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December 31, 2007

Happy New Year (2008)

Time flies, new year has just started. I wish everyone a very very Happy New Year (2008). I wish/hope, this year would bring us all that we want to achieve.

Last year (2007) has been full of events, I attended ApolloCamp, Flex Community meet in Korea, couple of Flex group meetings in different cities, initRIA, open-hackday and some more. I spent most of time in Pune working at Mixercast, where I got to work on and learn new things some of then were Syndication (RSS, MRSS and all), about widgets, Microformats and more startup culture. As usual, not much in personal life :-)

Last quarter of year (2007) has been slow because of new job, place etc. Anyway, I am excited about all new things, I am going to work on.

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 11:45 PM | Comments (9)

December 28, 2007

Exercise your options - lesson learnt hard way

I left Mixercast some months back and couldn't exercise my stock-options due to various reasons (new place, new job etc), I forgot it totally. Now ninety days are over and I am (or have) screwed up. As far as I know or told, nothing can be done.

I knew, Mixercast would do well and my reason to leave company was something different. I feel, I had worked hard enough to reach a state of burnout.

Anyway, a lesson learnt, always exercise your options, if you believe in the product/startup/company and have worked hard.

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 05:09 PM | Comments (6)

December 27, 2007

Solving Procrastination

I was talking to my colleagues about Flow state and Procrastination. I thought of sharing some links, which are really cool.

I am reading the book (Flow) and it's really worth reading. We all experience Flow state in our day to day life, we can experience it more often, if we learn how to get into the flow-state when we want to.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2007

Must Read: Security changes in Flash Player 9

With the release of Flash Player 9,0,115,0, there are lots of security changes are being introduced. Some are already there in the current release, more would be coming in later releases.

If your flash/flex applications require security settings for crossdomain data loading, cross domain scripting, socket connection or any other thing, you must read the Deneb Meketa's article on Adobe Developer Center.

I am reading the same and believe me, there are lots of new stuff (terms and things). It's good that Adobe is constantly trying to improve security features, though I feel, there can be more flexibility for Socket connections.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 09:39 PM | Comments (2)

Yahoo! Avatar Towns

As you know, I am working for Yahoo! for last couple of months. I would be working on Yahoo! Avatars.

I felt like posting about Yahoo! Avatar Towns, which my team has been working for sometime, I am yet to contribute to towns but hope to do very soon.

Yahoo Avatar Towns

Take a look at it and please post your suggestions/feedback on suggestion-board, if any.

You can also send any feedback about towns or avatars in general, by commenting in this post or sending an email to mail@abdulqabiz.com.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 07:24 PM | Comments (14)

Adobe Media Player - my thoughts

I started looking at the latest version of Adobe Media Player(AMP) available on Adobe Labs. I notice lots of improvements, be it user-interface or performance or content-coverage, that is, more feeds/videos are available to watch.

Lots of audio/video podcasts can be played in Adobe Flash runtime. I wrote some code to check if videos from Podtech, Diggnation etc, and it works without doing anything extra. All credit goes to new video/audio capabilities (H.264 and AAC) in Adobe Flash runtime (player/air).

The only thing I miss in AMP is to be able to add custom rss-feeds, for example, AMP doesn't show Podtech and Diggnation videos for some reason, if I can add those feeds to AMP that would be great.

Over all, AMP is good piece of work.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 07:02 PM | Comments (3)

December 17, 2007

initRIA was cool

It was good to be at initRIA, I met many (known or new) people. The event went fine, we had some good sessions. The following list was the agenda:-

We had couple of more session and some discussions (on Silverlight, AJAX etc) along with the above listed ones. I enjoyed most of the session, there is always something to learn. The most interesting session was by InstaCol guys, who showed us Live-Documents and also shared their experience with Adobe Flex.

I hope, all the slides/presentations (by everyone) would be uploaded to slideshare (preferably) or somewhere.

Around 130+ people were expected to attend (based on registration count) but it seems some fifty people showed up, which is not bad for something that was planned and organized in such a short time-span.

I feel, this is the first event, in India, which is focussed on the Flash Platform at the same time open for talks/discussions on all kind of RIA technologies. I am sure, next time (whenever it happens) we would have enough time to spread the word and developers from different RIA technology background can come up and share their views. As said, it was cool we had discussions on AJAX, Silverlight, AIR, Flex, Flash and RIA in general.

I managed to click some photographs, not really good quality due to my impatient and lazy nature since I have moved to Bangalore :-). Check out photographs.

Thanks to Mrinal Wadhwa of Bangalore FUG for taking the initiative and organizing the event. Thanks to Honeywell guys for a good venue with all facilities.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2007

initRIA - More seats available

There are more seats available for initRIA event, if you have not yet registered, you can register here. You can read more details on Mrinal's blog.

Two more days to go and I am already excited to meet everyone. I hope, I would get well by then.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 12:44 AM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2007

Again Down - not site but me

I am again down with fever, cold, headache and what not. It's seems smoking and improper (or no) eating have screwed up my immune system. Once I get sick, it takes little longer to get well, one of the reason is the worse combination - staying alone and being sick.

Anyway, I am going to be fine. I am going to have proper eating habit now and work on quit-smoking-plan.

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 10:32 PM | Comments (2)

Mixercast gets Series B round funding

It's good to see Mixercast raised good amount of money ($4.25 Millions) in Series B round. This validates the idea of Mixercast platform. I hope, we would see more kick ass features in coming months. I wish them all the best.

Update: Mashable talks about it.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 12:43 AM | Comments (1)

December 10, 2007

Google monopoly - no more text-link-ads?

Google hates text-link-ads, I heard about it via Aral's post. When I checked, I found search-result count related to me and my blog have gone down a lot.

Google is trying to control bloggers by not letting them use any other competitor products like text-link-ads?

Google adsense sucks, hence people use other stuff (TLA etc). It all sounds like M$ approach.

I had never imagined, Google would do that.

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 01:51 AM | Comments (2)

December 08, 2007

initRIA - an event for RIA enthusiasts

Bangalore Flex User Group, precisely Mrinal Wadha, is organizing initRIA on Dec 16, 2007. Haven't heard about it? Please read the details.

I hope to see good crowd and sessions there.

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Posted by Abdul Qabiz at 01:04 AM | Comments (0)