CodeToast

OpenVideoPlayer for Silverlight and Flash

I’ve been working full-time with a new open source project, OpenVideoPlayer, available at http://sourceforge.com/projects/openvideoplayer OVP is a cross-platform/technology web video player, with versions in both Flash and Silverlight. The project is sponsored by Akamai, Microsoft, Adobe, and others. The aim is to provide a good starting point for websites that need built-in players. We just released version 2.0 of the Silverlight player last Friday and it’s turned out to be quite a capable solution. The OVP started life as a media framework that Akamai provided to customers to make for an easier integration with their network. It was licensed as OSS for the 2.0 release in order to expand the community and involve other media companies and consumers. More…

Malware sucks, Anti-Malware sucks nearly as bad.

As for what it sucks, that would be system performance. It had been a long time since I’ve used Anti-Virus software on my Windows system, I hadn’t realized how bad the performance issue had gotten until I saw the benchmarks. I’d had more trouble with the Anti-Virus software itself than it could have possibly saved me, since well, it never found anything.

Part of the problem is that for quite a while now Spyware has been much more of a problem than conventional viruses, but the big boys like Norton and MacAfee have been slow to adjust and pick this up. Things are starting to change in that regard, but that leaves the issue of speed. More…

I’m bored of all this Smorgas.

It’s common in software that often the absolute basics get trumped by candy-coated interfaces and lists of features that mostly go unused (hmm.. MS office 2001-present?). In fact it used to be that the Operating System’s central role was actually memory and I/O management, can you imagine?  It is an easy mistake to make. It is fun making new features; tail-wagging dogs that help you search or desktop gadgets that crash in new and interesting ways. The saying that “every program will eventually expand until it can read mail”, is pretty insightful.  I swore off using Winamp on the dark day that it took over my video associations, but still couldn’t seem to handle ’shuffle’ correctly - it seemed at the time that every application was expanding until it could play movies.

There is way too much going on here.

More…

Ask not what your Operating System can do for you.

I recall first using Windows 3.1 and thinking it was pretty cool - but man they needed to do somthing about the file manager. I was a DOS user, accustomed to xcopy and the superb XTree and XTreeGold applications. I’m not asking for too much - just the basic abilities xcopy offers, like continuation after an error, copying files after a newer date, and the like. You know though, Windows 95 was just a few years around the corner - I was sure they would fix the basics by then.

Windows 95 didn’t do much for file management, other than eliminate the MDI interface we were just getting used to. In fact, the notoriously bad progress message during file operations just made things worse - it wouldn’t even tell us how fast the bytes were moving. I set to work on a shell extension to add some of the xcopy goodness to Windows Explorer. More…

About CodeToast

Welcome to CodeToast. I’m your host, Nick Brookins. During the day I’m Chief Developer at SAM Systems, a software company that specializes in video surveillance, compression, and streaming.

Beyond a blog, I envision a small community of programmers that create software to solve some real-world challenges, share the experience, and have fun in the meantime.

There are plenty of programming blogs with great information, excellent sites like CodeProject that provide tutorials and help, and open source software projects with people generously donating their time. The concept of CodeToast is to bring all of these aspects together. To build small open source projects, but share in the development with blog posts and articles on how and why they were created.

If you are interested in helping out with development projects or articles - or if you have an idea for software that should exist, but doesn’t - please contact me!