Free FLV (Flash Video) Player

Flash Video is by far the best way to deliver video on the web. Every online video sharing site (YouTube, Google Video, etc) use flash video. For smaller websites, flash video supports on-demand streaming without a video streaming server.
The problem previously was that all flash video players previously were commercial offerings (or required that you purchase Adobe Flash Pro).

Luckily a dutch guy - Jeroen Wijering - has now created an Open Source alternative. From his website:

The player allows you to show your videos more controlled and to a broader audience than with Quicktime, Windows Media or Real Media. It supports playback of a single Flash video file, RTMP streams or RSS, XSPF and ATOM playlists (with advertisement possibilities), a wide range of flashvars (settings) for tweaking both behavior and appearance and an extensive, documented javascript/actionscript API

Check it out here!

OpenSource real-time trip-routing

Hi All:

For any of you that have played with the real-time trip-routing in Google Maps, there is now an OpenSource version available.

A demonstration is available here: http://boston.freemap.in/routing.html

This system utilizes the following parts:

1. UMN MapServer for WMS based map image generation;
2. TileCache for tiled WMS generation and caching;
3. PostGIS for data storage;
4. pgRouting for postGIS based route finding;
5. OpenLayers for the javascript based map viewer

The demonstration is a little bit clunky compared to Google’s (probably all because of server speed), but shows the power of what OpenSource can do!

Meat Hair

Yikes! What artists will do... Meat-hair-art. Yes, the artist is German.

Google Earth as a flight simulator

Google Earth 4.2 can now be used as a flight simulator!

• Google's official announcement
• Google Earth Blog flying tips
  

Hatfield Agent Orange work on New York Times

Hatfield (the place I work) has done a lot of work studying Agent Orange in Viet Nam. Hatfield's work is noted on a recent New York Times article. The article can be read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18prof.html

MSDos 5 Upgrade Video

Disregard the fold

Here is an interesting web design article about how designing websites with “the fold” in mind is antiquated.

The author is from AOL where she is the Director of User Interface Design and Information Architecture.

The key point of the article is: “stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end. … The biggest lesson to be learned here is that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it.”