This one is funny: I followed this link off of Ryan Stewart’s blog to NewTeeVee with a video on Ice Cube promoting UVNTV, which is being advertised as an internet TV experience complete with a channel lineup etc built on Silverlight. I love it when Ice Cube basically forecasts the demise of Flash (’Flash is outta here’): hey man, if he says it, it must be true . The interview later has them saying that they got a better video quality using the windows codecs but seeing some of the really cool high def video around even before the Moviestar release of the Flash Player kind of makes me doubt that. Anyway, the video is a fun watch if nothing else than to see celebrities talk about server-side code, CDNs and of course, Silverlight .

Video: Ice Cube's UVNTV.com goes live with Microsoft Silverlight

So I am leaving for India in a couple of weeks to visit family and friends. Its always a fun trip and the time I am least connected with programming and all things on the web, which is a good thing since almost all the other times I am waaaay too into it. However the flight to and from is long, about 14 hours or so (and thanks to the Boeing 777s, direct without stops to refuel) and as you can imagine, really boring. So this year I want to ask the blogosphere: how the heck do I pass the time? Usually I code a bit till my battery runs out (3 hours) and then I unsuccessfully try to read a book or something. This year I am thinking I should maybe buy a PSP or something.

Anyone have any good ideas?

I just got back from my trip to San Francisco (top secret project…shhhhhh), but a couple of things made this trip rather interesting. I have never really been a tourist or a photographer. Its something I have been meaning to change for a while since I do want to have something I can look at years from now and be like: “oh yeah I remember that..”. However my interests are so much more in the new and shiny things on the www that cataloging my travels seems like a chore.

However this trip I tried to mix the two domains a bit. I have a shiny new iPhone (well not so new now), and I have been meaning to play with Google’s new my maps + embeddable maps features, so here is my trip with photos from my iPhone with some information about my trip on custom markers. I have a vague color coding going on there with green markers being the first day, the blue, the second and pink the third day at SF.

View Larger Map

While this was fun, it really isnt the experience I was hoping to create. Thankfully, both flickr (where my photos are hosted) and google maps have apis so I may monkey with ‘em a bit and come up with something interesting.

When Flex 2 came into beta, I wrote an online mp3 player application called FlexAmp. The application let you play songs from an online Box.net storage account and and used the ID3 info to load related content from Flickr, YouTube and Amazon.com. Mike Chambers later did a desktop application using AIR called Ascension that also mashed up your music with the sources mentioned(but I still want to claim first rights over the idea, plus I did remote storage ).

Just for nostalgia, here are some pics of what it looked like:

Anyway, a lot of people have asked me to release the source code for the application but the code (like the code for most of my weekend projects) is fairly messy. But I will try to release some of the core code as I get around to cleaning it up.

This blog entry links to the MP3Playback class which did all the playback for that project. I took some time to make the api pretty clean and similar to the Flex VideoDisplay class. I also wrote a quick example showing how the class can be used. The one interesting feature of this class is also the ability to fade out the song at any time. Not really rocket science, but nice to have anyway .

I hope this class helps someone with a project. If you find this class useful or find a bug, please leave a comment here and I’ll try to fix it.

The application can be found here. Please right click to view source.