The Hyperlogos

The recent buzz on Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash has brought it to my attention too many times to ignore, and so I will take my own turn at stabbing holes in it. The whole thing can be summarized with the following comment I made to a friend: Apple ranting about Openness is too ironic for me today.

fvfield is a flash video field for CCK. Unlike other modules it has no dependencies but the player (although it is much nicer with upload.module) and the player itself is Free-as-in-speech and not just -as-in-beer-for-non-commercial-use. In fact it is the same player used by the video.module, but you don't need three modules just to get flash working.

I decided that like every other website on the planet seems to, mine should support flash video. I don't actually have enough bandwidth with my current provider to make much of it, but I was determined to have it anyway. Unfortunately, the flashvideo module uses a nonfree flash video player (it is free only for noncommercial use, which is an extremely hazy term) and the video module just wouldn't work for me. Actually, the flashvideo module didn't work either, it wasn't even attempting to display the content. I had originally planned to add FlowPlayer (the player used by video.module, actually, which is under the Apache license) support to the flashvideo.module but when it didn't seem to want to generate any kind of useful output I gave up and began writing my own module. Note that there is not necessarily anyone to blame for any of this and even if there was every one of these problems might be solved by now.

Recently, I had a Transcend MiniSD card go bad, so after jumping through some hoops I managed to process a RMA (and I'm waiting for it to come back.) Well, my PNY 1GB SD died as well (you can see I only buy the best) so I went to their website to process the RMA - at which point I found out that they require that you have the original proof of purchase to process the RMA.

Locations

I got this 512MB flash card to go with my Motorola RAZR V3i. I bought mine at Wal*Mart where to be honest it's $3 cheaper, but it will probably get cheaper on Amazon in short order. It comes with a SD adapter so you can plug it into a normal SD slot, which is pretty useful because a lot of MicroSD/Transflash devices, like my RAZR, have a "full-speed" (11Mbps) USB interface. Most laptops seem to come with flash readers today, so this is definitely a very nice feature when loading albums onto a phone or similar.

sIFR is a tool that replaces text elements in a webpage with some styled flash text. While there are some failings in the tool (currently version 2.0.2, with version 3 now in alpha testing) it is in general the only highly-supported way to use nonstandard fonts in webpages.

I have taken the time and effort to finally make sIFR work on this site; I tried it out a long time ago but ended up being confused. Actually, I'm still confused; when you replace elements, sometimes elements you have no interest in seem to be replaced, even though the generated source (not the original page source, but what's actually rendered) doesn't show any way that the styles should match those elements. I was forced to use more restrictive CSS in the sIFR style sheet than I liked, but it's working out okay so far.

A firefox extension that prevents you from seeing flash animations (*.swf) until you want to