Day: December 19, 2003

  • A Less Expensive Athlon64

    CNet:

    The new Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 2GHz, the same as the existing Athlon 64 3200+, but it only comes with a 512KB secondary cache, according to an AMD spokesman.

    I’d love to have a meg of L2 cache just like the next guy, but these lower end Athlon64’s bring the price point down, I’m all for it.  Right now, prices of this new chip seem to be hovering in the just over $200 price range, but time lowers all chip prices.

  • Sun EOL’s Cobalt Line

    Netcraft brings the bad news: Sun has EOL‘d the Cobalt RaQ’s and Qubes.  Maybe we’ll see a better and lower priced selection of those cute littel Qubes on Ebay.

  • Serving XHTML-MP With Apache

    So I’m on a bit of a kick this morning.  I wanted to play around with 3GPP on my mobile phone, so I needed to be able to serve XHTML-MP content.  The first thing I did was add a few MimeTypes to the .htaccess folder of my mobile content directory, and tell Apache to use index.xhtmlmp as its index file:

    AddType application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml .xhtmlmp
    AddType video/3gpp .3gp
    DirectoryIndex index.xhtmlmp

    Then I created a really simple index file, and called it index.xhtmlmp.  I know that .xhtmlmp is an ugly extension.  I’ll do my best to find out if there is a standard extension (or a best practice even) and use that.  For now, here’s an index file:

    <?xml version="1.0" charset="iso-8859-1"?>
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN"
    "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
     <head>
      <title>Matt Croydon::XHTML-MP</title>
     </head>
     <body>
      <a href="tea.xhtmlmp">Testing 3GPP in XHTML-MP</a>
     </body>
    </html>

    That’s about all you need to start serving XHTML-MP content from Apache.

    Right now my XHTML-MP content resides at http://postneo.com/mobile/  Luckily you don’t have to worry about typing index.xhtmlmp, as Apache serves that up for you.  Right now it only holds a link to my tea movie.  It works fine on my 3650, YMMV.

  • Embedding 3GPP in HTML

    Now that QT supports 3GPP files by default, I thought I would look in to embedding 3GPP content in HTML.  It’s quite simple.  Pretty much everything you need to know can be found at Apple’s <embed> page and Apple’s <object> page.  This is how I would embed my little tea movie in HTML so that both IE and Mozilla-based browsers should be able to deal with it (thanks to Russ for the type addition, it should work in more browsers now):

    <OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" WIDTH="128"HEIGHT="112" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
    <PARAM name="SRC" VALUE="tea.3gp">
    <PARAM name="AUTOPLAY" VALUE="true">
    <PARAM name="CONTROLLER" VALUE="true">
    <param NAME="type" VALUE="video/quicktime">
     
    <EMBED SRC="http://postneo.com/vid/tea.3gp" WIDTH="128" HEIGHT="112" AUTOPLAY="true" CONTROLLER="true" type="video/quicktime" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">
    </EMBED>
    </OBJECT>

    The size of a 3GPP file from my Nokia 3650 is 128×96 pixels.  Apple suggests adding 16 pixels to the height of your file in order to fit in the controls.  I’m just following their instructions on that one.

    To avoid pissing off the people that read my blog via RSS, I won’t show an example of this in action, but you can check it out at my 3GPP tea test page.

  • QT 6.5 Supports 3GPP Out of the Box!

    Woohoo!  Anil points out that 3GPP support is included in Quicktime 6.5 by default.  I was rather annoyed that you had to download an addon to get 3GPP support in the previous release, but it is A Good Thing that support is there by default.

    With support for 3GPP by default, mobile phone users can post .3gp files directly from their phones to the web without having to worry about converting them over to something else.

    To celebrate, here is a short 3GPP movie.  The audio track goes “This is a 3GPP file of a cup of tea.”  Yep, that’s as creative as I get before the sun comes up.