I couldn’t attend Alper’s thesis presentation this afternoon, for I am in London (UK) and he is in Delft (Netherlands). So in order to still be able to watch his presentation I made a simple broadcaster with Flex2 and a developers edition of Flash Media Server 2. Now some others and I were able to watch Alper’s presentation broadcasted from Eelke’s laptop, live in the webbrowser. All everyone needed was the Flash Player and optionally a webcam.

I really like the power of Flash Media Server and Flex 2. Although heavily under documented, these provide a lot of options for people who want to do nice things with video, audio, and even shared resources. I had made a simple web-lecture recorder before when I first started playing with FMS2, but that project got lost in my hard disk crash. This broadcaster I now made only took me 2 days to build.

That low development time can mainly be accredited to Flex2 which is a toolkit build on Eclipse. It allows you to separate design from code in an easy way, offering much more flexibility and support for web-application developers. Sure as hell beats Flash 8 on usability!

PS: Midway in the presentation the server died so it is not bug free yet.
PS2: It wasn’t the server, but the wireless in the room that crashed.

Since moving to London in January we have been trying to get broadband in our home. One problem was that we first needed a UK bank account to order a connection. Once (after 2 weeks) this was arranged, we ordered broadband with NTL (now Virgin Media) because cable internet saved us the cost of a unnecessary BT phone line (£11 per month). A fucked up company as NTL is, they didn’t bother sending us an email to confirm when they would come to install the cable, but after some calls they could tell me that it would take them three weeks.

When the guy finally came to install the broadband he couldn’t figure out how to (he was not quite a genius anyway) as we life in a flat. When he told me “he had to come back another day” I decided to call NTL, cancel, and quickly order some “normal” broadband with Orange. Orange also managed to be quite unclear in their after sales support but at least everything eventually was clarified by email.

On the Orange site it says that it would take them at most 10 days to connect you, which later on was changed to at least 10 working days. So after two weeks we finally got an email that all should work. Strangely their CD+manual was quite well assembled but totally failed to do the job. Manually connecting with a LAN cable to the router I managed to figure it all out, and now we have internet.

We still have two problems though. First of all they promised at most 8MB but later on they could only deliver 2MB. Now their site said that the speed might “be subjective to the quality of your telephone line”, but I more or less expected a maybe 6MB or 4MB line. Does anyone know if I can get a discount for such a setback in speed?

Epilogue: NTL was so upset that I canceled, that it took them two fucking weeks to do a follow up call trying get me back to them. After a short discussion with the salesperson who almost tried to force feed me a broadband package I decided to brutally make clear that they were inconsiderate morons who were unable to understand the concept called “service”. The sales person hung up.