However visiting the so called “Peak-View” with the old-school tram was a nice compensation for that!

After that I traveled for one day to Macau, with a ferry. After visiting Macau casino’s, I had lunch in the famous “”. And I have seen the Macau tower. From every possible angle

And after having lunch in the “Garand Casino Lisboa” I took the ferry back to Hongkong. The Grand Casino Lisboa is the futuristic building here  on the left (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Lisboa)

At my last day in HK I took the scenic Ngong Ping 360 Cable Car at the Lantau Island to the Tian Tan Big Buddha.

I finally hit Sydney at the 19^th of November. After having a look if the Harbour Bridge is still there:

I got my campervan. A Toyota Hiace, that had its best day unfortunately with somebody else (more about that later)

But I had some very nice days in Wollongong area, here is an overview about some of the beaches. I guess I have camped at 3 or 4 of the ones you can see here:

They basically look all beautiful but you hardly meet anybody at the beach. Hardly any tourists or there is just too much beach to get any kind of crowded area.

This was one of the small beaches where some locals enjoyed surfing and the view:

I of course also did not forget to go to the dropzone in Picton NSW! After an assessment jump I was granted the Australian A-License and put into the mid of the B-License.

Here a photo shot by an instructor during a relative work jump:

Around the 3^rd of December I moved on and drove in one day from Wollongong to Coffs Harbour. 600Km, pretty tough, I would not recommend to drive that much a day actually.

Coffs Harbour of course also has some beautiful beaches )

And I moved on to the next place, famous Byron Bay, and guess what, more beaches!

And along the coast line up to the Gold Coast. This is a photo taken from “Surfers Paradise” at the Gold Coast.

Weather at Surfers Paradise was not as hot as in Byron Bay. Anyhow, Gold Coast is a very touristic area. With everything from shopping malls to mega hotels along the coast line.

I then went to the Ramblers Dropzone (ramblers.com.au) at a town called Toogoolawah (not even Aussie’s can pronounce it!) There is no phone, no internet but a nice Cessna 208 Caravan, that even runs to 14.000 feet if only 8 fun jumpers sign up for a load

The photo was taken at a coach jump at 18^th December .2012. I visited Ramblers several times. In between I went to the “Sunshine Coast” to have a swim and relax.

I spend most of the time at Alexandra Headland, there was a nice little Camp site with Palms and some kind of little garden in front of every site.

The beaches … of course also very nice, probably the most amazing was Noosa beach, around 20 minutes North of Alexandra Headland.

And I spend a day in Brisbane, cruising in the ferry around the city.

After that I had an issue with my Campervan. First it seemed like the battery was just empty and a jump start would help, but it turned out that the vehicle does not recharge the battery while driving anymore.

The replacement took a while, I have been lucky to stay at Ramblers DZ during the replacement and enjoy some fun jumping (and a thunderstorm that seemed like Armageddon, with a light show you would not find in any club).

Afterwards I moved up along the coast line with hop offs in Mackey and Townsville:

To finally arrive in Cairns at the 23th of December:

* …. proprietary backend solutions using Flash … *
=> the Flash protocols are called RTMP RTMPT and RTMFP.
Those protocols are not so much proprietary since there is for example
an Open Source Project called Red5 that implements those protocols.
The only remaining really proprietary part of Flash streaming is P2P.
You can see some overview in the evolution of P2P in Flash in the graphics here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/
But I think commercial clones like Wowza already have implemented it too.
Or for example companies like Justin.tv claim to have coded their own
Flash streaming cluster based (although not sharing their code of
course).

*… it lends itself very well to add-hoc collaboration such as
whiteboards and video chat, and could well replace many of the – often
expensive – existing solutions widely used in enterprise and education
alike….*
=> We at Apache OpenMeetings are using RTMP with Red5 to implement
Live Conferencing. We provide integrations for Sakai, Moodle, StudIP, ATutor and lots of website CMS:
http://incubator.apache.org/openmeetings/
There are also other Open Source project that already act as replacement, even without webRTC.

*…Looking ahead, its hard to say whether there will be a consolidation of WebRTC around one of the competing protocols, or a face-off between the two camps. …*
=> The real question about the webRTC thing is which codec’s are
supported. Browsers do not support even for simple Video On Demand
(VOD) / simple streaming the same codecs. The codec makes the quality
and contains functionality like echo cancellation, HD quality and
low bandwidth consumption. If you then push those packets using RTMP,
RTSP, RTP, HTTP-Tunneling, TCP or UDP or whatever is really
irrelevant.

Microsofts full proposal can be found at: http://html5labs.com/cu-rtc-web/cu-rtc-web.htm

According to their announce they’ve added significant changes to the existing proposal to be able to adopt bandwidth while streaming. But before any application would change bandwidth settings in a Real-Time communication you would need to find out if there are actual bandwidth issues. From what I understood their proposal does not say how to measure bandwidth issues. I guess from their point of view measuring bandwidth issues are not part of the API itself.

What makes me wonder is that they did not propose to set Buffer sizes for incoming and outgoing media traffic. From my point of view having the possibility to set buffer sizes is an essential functionality in streaming. Eventually it could be also used to measure bandwidth issues.

I also wonder when Adobe will start to add their proposal for Real-Time Communication. As a company with that history in Real-Time Communication it should be a quite valuable contribution.

Microsoft Announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2012/07/28/customizable-ubiquitous-real-time-communication-over-the-web-cu-rtc-web.aspx

See: http://markmail.org/thread/uqmzalvh32lhpqe5

Here are some proposals:

Please share your opinion on the mailing list.

https://www.google.de/search?q=Geschmacksmustereintrag&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&client=firefox-a

Their special clue:

For a monthly fee you get an “All-In-One” package, protecting your design. You receive a whole umbrella of tools to sue others that might or might not violate the design patent, just needs to pay xx Euro per month to those companies.
And of course you can get a bulk discount if you order multiple design patents at once.

Its seems just like a trendy new way of making money: Explain people that they need to patent everything.

I also wonder that there is not a single of those articles that do explain what a design patent really is and for what it is good for.
I am still waiting for the “Drive-Through-Patent-Station” where you get some nice stickers and T-Shirts together with a confirmation of your patent idea

Now looking at JavaFX:
They build some playback components to playback video. Additionally the JavaFX API ( http://docs.oracle.com/javafx/2.0/api/index.html ) has a Camera object, however it seems to have nothing to do with a “webcam”, it is an internal object used to render the UI. There is also no Microphone access. The plan seems to be like leaving this as opportunity to the users to program their own drivers to access the cam/mic. By looking at the way JMF was not developed since almost 10 years and all the negative feedback (or even “ANTI” (or counter-revolutionary) projects like FMJ ( http://fmj-sf.net/ ) I doubt that this is an opportunity lot of people will consider.

Btw: You can also participate in the discussion in the Jira issue on JavaFX bugtracker: http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-3458 Vote for it!

http://code.google.com/p/openlaszlo-schemagenerator/

Demo Video:
[youtube 9a2A8zy57a0]

The JAR contains tasks to generate a XSD from your project LZX files, by doing that:

• You have full Schema Validation in Eclipse and it will show you all your XML schema errors
• The validation is aware of ALL tags and attributes: The LZX base-components(+incubator) and your project specific code
• You get content-sensitive drop down menus for Tags and Attributes
• The XSD Schema also contains type-restriction, defaultvalues and documentation for Tags and Attributes parsed from your source files
• there is a task to trim the schema from your files again as the OpenLaszlo compiler does not accept schema and prefixes (yet )

… actually what needs to be done now is to wrap my library in an Eclipse Project so that the steps that I currently do using ANT are automatically done by the IDE.

There is also a hook in the JAR-library to transfer an existing “Non-XSD-aware” project into a XSD aware project. I will publish something about that soon.

Based on the XSD you could also generate Java files with JAXB, for example you can create a whole Java representative of the LFC and your project … or you could potentially create some data-services that automatically generate LZX from Java and vice verca…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

No paging / endlesslist for the mails

You still have those old-school back/forward buttons on top. Modern Email clients just have a endless list that loads new items if you scroll on the bottom. You could still combine that with paging 1000 items for example. If somebody scrolls really fast there is also no need to load all items really… So if you implement it clever you could really load 1 mio items in the list and scroll down to item 510.030 without need for buttons. Or live-filter on the results showing the number of results based on the current search …
Buttons to page new items has no “jump to last” or “jump to first”

Following use-case: You search for “invoice” in your mailbox, you want to goto the VERY FIRST or LAST EMAIL. You will have to click on the button to go to the first item until you have the first page. Why is there still no “jump to first/last page” button?
Suprising that those issues still not on their feature list.

Possible Features

• Embed Links to conference rooms into Drupal articles
• Single Sing on using your Drupal login
• List recordings in Drupal
• Embed recording links in articles

[youtube LmMIKFCLRV4]

Where to get the Drupal Module

Contact: service@openmeetings.de

Website: http://www.openmeetings.de