Great news for multiplayer flash games!
In the latest beta release of Flash Player 10, Adobe introduced the RTMFP support.
In short this technology will allow P2P communication between players and UDP:

Direct (P2P) communication between Flash players.

Every flash application will be able to connect to another without going through a server, saving bandwidth and lowering latency.
A Flash Media Server will be required to establish the connection between players.

UDP communication with a server

The next version of Flash Media Server (and maybe of Red5) will allow audio and video streaming from and to the flash player over the UDP, which is a more efficient way to deliver low latency packets.
Applications like Skype and the majority of multiplayer games already use that with obvious advantages.

Further informations:
RTMFP FAQ
Flash Player 10 Release notes
UDP Wikipedia entry

Today I’ve stumbled upon this wonderful 3d desktop application:

WHITEvoid portfolio application

Remembered me of the 3D desktop concept video “Bumptop”:

Only a day after the release of BlazeDS, Nicolas Cannasse (Motion-Twin) has just released haxeVideo:

haxeVideo is an opensource video streaming server entirely written in haXe
Features include :

* FLV streaming using RTMP protocol
* Webcam and Microphone recording to FLV file
* Live streaming for web conferencing
* light and fast scalable server
* only 50 KB of server source code : modify whatever you need !

Finally the multiuser/conferencing thing is taking place?
We will ever see affordable (T)RTMP hosting services?

PS: This can be the right answer to those interested in a web-radio solution

This week were released:
AMF3 specification
Action Message Format (AMF) is a compact binary format that is used to
ActionScript object graphs. Once serialized an AMF encoded object graph
to persist and retrieve the public state of an application across sessions or
endpoints to communicate through the exchange of strongly typed data.
And Java-Remoting BlazeDS Beta
BlazeDS is the server-based Java [...]

I’ve not blogged too much lately, however, there was some strange “activities” on my blog…
Today someone in a comment warned me that I have some spam links in the footer visible only with javascripts disabled.
I’ve updated wordpress some days ago because I’ve noticed some spam links in my sidebar, but as it seems this wasn’t [...]

The Doom game in flash:
This uses the original Doom shareware wad file and gets all content from it at runtime.
See it here: Flash Doom game

Must be blogged: The collaborative Zoomquilt 2.
Really worth seeing. Much longer, much better, now as a screensaver too.
Take the trip.

I've always thought that continuations are the right answer to many if no all the network-programming problems.
What are continuations?
A continuation represent the state of execution of a function: all the local variables and the instruction pointer (the last line executed).
(Update: At least: there can be many kind of continuations. Other than the local variables, [...]

Update3 (05 February 2008): now the applet doesn't upload empty folders
Update2 (04 February 2008): fixed a bug that prevented files with uppercase extension to be loaded
Update: all bug fixed, internationalized, run as as application and as an applet too
I've done a "droplet" that upload and resize pictures and folders with FTP.
Why?
Since I was looking for [...]

While I was wondering if using haXe or Java with my server, I've stumbled upon some discussion on Static Typing (Java) vs. Dynamic Typing (Ruby, Php).
In a really interesting blog post (read the comments too) I found this touching phrase:
"Static typing is Communist Bureaucracy".
In short: since we (should) have pervasive testing, Static Typing is only [...]