Electronic Music of Tyler Ichiban

 

If you like electronic music as I do, you might enjoy Tyler Ichiban aka Tyler Walker. Tyler Walker is an electronic musician based in NYC. His music has to qualify as Intelligent Dance Music or IDM. It’s unique and has a kind of video game feel to it, especially Freeze Tag, but very melodic, uncomplicated and inspired.

I haven’t heard a funky klav song in a very long time as cool as Officer Paton, and I also liked Curious Applicant. That song reminds me of the music in the movie American Pie.

The song Officer Paton was featured in the independent video Improve Everywhere: No Pants Subway Ride 2009. , and another of Tyler’s songs was featured in the Improve Everywhere: Human Mirror video.

Detecting Flash Version for JW Player in Shadowbox

I ran into a situation today where a client told me the video player I integrated into his custom website CMS wasn’t working on his computer. Naturally, I gave him the standard web developer response to any bug: “Well, it works fine on my computer…” After all, I successfully tested on Firefox 2, Firefox 3, IE6, IE7, Safari 3, Safari 4, Opera and Chrome on my MacBook Pro running Windows XP under Bootcamp.

After a little technical sleuthing, we narrowed the issue down to the Flash plug-in version. Mine was Flash version 10.0 -r22 while his was Flash version 9.x. An unanswered forum post about Flash version detection at the Shadowbox website, and a forum post at longtail video both describe the exact situation we were having, so I knew I wasn’t crazy.

Okay, so we needed to test for the Flash plug-in version before blindly serving up an .flv coded for Flash 10 to users with 9 or lower. Remembering that the “old school way” of hand-coding the object/embed tag properties for embedding the Flash player in a web page allowed you to edit the required minimum version your content needs.

<OBJECT classid="clasid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0"
WIDTH="432" HEIGHT="330" id="myMovieName" >
<PARAM NAME="movie" VALUE="myMovieName.swf" />
<PARAM NAME="quality" VALUE="high" />
<PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF>
<EMBED
src="/flash/ myMovieName.swf" quality="high" bgcolor=#FFFFFF
WIDTH="432" HEIGHT="330" NAME="myMovieName" ALIGN=""
TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash"
PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
</EMBED>
</OBJECT>

On this particular site, and most modern websites with multimedia capabilities, we’re loading a Shadowbox gallery via a Javascript file, that in turn loads the Flash player dynamically depending on the type of media that is selected for viewing/playback. I figured the first place to look was the Shadowbox API. I thought I it would probably have a ‘minimum required Flash player version’ variable to pass to it. Sure enough, there is:

flashVersion: The minimum Flash version required to play a flash movie (as a string). Defaults to “9.0.0″

Here’s my new sample Javascript code to embed Shadowbox version 3.0b, and test for the Flash Version:


<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="javascripts/shadowbox3.0b/shadowbox.css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="javascripts/shadowbox3.0b/shadowbox.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Shadowbox.init({
language: "en",
players: ["qt","flv","img","swf"],
flashVersion: “10.0.0″
});
</script>


Uploaded, tested, works. What this code actually does (for users with Flash 9.x and below) is causes the included SWFObject with ExpressInstall.swf to be displayed instead of your content, which seamlessly encourages your website visitor  to upgrade their Flash plug-in. If you want more customizable control over the alternate content your user sees, you might want to look into the Flash Detection Kit at Adobe.

Don’t you love well-documented open-source software? What a treat it is when fantastically useful and free code is actually documented and works as expected. That’s the beauty of open source. As it turns out, if we weren’t using Shadowbox to display Flash video inside a gallery, here’s how you can do the same thing with the JW Player Support for FlashVars API, by using the client variable:

client (Flash MAC X,0,XXX,0): Version and platform of the Flash client plugin. Useful to check for e.g. MP4 playback or fullscreen capabilities.


Note this not the same thing as the JW Player API. You use that if you want to customize the JW Player itself, mostly from within Flash.

On a somewhat related note, while talking about this issue with the best Flash designer in Florida I work with frequently, he asked me if I had ever heard of Kewbee, the Browser Plug-in Switcher, which is a great way to run multiple Flash versions simultaneously on the same computer. I think I’ll give that a try to make online software browser testing even easier. Now who doesn’t want need that?

How to setup a WordPress Blog in 3 Easy Steps

I thought it would kind of tongue-in-cheek to create my first blog about creating my first blog. Although I’ve been a software developer and system architect for over a decade, I recently changed jobs. I was really excited to land a gig at this amazing SEO company in Arizona, Search Engine Rankings. They do everything you need online, and they have many spices in their secret sauce that other SEO Companies can only dream about.

Everyone I work with is exceptionally talented. One of the guys in particular is a great designer and a total WordPress junkie. As we were getting to know each other, he showed me a bunch of different WordPress sites that a casual observer would’t know were done with WordPress. Some pretty big companies, including CNN and millions of others, are using it. Thanks for the inspriation, DC.

Okay, I admit, even though I’ve been programming rich internet applications with PHP and Flash for years, I never actually downloaded and installed WordPress. I’ve studied various blogs. I’ve joined forums and even hosted a few different forums. I like a lot of different email lists. I’ve even programmed my own blogging software from scratch. I’ve checked out Joomla, Drupal, PHPNuke and a dozen other open-source CMS systems out there, but I felt that most of them were either too cumbersome, too restrictive, too ugly out of the box, required too much time to learn, or all of the above.

Not WordPress. Here I am, just 15 minutes after downloading, and I already have a nice looking site with a bunch of terrific backend functionality. The back end is a snap to use and elegantly designed. Version 2.7 has some rather useful AJAX features as well, making it extremely intuitive, as well as providing “Automatic Draft Saving” as you write. In short, I’m impressed. I guess it goes to show you that you don’t know what you don’t know.  So here’s my recommendation to you, if you’re looking to setup a blog of your own using WordPress in 3 Easy Steps. I know it can be done because I’ve just done it. Here goes:

Step 1: Stop Procrastinating.

Nothing will ever harm your ability to create your first WordPress blog more than never getting around to it. In one of the best audio books on CD I’ve ever listened to, the author states that before you can do something, you have to think about it. But before you can think about it, you have to believe. Believe in what you’re doing, belief in yourself, belief that it’s not a waste of time, belief that it’s so easy anybody can do it. The lack of focus on belief is one of the fundamental problems with modern society. In short, if you want to create a WordPress blog, the first step is to believe that now is the time to do it. That belief causes a thought about what you might write if you had easily installed Wordpress. That thought causes the action of going to the WordPress.org Website and downloading the latest version, reading some help files and introductions for beginners, etc. For humanity to evolve and save the planet, we have to reverse the current action -> thought -> belief model, and start beliving -> then thinking -> then doing.

Step 2: Download and Install WordPress. And pick a cool theme while you’re at it.

For the total beginner, this may seem like a giant leap of faith, and maybe it is, but I’m here to tell you that you can do anything you set your mind to. If you’ve never heard of FTP nor used your website control panel before, this may seem like a daunting, if not, insurmountable task. In a nutshell, all you have to do is download the zip file, extract it somewhere on your computer where you can find it again (try the desktop), and then upload the files to your website using any FTP Program.  There are dozens of pages in the WordPress Installation help that walk you through this. The trickiest part for the beginner by far is creating a database, assigning a user, and editing the config file, but in truth it’s not difficult to figure out at all. Usually, you only need 3 pieces of info: the database name, the username and password. If you don’t know how to find phpMyAdmin within CPanel or Plesk, send an email or create a trouble ticket with your ISP. Also, many ISPs have Fantastico installed for CPanel, which lets you install WordPress with a single click. Ask your ISP. One more tip: Always read the ReadMe file that comes with any download. The ReadMe file that comes with WordPress has a nifty Famous 5 Minute Install right at the top that spells out each step, with links to more detail if you need clarification. If you try on your own to get started with WordPress and run into trouble, you can always contact a WordPress Customization Expert for help.

Step 3: Login and start blogging.

Assuming you got this far, you might find it somewhat ironic that the moment you complete step 2, you’ll receive an automagically generated email from yourself telling you what your randomly-generated password is to your own Blog. It may seem scary at first, but by taking this monumental step in your own evolution, in less than 4 steps, you’ve become the system administrator of a database-driven online software application that provides you with real-time worldwide multimedia content publishing capabilities. Think of it like your own channel. Your own network. Being responsible for your actions is one thing — but a whole network!? With the power WordPress gives you to project your thoughts and beliefs out to the world-wide stage — I can see how that may seem like a lot of pressure. It’s no wonder you procrastinated so long.

But have no fear — the anxiety, stress and worry you feel is just temporary and rapidly subsides. Once you start blogging, editing tags, setting up categories, trying themes, adding plugins and approving comments… you’ll wonder how you ever got along without your very own Blog on the World Wide Web.