NxtGen Media - The Freeman View

Another Particle Found

The scientist at Fermi Lab in Batavia Illinois, have found yet another particle. Dubbed Y(4140), in reference to its measured mass of 4140 Mega-electron volts. “Y” is interesting because they did not plan to find it. It is a completely untheorized particle and now challenges what physicists thought they knew about how quarks combine to form matter. Why is this interesting to me? After having spent about nine years of my life working in the high energy physics community, it is kind of hard not to keep up with it. That, and the discoveries are starting to look more and more like they can be related to computer science.

What does it mean to us? From a quantum physics perspective, we’re getting a whole lot closer to figuring out how all of this (reality) is put together. The physicist David Bohm made an analogy that all matter is simply “frozen light”. Kind of sounds like a reference to pixels in an off handed sort of way. It’s starting to look a whole lot like the universe is a massive simulation. Can you say, The Matrix? Not saying that we’re all batteries, but once we get to the truth of how our universe is constructed it may be a lot stranger than fiction. I want the source code. Just need to make a lotto hack

New Particle Throws Monkeywrench in Particle Physics

The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot

-DCF

Wing Chun Movie

Wing Chun is the second martial arts system that I have studied, and my favorite indeed. No wasted movements, and you don’t have to spend months developing long and difficult kicks that you may never use, and could be avoided by inside and ground fighters. Here is a clip from the the Ip Man movie where Master Ip (Donnie Yen) fights 10 karate black belts. Reminds me of the fight scene from The Protector. Some of the kickers I now spar with are phenomenal with their legs, so not sure this would fly against 10 such kickers (now with Wing Chun experience), but it is great fight scene choreography. Thanks to my Si Dai (younger kung fu brother) and student, Luis Hernandez for bringing this to my attention. Enjoy!

-DCF

Unity 3D v. 2.5 for Windows Released

The Unity3D version for Windows is now released. This means a whole lot more people are going to be able to develop Unity Games and Apps. This is great, but I wonder how soon it will be before we start seeing an influx of web 3D? I have heard some great things about Unity3D, and I have seen some good looking content, and wonder how soon the Unity3D player will begin to cut away at the Flash player territory?

Heck, maybe Unity3D won’t compete with flash much at all because of it’s focus, which is games and not apps. Flash does 2D, video, and Flex based apps really well, so maybe the two will compliment each other in someway. We’ll just have to see. I do suspect that those of us that have been desiring 3D in Flash for game development may jump ship to Unity. My conflict now is do I drop the cash for the Windows version? Or how do I get my employer to take the chance on this new platform, when our cash flow is so lousy? If it gets hot enough, then they have no choice I guess. Only time will tell.

There is another competitor out there. They make an engine called Shiva. Has similar specs as Unity3D, but is a little cheaper than Unity.  Heard very little about it industry wise, but one thing is for sure, the plug-in space that Flash has held for so long is definitely being challenged.

DCF

Unity3D, Wow!

I just finished working on a Flex app, and for the most part I have come to like Flex a little bit more. I was working with ZendAMF and was able to get everything wired and working without too much stress and strain. Still a lot left to learn and I just might consider using Flex Builder over Flash Develop when doing Flex projects, but not for Flash simply based on my established work flow in FD.

While I was out hunting up a way to figure out why my app seemed to be working, but was failing silently, I came across a blog post on Diamond Tearz talking about Unity3D. I had heard about it, but never thought much of it to look into it. Figured it was yet another 3D engine with a web plug-in. Upon further post reading, I find that John Grden and Andy Zupko, top dogs of Papervision3d and Infrared are very excited about it, to the degree that they think Adobe should buy company. To that I say wow!

Up until SilverLight, Flash really did not have any competitors. With the release of Flash player 10, there are many of us that were more than a little disappointed with its 3D offering. With the heat turning up on web app development, and Unity3D now in the mix, I hope Adobe can ante up because the game is getting intense. Unity3D does web, Wii, and iPhone. Granted it does not have the penetration of the Flash player, but if Unity3D apps are simply better it won’t take long for that to change. There is just no good reason why we can’t be having a better, richer 3D web experience both on the dev and user side. The hardware is there, it’s just that the leading software tools are not, yet.

That all being said, Flash does video and 2D REALLY well. For web apps and 2D games, it is a great tool. I expect Flash to eventually have much better support for 3D, but in time. 3D is just not as important enough for Adobe at the moment, particularly when we’re talking about applications shifting more to a web focus in time.

Unity3D \m/’s - Adobe should buy them

Unity3D vs Flash Or Not- Blogosphere Roundup

Unity3D

-DCF

Web 2.0 Government

Obama’s new CIO wants to web 2.0-ize government. What an incredible idea. No really, it’s a good idea, it just seems like something that should have been considered many moons ago. Actually it was, but no one was paying attention to the voices crying in the wilderness. Too much money was being siphoned for anyone to care at the time. Kundra, the new “tech czar” believes that using Web-based approaches will not only save the government money, but will probably foster new waves of economic development. Really? Go figure. Guess since the Internet had a significant impact on the election, now everyone is willing to listen.

Honestly, I am glad that they picked someone with a reasonable clue as to what is going on with open source and the web in general. Like it or not, there is a revolution going on and all things considered we are kind of behind from a government stand point. Whatever tools they chose to implement in the creation of web based apps, will obviously influence acceptance in other corporate arenas. I’m wondering exactly what will be the development platform of choice for their web apps? .NET, Flex, Ajax, Ruby, something yet unknown, or a mash up of all of them? Only time will tell, but it looks like RIA development just may pick up sooner than later.

Obama’s CIO wants more citizen activity on Web

-DCF

Zend AMF

In the past, I’ve used AMFPHP for my Flash/PHP remoting. Wade Arnold, the developer of AMFPHP has also been working with Zend and set up ZendAMF. I figured since Adobe is supporing it, it would probably be a good idea to get used to using it. I needed to quickly get up to speed on how to use it. There are a few really good tutorials out there. Lee Brimelow has a good one on his site that gives a good introduction. Mihai Corlan has a good one as well.

The tutorial that really helped me out the most was this two parter created by Richard Bates. I needed to understand how to integrate ZendAMF and Flex, and his tutorial explains it very well. Enjoy.

Getting Started with Zend AMF (Zend_Amf) - Part One from richard bates on Vimeo.

Also Check out the Zend Framework, which is a wealth of PHP goodness.

-DCF

Moving Day, part 2

Well, I must admit that I hit a brick wall in my site transfer escapade of moving all of our operation from our shared IT environment to 1and1 shared hosting. I must admit that despite my many years with 1and1, that I have now found the service to be quite difficult to deal with.

The first issue came when I needed to move GIGs of data to their servers. Thinking it would be a simple issue of sending a hard drive or a series of DVDs overnight, and they would copy the data up for us, 1and1 expressed in no uncertain times that they absolutely would not help us transfer our data and that we would have to use FTP to do so. WTF? Ok, so we were committed already and went about the task of painfully transferring everything up via FTP. Common guys, this is a bad economy, where’s the customer service?

Once the data was up, and the majority of the apps were transferred, and setup in their respective databases, it was looking like a pretty successful transfer. Now came the final application that needed to be setup and plugged into the database. Our crown jewel is a Moodle application that runs our Learning Management System. Got all the files in place, and we are ready to setup the database when I hit the 100MB database limit.

With the 1and1 developer package you get 100 databases which sounds really cool. The caveat is that each of these databases has a 100MB limit. My Moodle database had grown to 107MB right under my nose. What to do? Call 1and1 and ask can they increase the size of the DB and we will gladly pay. The answer was, ‘absolutely not, and that we would have to upgrade to a virtual server for an added chunk of change per month. Still not a bad thing, only their virtual servers run PHP 4.0. Most apps are running 5.0. Again WTF? The last option is fully dedicated server, (more money) and you manage everything. Again WTF?

So what to do? Since we are only out a few days work, roughly a few hundred bucks, and we own the domains, it’s time to look at some other options. Long story short, we talked to Host Gator, which has some great reviews, and an excellent business package. Unlimited everything, bandwidth, databases, disk space, domains, etc. and at a far less expensive rate. A fellow admin had good things to say about them, so we took the plunge. Part three of this will chronicle the move to Host Gator. All I can say for 1and1 is that for small projects, they have worked great. It is when I went to the bigger deal that the developer package fell on its face.

-DCF