Dots Are Famous!

I decided to attempt to make a movie of a simple Java program I wrote and upload it to YouTube. Nutty, huh? I used a program called Fraps to capture video of the program in action. Fraps is relatively inexpensive and is a breeze to install and configure. So, I uploaded the resulting AVI file to YouTube. YouTube gave me a "processing" message and later gave a "that part of the site is down for maintenance". This is what kills me. My customers would blow a fuse if their website showed a maintenance message instead of serving their needs. Imagine visiting Google only to see a terse message about the site being down.

Digg, YouTube and Myspace are notorious for making their sites inaccessible due to maintenance. How many billions of dollars are these sites worth? Can't they hire engineers who are smart enough to handle redundancy and fail-over while accomplishing maintenance? *cough* Hey, corporate owners, if you need some assistance, you can always examine my resume.

The movie failed to upload due to an issue with an unsupported codec. So I spent some time on the site reading the help pages. I learned that for best results I should resize the video to 320x240. So, I fired up Microsoft Movie Maker. In addition to resizing the video I added a title screen, credits and some music my brother Kevin gave me sometime last year. I saved it as a WMV file and uploaded it to YouTube.

This time the file was successfully uploaded. Here is the end result. In this video I am clicking on the screen spawning dots. The dots are affected by gravity and fall to the bottom of the screen. I hope you enjoy the cheese factor.

Posted at 9:26 PM