oddhammer

Just putting in a last minute pitch for a good thing:

There’s a FREE Web conference going on this weekend in Raleigh, NC that covers Flex, ColdFusion, AIR, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, and other web goodness.  The schedule looks good, there’s a networking party Saturday evening, and the hotel rate is decent.  So go.

And bring your business cards…  the next time I’m asked if I know any web gurus looking for work I need some names and numbers. 

My Mac Pro is starting to get kind of dated and I've been lusting after some of the newer/faster systems out there. I'm ambO/Sdextrous and spend my day working back and forth between a pc and a mac and had started to get tired of the minor issues I have working between the two systems so I had considered a tricked out pc with Windows 7. I wasn't too happy with Apple when they decided to change their licensing agreement and shaft Flash developers... that wasn't very cool of them.. Then I saw that Keith Peters went back to the dark side... and now.. well.. let's just say Steve's little rant sealed the deal for me.

So I'm enjoying some of the comments on his "pot calling the kettle black" tirade like this one, and this from icrontic. ha. And it's good to see some of the comments like the ones on this article... lolz.. some people do understand that while HTML5 is a great improvement, it's a very different tool from Flash.

I figure it might be Christmas before I slow down enough to go through the hassle of switching files and everything over to a new system, but when I do get that time I'll probably be getting a nice high end gaming system. One that can play Crysis.

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.