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By Larry B, May 18, 2010

There’s few things as delightful as being surprised by outstanding customer service and perfect execution of something difficult. Specifically, I’ve been wanting to move my website to a new hosting provider for a while now. My old host was becoming increasingly unreliable, particularly with respect to email. But the pain of switching hosts creates a powerful inertia – it’s easier, for a while, to deal with the problems than it is to move everything. I have a WordPress installation, MovableType, several busy email accounts using IMAP, a few databases, etc. I just didn’t have the time to deal with it.

Which leads to my experience with GreenGeeks hosting. I found them doing the usual Googling around and reading reviews. I liked the price. I liked the green idea of buying wind credits to offset power use (although how much of that represents a real net effect on the environment, I have no idea. It, at least, feels like doing something good.) I loved the idea that they will do your site migration for you.

I had absolutely no expectation that they would be able to migrate everything. I expected to spend some hours/days tweaking this and that to get it all up and running as on my original host. But just moving the files across and setting up users, etc….that’s helpful, anyway, right?

Well, it was perfect. There were a few emails as they asked questions and came to understand my environment, and then two days later I get an email that says “It’s ready.” And darned if it wasn’t. WordPress, MovableType, all my symlinks and apache config, all the email accounts with all the content intact. My migration effort consisted of updating my domain registrar’s DNS record. Period.

I can’t say much yet about reliability of the service (although it’s been 100% so far!), but I can say that the migration service and the general customer service I’ve received in my three days on GreenGeeks hosting has been outstanding. AFter starting to write this post I realized that they have an affiliate program, so yes, I signed up and these are affiliate links. But that was an afterthought. My enthusiasm for the service, and my delight at how easy it was to switch, is genuine.

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By Larry B, April 6, 2010

For years I’ve been hearing and reading about demand for a simple synchronized slides plugin for the JW Flash Video player. Sure, you can do it with some Javascript: add event listeners to track the play-head position and use that to trigger image loads in a separate DIV. But that requires page scripting and introduces dependencies that might not always be do-able.

But I always thought there oughtta be a simpler way. So I made one. Honestly, I didn’t know if it was possible using the JW Plugin API, and while I’m a pretty good Java/Web programmer, I’m definitely not a Flash/ActionScript ace. So I decided to give it a try as a learning experience. The result is two plugins for the JW FLV Player: SlideSync and SlideScroller. These are free for commercial and non-commercial use.

You can see an example of the SlideSync and SlideScroller plugins in action, or look at documentation of the options and parameters, or go to Longtail Video’s plugin pages for the SlideSync and SlideScroller plugins.

There’s a lot of room for improvement and growth in this. It’s really a first-effort, but should be useful anyway in some cases. There are still reasons to use the Javascript event-listener model as well, which offers lots of flexibility and control you won’t get from the this plugin. But for simplicity, this is a good start. Feedback is welcome. Improvements welcome, too! The source is linked on the documentation page.

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By Larry B, March 17, 2010

In the course of researching my article on Dynamic Streaming in Flash, I ended up doing way more testing than I’d initially intended. But things didn’t work the way I expected right away, and being the way I am (foolish? glutton for punishment?), I had to find out why.

There’ll be more on that in the article when it comes out on streamingmedia.com, but for now, I wanted to make a note about how to simulate fluctuating bandwidth conditions.

On Windows, Netlimiter 3 Lite works OK, especially if you’re just doing bandwidth detection to select the appropriate stream at startup. Shunra VE Desktop seemed to create more realistic test conditions for fluctuating bandwidth and stream-switching during playback, an impression that was validated by colleagues I spoke with. At $850 a pop, it certainly ought to be better than the $20 NetLimiter.

But on the Mac, it all worked for free. It’s already built in to the OS’s Unix roots.  It’s in the ipfw command.  You set it up by creating filters with bandwidth limits, then associating those filters with the ports you want limited.  Here’s how to set up a bandwidth limiter for testing streaming over all ports. Note that if you’re not logged in as root, you will need to use sudo to run these:

Change it at will by issuing the pipe command again…

Or remove the filters like this…

You can also introduce simulated network latency, control outbound bandwidth separately from inbound, and control bandwidth to or from a single IP address or subnet.  There’s great documentation at Luigi Rizzo’s Dummynet site.  Thanks also to Ask Bjorn Hansen for his mini-tutorial on this.

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