02 May 2007
I have been a regular customer of Amazon and have been been buying books and other stuffs for years, even when shipping cost is generally higher than the actual cost of item.
After using their services for more than three years or so, I have decided not to use it anymore unless it's the only option. I am now a frustrated customer of Amazon. These are the some reasons:-
- Items don't get shipped on time, even when I pay more for shipping.
- Generally, Amazon doesn't provide the tracking number that means I can't track. Amazon actually tries to save money by sending mails through cheaper options (for them), that's the reason for no tracking-number.
- Their support emails suck big time. It would say same thing except one-two lines replaced in similar mail-template (draft).
- Amazon tries to prove that I (customer) might have given a wrong address or I might have been out and courier got returned, blah-blah.
BTW! Amazon has development and support center in India, still they don't understand how important Indian market can be for them. There is big-big market for programming (IT) books only.
BTW! There are bunch of Indian websites for books:-
These serve the purpose for old books, not for new/latest books. In India, you get books at lower rates because of lower paper-quality. Most of international books are photo-copied/printed, by partners in India, on lower quality papers (which are good sometimes but mostly sucks).
I hope that some other company provides better services (faster and cheaper shipping, I don't mind paying $$$ for books) to Indian customers.
27 Apr 2007
This is old news by now but I couldn't stop myself writing about it. I am so happy and excited after this announcement. I told to couple of friends, who are total FOSS guys, in my office and I could see a positive smile on their faces.
I can imagine a brighter future of Flex and Flash Platform. I can imagine the kind of tools we would see once Flex/AS compiler code is out.
After MAX 2005, I (and some other folks) had some feeling (intuition) that Adobe might release the flex-framework under open-source license but I had not thought about tools/compilers.
Well done Adobe, keep it up.
24 Apr 2007
I have created a Google Project called as3httpclient. The project would host different actionscript-3 classes to extend Adobe Flash Player's capabilities for HTTP/HTTPS related stuff.
I have committed the HTTPURLLoader class . If you are doing something similar or have done any changes to HTTPURLLoader, it would be great if you can merge changes or add new classes related to HTTP/HTTPS.
All the classes in as3httpclient would be licensed under New BSD License.
24 Apr 2007
Have you tried mixing two Media-RSS feeds using Yahoo! Pipes? If not, check the following Yahoo! Pipe, it's mash up of YouTube and Flickr Media RSS feeds.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=_HAgzffx2xG1mXUc60jTQA
If you look at the output xml, you would notice there is no media-rss (module) elements(media:content, media:player etc). Yahoo! Pipes removes all media module specific elements which were present in original feeds (in this case: Flickr and YouTube).
This is not usable because I am loosing my data and I couldn't even figure out a way to add namespace declaration, if you know a way please let me know.
I am tired, going to sleep :)
Update (14/08/07): Yahoo! Pipes team has fixed this issue. Yahoo! Pipes now emits media-rss tags. Check out this thread.
23 Apr 2007
I have been using DotGNU on my MacOSX to run .Net programs I wrote long back.
DotGNU sweet project and I heard about in FOSS during Gopal's talk.
You can write, compile and run .Net programs on GNU/Linux, MacOSX and other platforms.
Great effort by Gopal and the team on this project. Thanks guys.
I also tried running Mike Chambers FlashCommand tool, I think it worked but I would confirm it another post.
BTW! Mike has allowed me to post the updated code (some new features I added). Thanks Mike.
BTW! It would be great of FlashDevelop can be run on MacOSX using DotGNU. I read somewhere, someone has already managed to run SharpDevelop, so I feel, I can try running FlashDevelop. Thanks Arul for suggesting this.
update: I think, I am able to run FlashCommand using DotGNU
23 Apr 2007
I received Adobe Flex 2 framework and Flash Player 9 API posters. Those are huge but it's easier to read.
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Thanks to Adobe for sending it. You can also get one set, link the flex.org from your blog and keep an eye on this page and apply (whenever you can).
Meanwhile, you can download the Flex, ActionScript and Apollo cheatsheats.
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23 Apr 2007
It was good experience to be among the Flex-Apollo leaders from APAC region. I have lot more to write about this event so I would do it in another post, I just wanted to post this group photograph.
Check out more in flickr set.
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17 Apr 2007
I posted about Media RSS sometimes back and now it seems like Adobe Media Player (AMP) would consume RSS 2.0 feeds (with Media RSS extension/module) and do cool things.
I also posted about how something like Democracy Player can be built for Adobe Apollo platform, seems like Adobe Media Player is the answer.
AMP would be cool, I can feel it. It's another platforms for content-distribution. I don't have to think much about integration, just follow the standards (RSS, ATOM, microformats etc) and I am cool. That's the beauty of standards, that's why I love them.
17 Apr 2007
Brajeshwar posted about Mixercast, so I won't repeat thing. I would just request, please check out Mixercast.
Please send feedback via feedback-form or directly to me at [mail at abdulqabiz dot com]
I would probably post some examples and discuss the features in later posts.
14 Apr 2007
I just watched Robert Scoble's video-audio-live-stream , which was being broadcast from his car. He was using his laptop, a Verizon wireless card, a webcam, inbuilt-microphone and UStream account.
Check out the screenshot.
UStream looks pretty interesting to me, it has live chat and different social-networking features (embed, comment-engine etc).
BTW! Motvik, a startup based in India, would allow you to use your camera-phone as webcam over Bluetooth. Now imagine, how UStream and Motvik would go together?