I am growing old. Or Borat was just not that great, which is also possible.
The movie is very funny at times but I felt it was also taking advantage of the welcome innocent people extended to a foreigner, however narrow minded they are themselves. Or maybe that was the trick – to show the real face of people behind the gentile facade. And yeah, if you were worried about it, Antisemitism and xenophobia are alive and well in America.
A perfect 7.
We are working with a Nokia N70 phone which is really not cool anymore in Europe but in the US it is absolutely remarkable. We shot some video with its really remarkable for Americans camera and wanted to use it. Being really cool I transferred the video over Bluetooth but the files are not playable in Windows Media nor usable in Flash as they are in the mp4 format, wrapping the gp3 codec.
There are a bunch of conversion utilities that cost money but there is also a tool from the people behind the amazing-but-I-never-really-tried-it Zwei-Stein Video editing application. t@b can do the job of conversion from mp4 to AVI and seems to work admirably. Yay!
Well, that is really impossible.
Let’s go over the basic scenario: You create a Flash movie or component to place on your page. You compile that movie from its native FLA format to the ‘executable’ SWF file. You then place the component into your html page using the object and embed tags, something like this:
<object … >
< param name="movie" value="http://somedomain.com/flash.swf" />
…
The problem is – anyone can take look at the source code of your page, take the object tag, copy it and have YOUR component be displayed on THEIR site. Your server will keep on hosting it, but the only way to find out if this actually happened is to have the Flash file check the browser’s location through a JavaScript call. Still, if scripting is disabled (one of the parameters in the Flash object tag controls that), the movie cannot really ‘know’ where it is playing. The only measure left for you is to disable the movie from working if you cannot get information on the host page.
I do not know about you, but this is a rather big issue if you care where your work is being used.
