oddhammer

I was mucking about on about 4 or 5 different things at once and ended up back at this post. I was really curious about what the "Godfathers" of Flash were up to when I read that post over a year ago, and it seems like the question has been answered and I apparently missed it.

So here's what they've been up to..

"The Greenbox™ Home Energy Manager empowers homeowners to understand and manage their energy consumption. With knowledge of their energy use, consumers can take proactive steps to conserve energy, understand their impact on the environment, and save money.

Conveniently monitoring electricity, water, and/or gas usage in real-time, the Greenbox provides direct feedback to consumers about their homes performance. Studies have shown that households can reduce their utility bills by 10-20%, just by being aware of their ongoing usage.

The Greenbox presents easy to understand graphs, charts, historical data, and community comparisons to empower people to understand and make informed decisions about their energy and water usage. A personalized recommendation engine takes the mystery out of making your home more efficient by forecasting usage, cost, and emissions savings that can be created by implementing various efficiency improvements."

That's something that just might come in handy as a barrel of oil topped $123 today and other types of energy are slowly creeping up in cost.

Now I'm curious if they're using Flash for that device and if consumer devices like this are the reason Adobe moved to open (free) the licensing for the Flash Player recently. I figured it was for flashy fun things like set top boxes, handheld games (leapster), etc. and not necessarily for utilitarian devices like an energy management system. I guess I figured wrong.

wow..... the announcement today from Adobe about opening the Flash Player up to the market to be placed on any imaginable device is just stunning. This is going to place even more demand on people with Flash skills as these companies begin to produce handheld devices using the Flash Player.

The only thing in the press release that set off my BS detector was this.. "“The Open Screen Project will make it simple for Verizon and our partners to deliver rich mobile experiences to more devices,”" .. yeah, and how big of a fee will they charge developers before they can develop for the Verizon network?

I also noticed that there was no mention of Apple in that press release.

I have a little Linksys BEFSR41 firewall/router that I use at home.. and have a few machines behind that. One of the neat features of the Linksys is that it can do port forwarding.  So if a request comes in on say port 80 you can forward that request on to a particular machine behind the firewall.  The limitation I’ve found on this is that it only forwards to one IP address. 

I have a little Linksys BEFSR41 firewall/router that I use at home.. and have a few machines behind that. One of the neat features of the Linksys is that it can do port forwarding.  So if a request comes in on say port 80 you can forward that request on to a particular machine behind the firewall.  The limitation I’ve found on this is that it only forwards to one IP address.  So if I’m running a Windows 2000 server and want to run a bunch of web sites off of that server I have to use the “Host Header” technique to determine which web site the server should serve up for each request (requests for all of the web sites come in on the same IP address). 

Now Win2k server can disntinguish which web server should handle each request three ways:  IP address, Host Header, or Port.  Since the Linksys will only forward one port to one IP address the only solution I’ve been able to find is to have the different domains for the different web servers mapped to unique ports.  So if you send a request to ABCDEF.com your request would be forwarded to 192.168.145.12:80 (port 80)but if you send a request to FEDCBA.com your request would be forwarded to 192.168.145.12:84 (port 84).

Obviously if you have access to your own DNS server you can handle this yourself.. but if you need a DNS service here’s one that is capable of converting that domain name you have around into an IP address AND a port number:
http://www.dynu.com/
http://www.no-ip.com/

The only catch.. you’ll be paying each year for the service.. 

I’m out at the Flash Forward 2003 film festival and conference and sat through the keynote address by Kevin Lynch yesterday morning.  He gave a sneak peek of a new product named Central they’ll be releasing “this summer”. 

I’m out at the Flash Forward 2003 film festival and conference and sat through the keynote address by Kevin Lynch yesterday morning.  He gave a sneak peek of a new product named Central they’ll be releasing “this summer”.  Macromedia put out a press release on the web about it here and have a new section on their site about it here.

My reaction?  it’s a paradigm shift.  the applications he demonstrated included a financial forcasting app that could be used offline to view complex charts and data.  When the user reconnected to the Net the data was updated.  He also showed a “hot spot” locater being created by Intel that will give you specific locations of wi-fi points.  It can be used either offline, or if you are online the locations listed link to a map so you can see where the addresses are.  Lynch also announced that Macromedia has released a Flash 6 player for the PocketPC2002 and showed it playing back video in a Flash clip.. and the video looked good..  very cool.