You’ve read my rant about Java 6 being missing from the recent Leopard release, now you can help make a poor, not-so-humble geek’s wish come true. All you need to do is post a short entry on your blog with a reference to the string ‘13949712720901ForOSX‘. Doing so, means that you are casting your vote to tell Apple to fix it’s cranio-rectal inversion. Plus, you’ll be helping me and the 5 (there’s many, many more out there I am sure) other developers that actually write Java on a Mac out a ton. But why ‘13949712720901ForOSX‘ you ask? The actual meaning of the string is a bit entertaining. Translated from decimal notation to hex, the numeric portion is ‘0xCAFEBABE405'. Yup, you read that correctly. Who says Apple Sun engineers don’t have a sense of humor? What’s more entertaining is that 405 is the HTTP response code for ‘Method not found.’ You can read more about the effort to bring Java 6 to a Mac near you and the meaning behind the magical string at the Sun Babelfish blog.
Author Archives: Carl Sziebert
13949712720901ForOSX
WTF: Apple ships Leopard without Java 6
Having been a Java developer for the better part of a decade and an Apple fanboy for longer than that, I am left wondering what the hell they were thinking when they decided to not add Java 6 to Leopard. Keeping in mind, of course, that Apple has been notoriously bad about updating Java for OS X, the release of Leopard took just over 2 years to complete. They couldn’t find the time to get it done? Read More
Remote debugging Red5 applications
Red5[1] contributor Paul Gregoire recently added a new server startup script targeted specifically at application debugging. The script is quite simple in nature and is provided in both Windows and Unix flavors. Take note, however, that this script is exclusive to the standalone version of Red5. Debugging the WAR version of the server is quite a different task. To demonstrate the ease of debugging your applications, I’ll walk through a simple example using Eclipse[2] and the source code from my stream recording tutorial. Read More
Server-side stream recording with Red5
This tutorial has been updated. Please check out the new post.NetStream.publish(“streamName”, “record”) API, it is sometimes useful to take FLV snippets from the publishing stream instead. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest features of Flash Media Server (FMS) and Red5. Utilizing this strategy allows the application developer to precisely control when and how much of the video is recorded. While recording via the NetStream function has been available in Red5 since the beginning, recording video from the server-side application has not. In this post, I’ll demonstrate Red5′s ability to record an FLV with a very simple pair of publish and subscribe flash applications. Read More
Server-side ActionScript plugin for Eclipse
Server-side ActionScript (SSAS) has long been the bastard child of the ActionScript permutations. There are a number of editors that offer syntax highlighting and in the case of the Flash development tool, the bare minimum of auto-completion features for SSAS. That is until now. Read More
Red5 + Hibernate
This tutorial has been updated. Please check out the new post.
Having followed the growth of the Red5 Media Server[1] from it’s fledgling 0.3 days, I’ve become fairly familiar with its offerings. One of the most frequently asked questions on the Red5 mailing list pertains to database connectivity for user authentication and application security. I’ll attempt to tackle one solution here using Hibernate[2], an object/relational persistence framework. Read More
I hate blogs.
Okay, it’s not that I hate blogs, I just don’t care for what people are writing in them. In my not-so-humble opinion, most of it is self-serving biographical drivel. I don’t want to read about what you had for dinner or how your cat craps in those cute little balls. Read More
Carl Sziebert is a loving husband, devoted father, and accomplished software engineer, living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is no stranger to code, having spent the better part of a decade developing software for a diverse range of organizations, including small startups, large corporations, and government agencies. Having built a solid foundation of skills from these experiences, Carl now works as an engineer at 




