ExtremeTech has an interesting article about Flat Panel Display Technology. Since the LCD screen is becoming more and more common, its a good idea to have some insight into how they work - at least if you make multimedia presentations.

Besides, the geek in me just plain out want to know how they work.

ExtremeTech has a lot of other interesting articles, among them one titled "Exploiting/Protecting 802.11b Wireless Networks", a good article about how vulnerable and insecure Wi-Fi networks really are -- and what you can do to at least make them a little more secure.

Sean Voisen has released the Flash JabberConf.

Sean writes:

Flash JabberConf (FJC) is an API for Flash MX that I wrote. It should allow anyone familiar with MX and the new event model to quickly create chat and messaging applications in Flash.

FJC was written to allow communication with a Jabber server running the Jabber conferencing component (also known as group chat). It is essentially an "MX-erized," light-weight version of JabberFlash with the necessary extensions that allow it to easily support conferencing and group chat.

FJC is available for download in zip format, and there is good documentation with the download. Sean is looking for feedback and suggestions for improvements. So when you have looked at the code, head on over to Sean's weblog and leave your comments there!

Sean Corfield, director of Architecture at Macromedia has joined the Macromedian bloggers with his An Architect's View.

According to Branden Hall "This man is smart - and I mean really smart - he's the director of architecture at Macromedia! He's about, oh 2 billion steps out of my league" - which should put him somewhere out in the gallaxy compared to me ;-)

Sean has an article up at Macromedia.com about Software design patterns for Macromedia Flash Remoting, which is an interesting article.

He also writes interesting stuff on his blog, most notably he has touched on all the people asking for ColdFusion MX on OSX, sounds like its possible to make it work, and that there are some descriptions on the way of how to do it. Hopefully it will make available all the functionallity of the CFMX server on OS X. Especially now that Apple has made available such a cool server platform. Personally I feel that Macromedia should make OSX one of their standard platforms for the ColdFusion MX server.

[Via Mike Chambers]

On wednesday the 19th of June Tom Harwood of Macromedia Server Products, CFML Language Development posted a Lisence Approval Request for the "Macromedia Open Source License" to the Open Source Initiative

You can follow the discussion/thread at the Opensource.org mailinglist. The reception of the request has been good, although the license in many ways appear as a vanity license, as pointed out in the discussion of the request and by Steve Mallett that picked up the posting to the list.

In my opinion this is a good first step. hopefully Macromedia will go along with using the Common Public License, I tend to agree with David Johnson (Usermode.org) in his worries that the CPL license could end up as several hundred identical CPL's with just the name of the license changed.

SwfNews also picked up on the story, and the following discussion focused on what Macromedia might want to open source. There were suggesions that Macromedia might open source the Flash "remoting server" or maybe the Flash player, but I think the safest bet was that of John Dowdell, that Macromedia is looking into open sourcing extensions to the ColdFusion Markup Language.

Jakob Nielsen has recently become a part of the Flash scene since his company signed a deal with Macromedia to help them make a best practices paper for Flash development. Most recently he wrote a review of Macromedia's blueprint Flash application "Pet Market"

But he is still suffering from the animosity he accumulated after his "Flash 99% bad" article, Keran McKenzie has a list of sites making fun of Jakob, where the funniest one possibly might be a photo-collage of Jakob Nielsen closing the deal with Macromedia.

[Via Flazoom via Pnut's Thoughts]

Scott Hamlin has written an interesting article about animating type in Flash: Better Text in Motion

Creating smooth animations in Flash can be a challenge. One major factor is the speed and power of the viewer's computer. Another is the complexity of the animation itself. Text can increase this complexity, but I'll show you how to make the most — or more accurately, the least — of it!

[Via Flazoom]