November 1st, 2009
New Version of Open Source Flash Audio Player
Early last year, I created a web site for my Mainz-based rock band. I was looking for a Flash (SWF) audio player to use on the page, but I could find no player that was fully customizable without using the commercial Adobe Flash IDE. Thus, I wrote a new Flash audio player that is fully customizable using open source tools (swfmill for creating the SWF file, MTASC for compiling ActionScript code and Inkscape for creating the SVG control graphics) and called it Flourish Player. Yesterday, I released a new version that makes use of new features of the recent swfmill version so that customization of the player is now even easier. The individual button graphics are stored as SVG files and after they are edited using Inkscape or another SVG editor, they are incorporated in the player by recompilation. Plans for future versions include full customizability without the need to recompile the player.
The new release is available in source or binary form from the Flourish Player project web site or directly from SourceForge.
Tags: ActionScript, Audio, Flash, Open Source
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September 1st, 2009
My Master's Thesis
A few weeks ago, I handed in my master’s thesis with the title “A Distributed Architecture for the MediaSearch Framework” after almost six months of work. Here is an abstract of the thesis:
The Fraunhofer SIT MediaSearch Framework is a loosely coupled, event based software system that searches internet platforms such as BitTorrent, Rapidshare or YouTube for media that match specified search criteria, downloads them and examines them for the presence of digital watermarks. Since the amount of media available on the internet is huge, the system is required to be scalable so that large amounts of data can be processed simultaneously. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Fraunhofer SIT, Master's Thesis, MediaSearch Framework, Watermarking
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June 13th, 2009
Taking the Scenic Route
An issue that recently gave me something to gnaw on was that of auto-starting an EJB: I wanted to achieve the effect that an EJB within a Java enterprise application would become active (and in that special case, connect to another component on another machine) as soon as it was deployed (or the container was started). If possible, I wanted the solution to be container independent. After a lot of googling and trying, I found a solution that works, but it is probably one of the most awkward hacks to solve a problem that sounds as simple as this.
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Tags: EJB, Framework, Java EE
Posted in Development | 1 Comment »
June 13th, 2009
Interesting Talks and People, and a Lot of Good Food
Like I mentioned in my last blog post, I had the possibility to attend the international conference “Information Hiding 09″ last week. I had quite a good time and learned a lot, even though some talks were a bit too sophisticated in their special field for me to follow – especially the hardware security related ones by Miodrag Potkonjak.
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Tags: Conference, Information Hiding, Watermarking
Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »
June 4th, 2009
Conference at Darmstadt next Week
Because my employer, the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, is one of the parties organizing the conference Information Hiding 2009 next week, I will have the chance to join some talks there, which I am quite looking forward to. I am especially interested in hearing about some of the latest developments in digital watermarking, which I have been dealing with for over a year now at the Fraunhofer Institute.
Tags: Conference, Information Hiding, Watermarking
Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2009
PHP Framework with Unique Features
Today, the FLOW3 Core Team announced the release of the PHP development framework FLOW3 as an 1.0 alpha version. FLOW3 features many features unique to a PHP framework, such as:
- Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP)
- Object Manager featuring dependency injection
- MVC framework
- Persistence framework
…and many more.
The framework seems to be very interesting and sophisticated, and although I couldn’t yet find time to try it, I will definetly do so in the next time. The framework is developed in conncetion with the TYPO3 content management system and can thus be expected to be of high quality.
Tags: FLOW3, Framework, PHP
Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »
