I thought I’d drop you a notice that we at Abelssoft decided to give away FREE FULL VERSIONS of our browser-tool AntiBrowserSpy for new fans / likes of our german Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Abelssoft … only till MONDAY.

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The workaround I use now is the Firefox Addon “Session Manager“. In it’s preferences, you can set “Close Firefox on close of the last Window” and “On close: save current session” and “On start: choose session: last session”. This let’s Firefox always open with the last session, that means with all the tabs you had open before you closed it. Happy Maccing, Mr Firefox. Also works with 4.0 btw.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

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That nearly nobody does. When I look at page views vs. registrations, it becomes clear that nearly nobody will do the many steps needed. And the backend functionality for logged-in users took some time to develop that basically seems to be wasted development time.

So to at least draw some conclusions of the failiures involved, the next few days I’ll be looking at ways how I should have done it differently and how you should do it, if you have the same problem. And I’ll write about different approaches than the Desperate Housewives inspired safe registration route, namely the approaches that Doodle, Stackoverflow and the average Twitter or Facebook-login enabled site use.

photo credit: ฿lαcĸouт14*

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And using those better ways is like wearing a watch when you never did so before. It feels strange first, often you don’t realize it could help you, but then, you find enough situations where the quick glance on the watch is really much more convenient than getting out your phone buiried in your pocket, klicking a button and waiting the screen to apprear, only to have to lock the screen after that and putting the phone in its safe position.

photo credit: KatieKrueger

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What is Media

You think media means music, videos, TV and the newspapers, and thats true, but there is a lot more out there that you oftentimes don’t recognize as media. Media is a either a more or less unlimited channel of content (TV, internet in general, radio, a library) or a set size of content (a music album, a book, a video,  a videogame, a magazine, a blogpost, a newspaper). The “content” is what’s tickling your fantasy, mind, interests, thirst for knowledge, imagination, anxiety, … or just lets your brain consume  stuff so it is freed from the hard work of thinking itself. You could even argue that other people talking to you are a stream of content and therefore media. All these contents influence you and your ways of thinking.

photo credit: dearsomeone

The Problem

Technically, oftentimes you’ll find digital media bound to storage like CDs, DVDs or a lot of dead trees (formally known as paper). I never understood people hoarding their music-CDs, and their videos, be it on tape, VHS casette or DVD ar BD – even if I know a lot of people who do that. As a kid (when you watch movies dozens of times) I might have liked that myself, but since the dawn of digital media, I don’t see the point anymore at all.

The advantage of having collections of media around is that you can show off what you have, and what you’re interested in. It’s like wearing a T-shirt or your favourite movie or band: everyone instantly recognizes that interest of yours – that you’re into something. The opposite is like saying you’re a fan of Star Wars without having action figures, T-shirts or lightsabres around: people don’t instantly know.

The point of keeping books around that you might need for reference also diminishes quickly: you can keep digital versions of books and read them on screen, on your ePaper device or even your smartphone. Reusing music is common, but stories, news and movies are also not used much more often than maybe once or twice.

photo credit: jm3

Availability

Music is available through a multitude of services: either you rip them from your CD and keep it on a harddrive (or even in the cloud), sharing it with you game console and all your other household networked things. Or you buy them via iTunes and just stream them from there to anywhere. Or you use Pandora, Last.fm and all the other free music stations in the net, or the usual old radio stations which are all available digitally streamed.

Apart from music, nearly everthing else is available for download, be it in a paid version as with rented movies, music tracks or eBooks or in a free version as with a limitless source of information in form of blogposts or news. Having media bound to physical objects needs to to have them around in one place and to carry their weight if you need them somewhere else.

Prices

• Buying movies on disc isn’t too cheap. If you get a cheap 3 for 1 BD box, you might be paying 20€ if you’re lucky, but usually it’s more expensive. As opposed to renting it in a video renting service for 2,40€ per movie you can rent a movie for 2,99€ via online renting (and therefore not paying for fuel and use less time to get it) in iTunes, Playstation Network or a lot of other services I didn’t even try out.
• Buying music digitally is basically the same price as buying them in the real store. But here you can get the two songs you really like instead of the 12 tracks you don’t really want much cheaper. And you already have all the metadata included. I mean I don’t see too many people still walking around with “discmans”, so to get their stuff on their custom media player, they’d need to rip it and add all the metadata in a time consuming way.

• (Many people say they’d miss the artwork and booklet on the digital thing. To me, this is stupidity. Yeah, I also read the booklets back then, but times are changing. Enter the World Wide Web. Just head to the artists website, we’re not in the eightees anymore. There you’ll find much more artwork than you can ever hope to fit into some paper booklet. Oh, and you’ll find the lyrics there too.)

• Buying eBooks isn’t more expensive than buying a “real” book. Here the market still didn’t finish converting to the digital medium as often fiction books are still not avaible in open ebook formats, but you can see it happening faster and faster, and soon the rainforests can rejoice when all people have Kindles and iPads around and can easily obtain digital versions.
• News and information basically cost nothing. You can of course buy well researched or well authored stuff, but those authors have to fight the free price you get though the free news websites.
• Games are same price online or offline, if you can get them online. But games are a special case, because most of the publishers still stick to the old distribution model. If you’re looking at the Apple appstore, digitally distributed games might even be much cheaper than games bound to boxes, discs and paper, but that will soon be known when the Mac appstore becomes tested and when Microsoft copies the concept.
• (TV and Radio was always distributed in a way that wasn’t bound to physical objects other than the receiving machine. Not much change there, other than the quality of non-paid TV broadcasts diminishes while paid services are like a flatrate for content.)

And there’s another price people don’t think about: either you spend time getting your analog media, or you pay for postage and packing that wouldn’t be necessary if you downloaded the digital versions.

Conclusion

Digital Media does not rot. After about 10 years, a CD or casette might even be unreadable and thereby broken. Digital media can be copied an infinite number of times and you can create as many backups as you want.

The main point of this post is that analog media is written on three dimensional stuff that just takes up a lot of space. For that space, you usually pay rent (or pay interest on loans in my case). Therefore, your media should pay a part of your rent. But it doesn’t. So please understand that media is about content, and not about collections of paper, CDs, DVDs and such. The digital versions are much more economic, overall cost less time and money to obtain and are better for the planet’s ecological environment.

photo credit: purplemattfish

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Cobian Backup: Not the most beautiful user interface, but definitely the best free backup tool that I found and use on a daily basis. Has ALL the features.

JetDrive & PC Fresh: Two of our own programs that I use on my PC. JetDrive is the best defragmentation software on the market (in terms of PC speedup) and PC Fresh lets you configure all the low level stuff, that windows tries to hide from you. Both boost performance.

YouTube Song Downloader: Another one of our tools. Want to have music for free? We have the Windows tool. Getting YouTube avi videos or MP3 is no problem with this.

Skype: Why doesn’t everyone use Skype? It’s instant messaging with group conversations and included high quality phone service. It can send files. Perfect. (If the ads were removed.) You could even do video conferencing, but who would want that?

HeidiSQL: A free MySQL database client thats VERY nice and easy to use. If you find yourself or anyone else using phpmyadmin, tell that person that HeidiSQL is much better. Even if you need to tell it yourself.

TeamViewer: Help your father fix a Windows problem? Help a friend to setup his e-mail-client? Use this and share his screen and use your mouse and keyboard on his machine over the internet. Saves a lot of travelling time.

FileZilla: The best FTP client out there.

VLC: If you want to watch a video, just download this and watch it. Superb video player.

I’ll update this list if I find something else that I’d use every day.

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Okay, I had a really hard time getting started with ServiceMix, as there’re so many technologies involved and I knew none of them. Maven. OSGi. ServiceMix. Karaf. Most of the time, you only want something to work so you can apply the same or nearly the same technique again, right? So here’s a little plan what works and where you can start your journey:

- Install maven. Install Eclipse.

- Install the m2 plugin for eclipse.

- Download ServiceMix 4.2.

- Open a windows command terminal. Navigate to %servicemix_home%/bin

- “servicemix.bat” starts ServiceMix. You get into the Karaf console. Typing TAB and “y” shows you a lot of commands you can try out. (If you want, try some … easy administration!)

- Open Eclipse. Seriously. Import –> Maven project

- In the wizard, browse to %servicemix_home%/examples

- Pick the “cfx-osgi” folder and use the pom.xml the wizard finds there for importing the project. Finish the wizard.

- Change the sourcecode of the HelloWorldImpl.java file to do what you want and save that file.

- Right click the project –> Run –> Maven install. A .jar file gets generated.

- Copy that jar file into the %servicemix_home%/deploy folder.

- Get back to Eclipse … there’s a client.html file in the imported project. Right click that –> Open With –> Web Browser

- Click the “send” button. Smile.

- (Optional: Now remove the .jar file from the deploy folder of servicemix. Click the “send” button on the HTML form again. Smile.)

If you want to learn more, you can look into the FUSE ServiceMix documentation (FUSE is documenting and selling support for ServiceMix, but they don’t put much more on top of ServiceMix, so the documentation is pretty good). Or try the text files that come with the examples.

Hope this helped you a bit.

Edits and Updates:

• I found this tutorial VERY helpful dealing with and understanding BCs: http://servicemix.apache.org/hello-world-bc.html
• And as you will be using Spring anyways and there’s no way around it, just to understand how simple it works, begin with this small tutorial: Getting started with Spring
• FUSE is a trademark that’s selling support for servicemix and label servicemix as “FUSE”. No matter if I got that right, FUSE is basically just ServiceMix. As the FUSE people are apt writing nice documentation (and the ServiceMix-page documentation basically sucks), you should head over to FUSE and read their docs (click on documentation and see a lot of nice PDFs). They explain everything you need in a well-written way – OSGi, Spring, Karaf, Maven, CXF, …
• If you want to use Eclispe and Maven to build OSGi bundles, read this page calmly. It explains how you configure all the OSGi stuff in the pom.xml. Additionally, don’t try to use Eclipse’s plugin-development features as this will mess with your dependency resolution. Maven seems to say: put everything into my hands and you’ll be fine (even if you don’t like me).
• This is a neat wiki article for getting started with building OSGi bundles for ServiceMix from Eclipse.
• Here’s a nice article and tutorial explaining how to develop OSGi Bundles with Eclipse.

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