The Blog of Scott

Today, I had to perform a minor modification to a page on one of my worksites. It was a simple mistake, an English page was pointing to a Chinese language video, rather than the English. However, it brought me back to the time some months ago, when I was converting not one, but many MPEG movies to Flash Streaming Video format. The whole process of getting the movie, converting it, creating the necessary templates, linking the whole lot together, was a really messy process. Now that Flash video has become much more popular, I see that the forthcoming release of Macromedia Flash Professional 8 will include much better ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality for producing the video, template etc. If and when the trial version of Studio 8 is released sometime in September 2005, I’ll be most interested to see how these work out. A lot has been said about the time and effort Macromedia have put into this release, getting as much feedback and review from customers to ensure that the mess that is Studi

Now I can use Word to make blogger.com postings. This post was done using it. Glad to see that my office installation of Word works properly with it. I think now that my personal website has settled down nicely. The only major downtime for which I had to make workarounds was DirectNIC ’s hosting of one of my work sites. Hurricane Katrina brought New Orleans practically underwater, taking down some of their infrastructure. I did say things were coming back to normal, which is somewhat optimistic, as the Mayor of New Orleans has ordered everybody to leave the city, as it is in no habitable condition. In fact, DirectNIC have been keeping their servers on with diesel generators, and some of their team have been holed up in the building during the whole event. Their blog has been reported widely in the media, since apart from their postings, they have had photos, and live camera feeds showing how things really are from the center of the city. Btw, I’ve moved the worksite back to them now, f