The Rob blog

My friends at Raketspel have released yet another stunning web game, and this time it's all about football! You can pick any countries and create a tournament. It's easy to play and extremely fun!

Try out Simple Soccer Championship here !

FFMPEG is the universal Go-To app for everyone that want to work with video on the web. It has been used for basically every YouTube clone out there and is both easy to use, fast and totally free.

The biggest problem with FFMPEG has been the missing support for the Flash Video Codec VP8 that offers the best quality for Flash Video.

The good news is that since Google bought On2 Technologies that is behind the VP8 codec, they have now published it freely using BSD license.

The WebM Project aim to spread a high quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to avaryone, and it is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and others. And yeah, Internet Explorer 9 will also support VP8, so it looks like we have a winner in the HTML5 video codec battle?

WebM includes:

• VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
• Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
• a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

FFmpeg Patches

They provide patches against FFmpeg revision #23190 (trunk, on May 19, 2010), which add VP8 and WebM support. Get them at our downloads page.

There are instructions at FFmpeg.org for acquiring the FFmpeg source code. Using Subversion, you would checkout the source with the following command:

$ svn checkout -r 23190 svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/ ffmpeg

A git repository is also available at FFmpeg.org.

DirectShow Filters

We provide DirectShow filters for playing and working with WebM on Windows. Once the filters are installed on your system, applications that use the DirectShow framework (such as Windows Media Player, and others) will be able to play and encode WebM media. Note that you’ll also need to install Vorbis audio support.

Follow these steps to get started with VP8 and FFMPEG:

1. Visit the downloads page.

2. Download the latest .zip archive of filters. The download filename is similar to

   webmdshow-<version number>-<date>.zip

3. The archive contains Windows .dll files. These are the DirectShow filters. Extract them to your disk.

4. In a command shell, change (cd) to the directory (folder) where you extracted the filters.

5. Register the filters on your system with the following command:

   c:\webmdshow-0.9.4.0\>regsvr32 webmsource.dll webmsplit.dll vp8decoder.dll vp8encoder.dll webmmux.dll

6. To later uninstall the WebM DirectShow filters, use the following command:

   c:\>regsvr32 /u webmsource.dll webmsplit.dll vp8decoder.dll vp8encoder.dll webmmux.dll

7. WebM files contain Vorbis audio, but Windows does not currently support Vorbis by default. An easy way to remedy this is to install the set of DirectShow filters provided by the Xiph Foundation. Download at Xiph.org

UPDATE

Michael Adams have made an really easy example how to install this in Windows:
http://unquietwiki.blogspot.com/2010/05/install-webm-vp8-on-your-windows-box.html

This is an awesome team with an awesome business idea that came to life today!

I think we are on to something great here! I'll keep you posted later on ;)

In the complete guide to .NET Performance Testing and Optimization, Paul Glavich and Chris Farrell offer a comprehensive handbook to anybody looking to set up a .NET testing environment and get the best results out of it. The authors will also walk you through both memory and performance profiling and suggest steps you can take toget fast performance gains

• Chapter 01: Introduction - The What and the Why
• Chapter 02: Understanding Performance Targets
• Chapter 03: Performance and Load Test Metrics
• Chapter 04: Implementing your Test Rig
• Chapter 05: Creating Performance Tests
• Chapter 06: Next Steps - Profiling
• Chapter 07: Performance Profiling
• Chapter 08: Memory Profiling
• Chapter 09: The Performance Testing Process
• Chapter 10: Common Areas for Performance Improvement
• Chapter 11: Load Balancing
• Chapter 12: Internet Information Server (IIS)
• Chapter 13: HTTP Optimization

Original post: http://www.red-gate.com/products/ants_performance_profiler/want_to_be_dotnet_perf_testing_expert_ebook.htm

Slides on AJAX Performance Anti-Patterns by Andreas Grabner.

This is a great presentation with a lot of do's and dont's when it comes to AJAX and JavaScript DOM programming.

Found this super easy example on how to create a Google Chrome extension:

This article is a good place to start if you want to know the basics of creating a Chrome browser extension. This is largely because at a minimum this article only needs just 2 code files and an image icon to run.

http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/apps/google-chrome-extension-to-submit-to-google-buzz/

Working with multi-regional websites
Googles guidelines on how to structure URLs and content for localized web sites

Reddit have replaced memcached with Cassandra
How they switched to NoSQL in 10 days of development

The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable.

Saying Yes to NoSQL; Going Steady with Cassandra
Digg has jumped on the NoSQL train.

FluentPath: a fluent wrapper around System.IO
A flexible way to work with files and folders in .NET

YQL Geo library – all your geo needs in pure JavaScript
Using this library you can do the following:

• Detecting the visitor's location with the W3C geo API and with IP as a fallback
• Find geo location from text
• Find location from lat/lon pair
• Find locations in a certain web document (by URL)
• Get the location for a certain IP number

Ambilight Sample; video and canvas
A cool HTML5 Video + Canvas example how to create a real time TV ambient effect.

When dealing with external text data such as RSS/Atom Feeds you often get articles that look ugly and is pretty hard to read. Text information in feeds are often stripped of any HTML/CSS formatting to keep the payload down, but if you want to display that text on your web site it often does not look good.

I wanted to create a function that at least split up large text chunks into paragraphs so that it becomes more readable. That is of course if there is no HTML formatting already.

        /// <summary>
        /// Splits text into 200chars text chunks separated by <br /><br />
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="text">The text.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string HtmliFyText(string text)
        {
            if(text.Contains("<br>") || text.Contains("<br/>") || text.Contains("<br />") || text.Contains("<p>"))
            {
                return text;
            }
            const int threshold = 200;
            const string sep = "<br /><br />"; //the html tag that separates paragraphs
            int currentChunkLen = 0;
            StringBuilder outs = new StringBuilder();
            string[] chunks = Regex.Split(text, @"\.\s"); // split on ". "
            foreach (string chunk in chunks)// loop all chunks/paragraphs
            {
                if (chunk.Length > 0)
                {
                    var len = chunk.Length; //how long is the current paragraph
                    if (len + currentChunkLen >= threshold) //have a big enough chunk?
                    {
                        outs.Append(chunk +". "+ sep); //close current paragraph
                        currentChunkLen = 0;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        currentChunkLen += len;//calc new length of current paragraph
                        outs.Append(chunk);//append to current paragraph
                    }
                }
            }
            return outs.ToString();
        }