do and you don't get your backside treated to something like an Aeron (like me) then take my advice and set up an ebay alert for an BMA Axia Profit chair. This thing is super comfy and adjustable in every imaginable way. I've paid roughly USD $300 for it which isn't bad for a chair that's in almost new condition and retails for around USD $1,000. My last seating arrangement was some $99 run of the mill Officeworld type affair - and the difference in quality only becomes apparent once you try something better. And how much better it is...

All that's left now is to convince my employer to reimburse me (Phil, do you hear me? :-)

What chair do you use? Got any recommendations?