⑧ ericd.net blog: February 2008 (Archival)

Friday, February 29, 2008

Flex3/AS3/AIR API Posters

Friday, February 29, 2008 0 Comments

Looks like printed official versions of the Flex3/AS3/AIR APIs aren't ready quite yet, but you can snag them in PDF form from the Flex Blog. We have one of those huge spooling HP Printers in our area (like 4' x however roll you have). Tried printing once and because this PDF is so large, I think Acrobat crashed. I'll have to try it again later. These I'll use. You should see the lame Silverlight API sheet M$ sent to me. Almost unusable.

VisDoc Rocks AS3

2 Comments

The options for documenting AS3 Classes are slim, notably ASDoc released with the FlexSDK. However, I have found using the tool to be a little cumbersome on its own, and when hooked up within FlashDevelop, I sometimes get errors that I don't get when I compile the same code. So, for ease of use, control over the resulting documentation, and overall results I side with VisDoc.

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings

1 Comments

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Another free SVN service

Thursday, February 28, 2008 2 Comments

If you're comfortable with the contents of your SVN repositories sitting in a cloud outside your corporate firewall, etc. I have found a really decent SVN service thats free and offers quite a lot. Yes, Google Code is cool, but it doesn't seem to offer the same kind of feature plans. Which service is this? Assembla.

FREE ACCOUNT:

Unlimited team size
Public or Private (invited members only)
Subversion - the standard in SCM
Trac - development tickets and timeline
Integrated Ticket tool
Wiki
Milestones, Tasks, and Discussions
Alerts: Real-time email, batch email, or RSS
File attachments
Chat
"Stand-up" or "Scrum" team member reports
Image Annotation
Time tracking and reporting

You can get more if you pay. Check out the tour to see all the stuff. The UI overall is kinda lame compared to some other UIs I've seen for online SVN (its not very Web 2.0), but the UI is acceptable given all the features you get for free, and you get 500MB space for free... thats a generous size when your projects contain AS3 and perhaps some MXML, JavaScript, etc. Even if you check in your resulting binaries, that's still a decent amount of storage.

That being said, I think I still prefer the simplicity of purpose of Beanstalk, and the UI for it is superior. You won't get as much storage, and you can only create a single repository for free of 15MB. Thats pretty small. You can get 250MB for $15/mo., 1GB for $25/mo., and 3GB for $50/mo. However, if you're going to need that much space, I think that you would probably suck it up and opt to just install SVN on a box on your network or something.

AS3 UI idea: music targeting ONLY visualization

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By now we've all seen some pretty brilliant and creative uses of the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum method to show us great visualizations of audio. However one thing I haven't seen yet is using this same method for audio that one cannot hear.

What do I mean? Muting the audio but displaying the spectrum data. And that might open up opportunities to create specialized music whose main point of existing is to generate desired visual results.

If you're after soothing PSP type movements, you might end up creating audio that specifically targets this type of response. The music on its own might be completely unlistenable on its own, but create amazing visualizations for your project. Something running under you interactive UI... kind of like the PSP or even a take on the TiVo background (subtle animation).

Just a thought that might gain some kind of traction.

ADC Desktop is a randy AIR app

4 Comments

I don't visit the Adobe Developer Connection site very often because I generally forget to visit. Adobe has released a very cool AIR application that wraps up the experience and then adds a ton of ease of use when perusing components, RSS, etc. This is a slick application, I encourage you to download and use it. As I like to say, "This thing is randy, just simply and wonderfully randy."

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

What a f'in week...

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 2 Comments

My grandfather dies, then William F. Buckley Jr., and now Myron Cope (inventor of the Terrible Towel and Steelers announcer for 35 years). This week has been the pits.

FlashDevelop and FlexBuilder 3

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With FlashDevelop and FlexBuilder 3 I feel like I can do almost anything. Its a really wonderful feeling. Just thought I would throw that out there. Have a great day!

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

iPhone 1.1.4 is out, No Flash.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 2 Comments

The iPhone touch surface prevents for certain mouse actions, ones Flash eats up to provide a lot of its fun... rollOvers, rollOuts, mouse positions, etc. Since the iPhone doesn't bubble those down, what would be left? A mouse onRelease I guess. And video (which exists on the iPhone in the form of YouTube H.264 already). I agree that Flash on an iPhone would be tons of fun if it could work, but maybe the SDK will be fun enough to use that you'll author iPhone-specific applications using it. Just maybe. We can all agree that writing apps for the iPhone in Flash/Flex would leverage skills we already possess but I don't see how Flash could really succeed on the iPhone because of the Flash-required user-manipulation hurdles already present in the hardware.

The many faces of Adobe

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Adobe has a few public-facing sites bearing its moniker that are visually pretty different. Adobe.com, Abode Developer Connection, Adobe Open Source, and Adobe Labs. They share a grey background for the most part, however their structures are quite different. I understand how a site like the Dev Connection has a unique navigation & thus the structure voices this, but elsewhere I feel more visual unity would be most welcome. It would be a boatload of work certainly, but ultimately I feel would bring together the sites into a global presentation. If the current layouts don't allow for this, a unified design might be in order to get the job done. Apple did this a while back to outstanding effect. I don't know the size of the web team, I don't know what is on their plates, but I imagine someone is whipping pixels together to hopefully achieve this end.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Unverified AIR apps

Monday, February 25, 2008 0 Comments

Will the lack of purchasing a certificate hold back AIR application installations? I highly doubt it. Most people will click install without even noticing the unverified status of personally signed AIR applications. And this is a good thing unless some jokester decides to try and give AIR a little bad press. Central has come a LONG way baby, let the wave of fun and interesting applications flow in. These are exciting times. If AIR is kept in decent sync with full player releases, its only going to get more exciting.

AIR 1.0 Released

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After extensive private and public Alpha and Beta programs that ran for well over a year, Adobe has released Version 1.0 of its innovative Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time Monday February 25, 2008 and has ushered in a most exciting new era.

Adobe AIR lets developers use their existing web development
skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet
applications to the desktop.

You can download the latest version of Adobe AIR from the Adobe AIR Download Center on the Adobe Website at the following URL:

http://get.adobe.com/air/

In addition to the Adobe website, you can keep track of all the latest news and information about AIR at the O2Apps.com (formerly AIRApps.net) website at http://www.o2apps.com. We'll be adding great new content to the site imminently.

To receive the latest links to news and stories about AIR as they hit the Internet, follow the O2Apps Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/O2Apps

You are receiving this e-mail as a registered member of the O2Apps website and as someone who took the time to sign up for the O2Apps website, we wanted, out of courtesy, to make sure you knew about this historic event - the exciting release of Adobe AIR 1.0.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

This morning I lost a hero

Saturday, February 23, 2008 4 Comments

My grandfather (Dziadzia) passed this morning in a hospital in FLA. I haven't felt pain like this, even when I spent 2 weeks in the hospital after two major surgeries.

It may sound boastful, but this man was seriously in every sense of the word: a saint. I was learning Polish to surprise you when I saw you next. And now that will be when I am a pallbearer at your funeral.

This is going to take a long time to get over.

Dziadzia, namesake to my son, kiss Babcia for me.

Friday, February 22, 2008

AIR Garbage Collection

Friday, February 22, 2008 1 Comments

I was at Keith Peter's blog reading stuff and saw the localConnection thing to force gc in Flash. I then saw something interesting:

In AIR, although not in Flash, you can use
System.gc()
to trigger garbage collection. It should still be called twice in a row, however, if you want everything possible to be collected immediately.

Oliver Goldman | Adobe AIR Engineering

That's extremely useful information. It might be cool to see an actual method in AS3 that can force gc instead of using the localConnection hack

new LocalConnection().connect('foo');
new LocalConnection().connect('foo');

Very useful information to have. In AS3 and also AIR-specific cases. Nice work Grant Skinner, Keith Peters, and the AIR team.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Flash/Flex/AIR wiki (crucible)

Thursday, February 21, 2008 0 Comments

Hoping you didn't land here thinking of seeing source for an AS3 wiki system, but rather one you might enjoy participating in.

If you'd like to participate in a new wiki targeted at Flex, Flash & AIR designers/developers, point your browser here and check it out.

The paint is still quite wet & there isn't any real content there yet. The whole thing is only about 2 hours old. Who knew there was so much to learn in coding aspects of a supplied wiki? I do now.

However I'm hoping it gets flushed up with good content over time. It works like a regular wiki, with the addition to having a Forum with various modules associated with it.

Get your wiki-hats on. I'm hoping for a combo of layer51, a bit of flashcoders, a little senocular as3 forums, and whatever you want to bring to it. Its for the community, so I hope it works out.

Sometimes its best to know when to say when

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I have been developing a business site for someone and being a developer and a designer, I wanted to do something clever. So I decided to use some AJAX for one of the pages that has several sections... essentially like loading HTML pages into an IFrame on the page... taking 6 pages and turning it into one. I thought it was cool, the end user probably could not care less. "Hey, look, the content is changing but the URL is staying the same!" -- ya, only a geek would appreciate that most likely.

But I took it further because I have global navigation in a server-side include that has links to all those subpages too... so I mistakenly decided to use different anchor tags for the same URL, and read the

document.location.hash

value with javascript and load the appropriate content into the AJAX container. And this worked well (ignoring the bastardization of the anchor tag). However if you were already on that one URL and used navigation to visit again, there would be no body onLoad to fire, so I changed my javascript to look for a hash and also the value of a param sent in from the navigation, etc. Everything was working pretty well, but all of this was hanging on javascript.

I was trying to be clever and have some fun with things by forcing this technology on the site. The javascript itself felt like building a house atop of lot of toothpicks. It might work for a while, but the whole thing was architected in a fragile manner. If someone visited having turned off javascript, the site would be broken as well.

In the end, I ripped out all the javascript and simply turned the thing into 6 distinct pages. Its not as cool as it was before, but its incredibly stable now and doesn't require javascript magic to enable it. I wasted a lot of time getting that thing to work (mostly), but I am certainly glad that I knew that it was time to throw in the towel and go old-school on it.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

AS3 Color (TextFormat)

Wednesday, February 20, 2008 3 Comments

I am applying a color (white) to a field in a class. Simple enough.

white = new TextFormat();
white.color = 0xFFFFFF;

Now later on, I flip through the DisplayObject looking for that value. I never find it, but tracing shows me what value I should be looking for.

var nCount:Number = container.numChildren;
for ( var i:Number = 0; i < nCount; i++ )
{
    var curSprite = container.getChildAt( i );
    trace( i, curSprite.label_txt.getTextFormat().color );
    ...

So what gets traced? The value: 16777215. I am assuming that 2 extra digits in there are translations of the alpha value. However, it still seems a little strange... but I am no mathematician or color theorist. I'm sure its correct, and I know what to look for, but I don't know exactly why yet ;) Magic numbers to me at the moment.

ScribdPlatform's iPaper

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Billed as the best document viewing experience on the web, iPaper is a Flash application that displays PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and text documents. It has a Google ad system you can use to embed ads and generate some cash (good I'd say if you publish a good white paper, etc.)

You cannot download, upload, or email the presented file(s) providing a measure of security. You can read more about it at the site. Seems interesting to me, of course, all tools have their own unique measure of usefulness to different people. Its a little like FlashPaper 2.0.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Evgeni Malkin takes over NHL Points Lead

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 0 Comments

With a pair of assists in Tuesday night’s 3-2 comeback win over Florida, Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin took over the NHL scoring lead with 79 points (34+49). He passed countryman Alexander Ovechkin, who has 78 (48+30).

“It's a great feeling to be leading the NHL in scoring," Malkin said through translator George Birman. "There are still lots of games left and Ovechkin is a good player. He will try to prove he’s the best in the NHL. We’ll see what will happen."

Malkin continues his torrid play. He saw his five-game goal streak snapped, but extended his points streak to nine games (6+14). He has 38 points (19+19) in his past 20 games.

"I never had a stretch like that over here in the NHL or back when I played in Russia," Malkin said. “I just want to thank all my teammates who are giving me such great passes."

Apple TV Podcasts

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Greetings from the iTunes Podcasting Team:

The Apple TV "Take Two" software upgrade has been released, making it easier than ever for people to enjoy your podcasts wherever there is a TV. A whole new audience will understand the benefits of podcasts as soon as they experience them this way.

Recommendations to help you create the best possible experience for users:

1. Apple TV viewers are immediately aware of video quality. If you encode your video podcast at 320x240, we strongly encourage you to increase the resolution to 640x480 or 640x360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). When encoded well, video podcasts at this resolution look great on Apple TV and still play on iPhone and video-compatible iPods. To ensure compatibility, we recommend that you encode using QuickTime's "Movie to iPod" preset or Compressor's "Apple > Apple Devices > H.264 for iPod video and iPhone 640x480" preset.

2. When you perform the final encode on your video, enable fast starting. Most recent versions of QuickTime enable this setting automatically. But it's easy to undo the setting by making changes to the file after the encode. If you do make a change after the encode, be sure to "Save As" again.

3. Apple TV displays a large version of the podcast art (the file referenced in the tag). We recommend that you use a 600x600 square JPG or PNG file.

4. Several new introductory video tutorials have been developed for iTunes, including one for podcasts. If your web site offers how-to information for new podcast users, please consider linking to it.

For those hosting podcasts on their own servers, consider the following recommendations:

5. To reduce wait times, iTunes and Apple TV use byte-range requests in some circumstances. For example, Apple TV 2.0 employs this functionality when the user accesses the podcast directly over the Internet. We recommend hosting episode files on HTTP/1.1 servers that correctly support the HTTP byte-range request specification.

6. Please ensure that your HTTP servers return the correct MIME types in the Content-Type header. Failing to do so can create errors. A list of MIME types can be found in the iTunes podcast technical spec.

AS3 saddle today

2 Comments

After a fine President's day, back to an AS3 project at work. I am actually pretty excited about it, although its really not ultimately that exciting. Working in AS3 is exciting though, a bit of a challenge, and forces me to think a little differently at times which shakes things up. AS3 has been around for a long time now, I know. But I am a little on the AS3-n00b side of life. Can't wait to fire up FlashDevelop later this AM.

Update:
Well, I was trying out Tweener (AS3) and found it decent, but lacking some features. I tried out TweenLite and TweenFilterLite and wow, I'm sold.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

I am lucky I didn't buy that 360 HD DVD kit!

Sunday, February 17, 2008 3 Comments

Toshiba has officially pulled the plug on HD DVD, essentially killing the format all-together. Regular DVDs are going anywhere anytime soon, but I was close to getting a 360 HD DVD kit just because I already had the 360 (I didn't go with the PS3).

I am so lucky that I didn't buy that kit, because I would just have a lump of ugly hardware to recycle now. I have experience with Blu-Ray... back then it took about a minute to boot the box (with the obligatory hourglass icon), maybe those times have come down with better custom Linux kernels. I imagine M$ will come out with a Blu-Ray player sometime soon after it can convince itself to stop supporting HD DVD. Then I might get one that way.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Patriots... it just doesn't end

Saturday, February 16, 2008 0 Comments

Just read where the Patriots are being sued for $100 million dollars because of their alleged taping of practices before the 2002 Superbowl against the Rams. Willie Gary and others have filed. Since the Patriots have already been caught cheating & paid a fine, Belichick admitted he's been doing it since he started with the team and didn't know it was wrong, seems like there might be a lot more layers to this stinky onion. Belichick sucked in Cleveland, he comes to N.E. and all of the sudden he's a genius? Maybe there is something to all this. Baseball is having its guts examined on the steroids front, looks like the Patriots are having their's on the cheating front.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Dancing with AS3

Friday, February 15, 2008 1 Comments

I finally got a chance to create an application using AS3. I have dabbled in it in the past with my own projects, but this one is time-sensitive, needs to impress, and delves into areas I haven't played around with in detail yet.

Yes, AS3 is very different than AS2. One of the major hurdles for those comfortable with AS2 is going to be all of the various class imports. Where before you could simply call on some methods of objects, etc. now you need to import classes before using them. Knowing which you might need is the first thing you should start investigating if you're new to AS3. For real.

AS2 and AS3 aren't totally different on the face of it, but knowing how they are different on the face and how to translate what you did with confidence in AS2 to AS3 is going to save you tons of time. AS3 is all about events (yay!), so learn the ins and outs of the event model. Learn the packages. Really well. It will save you a lot of searching later on when you can't quite figure how to tackle something.

In a few hours something I did regularly in AS2 was converted to AS3 and while I had to do some googling to find out which exact packages I needed, when the day was done I felt like I had just coded in a pretty mature language. My code looked pretty clean & I started the whole MVC thing in more earnest even though I didn't really need to do it. I just felt more organized so it was a natural progression.

There are many things I love about the DisplayObject model, and a few things that equate into more work. Its surely less hacky... which can sometimes be a bad thing when you want to speedily create something. But ultimately its so much better. And if its simply speed one wants (in coding, not execution), AS2 is still an option since the new player contains virtual machines for AS1/2 and also AS3.

So now playtime is over and my FlashDevelop has never felt so good. I could go with FlexBuilder too, but then I'd get a little too sucked in and want to deploy a Flex application. Sticking with IDE compiling for the time being on my application. If it works out well, I'll make a few different Views for it and slap it all into Subversion. This is a nice way to force myself into learning AS3 to a better degree than playing with whatever technique I'd fancy (ie. E4X), I have put myself under the gun, I need to deliver.

Pressure and the desire to learn will teach myself AS3 at an accelerated rate. And with Flex/Air goodness, AS3 is the name of the game. Period. I hope I don't touch AS2 again.

720p HD + Flash Video Encoder = Painful

3 Comments

I am taking some 720p content and ripping it to FLV (ya, I know, Flash can do HD, etc. but I need stuff to play decently on old crappy PCs), and the situation is awfully brutal. 1 hour 20 minutes to rip down a 5 min piece. Time for the weekend. I hope the settings were okay come Tuesday, or I'll have another rip to create. I should queue up a few then maybe and just take the best result. Ya. OOOOPS, it is running already, can't add another via drag & drop... I can through dialog though. There we go.

Hilarious T-shirt... It's Britney Bitch

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If you are a Maiden fan, you'll notice where this idea came from, the cover of the album "Piece of Mind"... and the font drives that home too. Now, I feel sorry for Britney and all the shit her family is going through at the moment, but this is a pretty funny t-shirt documenting the demise of a previously untouchable pop-queen. While the tastefulness of the thing can be argued, its still pretty humorous. $20 slaps it on your back.

8TB inside your MacPro?

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It seems crazy to think you can slap 8TB total inside a MacPro, not to mention how you might be able to add external to this as well, but MaxUpgrades brings you the ability to slap 8TB of storage in your MacPro. Thats a lot of ~~porn~~ digital media assets to be able to store.

Super-delegates or super-lame?

3 Comments

Okay... so super delegates are getting cash from Hillary and Obama. Which is perfectly legal I guess. Each of them represents up to thousands of voters on average. Which basically thumbs the nose at those who have cast their votes in good faith. I don't know why super delegates were created in the first place, and I don't see how they are a good idea right now. If they can switch after promising to vote one way, I mean WTF. So they nullify other people's votes for whatever reason. How is that a good idea? They supposedly shape the face of the party, but isn't that up to the common man? If they went along with the actual numbers of people who voted more for one candidate over another, then what would the point of their existence be at that point? Seems to be constructed to go against the will of the people and to merely be a tool of power. People matter, not crusty party wonks acting as a collective among themselves only. Rant over. Someone needs to explain how these super delegates are a good idea, because I just don't see it. I'm glad only the Democrats have these things.

I haven't touched code for a while now

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I am kinda lucky right now as I am recovering from the effects of carpal tunnel in my right wrist & that I haven't had to code anything since then. I have been sketching in my moleskin and working in Illustrator and Photoshop (tried Fireworks and its powerful, I'm just more used to PShop). I've been designing GUI elements for a few projects -- each with its own perils and pitfalls and technical constraints. Its been a lot of fun to be able to switch gears and put usability up front in terms of visual presentation instead of doing both (that & also the code behind it to power the system). Right now I am turning assets over to software for them to run through their applications and to code to and its been lots of fun. I look forward to getting back into coding really soon, but sometimes you can burn out on the stuff and need respites (besides carpal considerations) to keep things fresh.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

The Clone Wars

Thursday, February 14, 2008 1 Comments

This looks simply pathetic.

Nothing like this has ever been produced for television, said Stuart Snyder, President/COO Turner Animation,Young Adults & Kids Media.

You got that right. And perhaps never again either. This looks like simple cashing in to me. Especially with the movie thing happening, animated for television alone would have rubbed me well, but the movie thing seems lame. And I am a fan of the movie series. I'll be passing any and all of this up. Reverse pwnage.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Things I'm digging right now

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 0 Comments

Office 2008. I have no need whatsoever for Office on my Mac, however I like the GUI changes made by the Mac team at Microsoft. Lots of clever things. I know I'll need Entourage on my new Mac at work, and the MyDay thing is really clever and doesn't pollute Exposé or Spaces. Nice.
Webkit. Nightly builds rock nicely. Speed and lots of nice additions.
Adagio for Strings. Ya I know, it will get old soon, but for now its a nice change from all the metal I've been grooving to at work.
Call of Duty 4. Halo 3 multiplayer was getting old, and Peppi Roni was constantly crushing us RhymesWithNose people every time. He still kicks it hard in CoD4, but we have more of a chance against him now. Tonight is our community kill time. Hope my router acts nicely and doesn't give me weird errors like it did last night. Live is sweet, except when it wants to burp errors at me for whatever reason.
iTunes still rocks. Its been a long time with few changes (except sweet content) and now I am learning a new language on the cheap (ie. free). Love that. Apple TV looks sweet enough to consume one of my HDMI slots on my Samsung LCD.
That TimeMachine icon in the menu bar... I dig it. Also, I just had a backup where old stuff is getting deleted now. Cool. Time to get a Time Capsule (when they come out). I haven't had to use Time Machine yet, but its good to know its there when I need it. Thats the point, right?
Firefox 3b3 and netvibes on the PC works better than FF3b2. A lot better. Makes me like netvibes even more.
Internet radio... the ability to listen to my Pittsburgh Penguins home radio broadcast every game rocks. Shows some of the power of the internet and how it shrinks the world. I wish I could say the same for Last.fm... but I can't yet.
Networked audio streams around the house. Control is sweet and if I'm in the shower, I can select something from my whole collection to stream in there. Perhaps some vintage Tull this evening. Before the boy goes to bed.
MXML. Its slick, its quick, and makes all kinds of nice things happen. Including AIR.
A package I got from a certain someone... opened my eyes to lots of exciting new things the world will be privy to sometime in the future. I can't wait. Its all quite excellent.

Firefox 3b3 for OS X

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I can't tell you how psyched I am that Firefox on OS X now actually looks like its on OS X. The controls have the look of OS X, overall the top looks like Safari (when not using custom headers), and it does seem snappier. I have found some UI glitches, but I hope those disappear soon™.

Adagio for Strings

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I have several versions of Adagio for Strings, and I honestly think its one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.

per wikipedia: Barber's "Adagio for Strings" originated as the second movement in his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11, composed in 1936. In the original it follows a violently contrasting first movement, and is succeeded by a brief reprise of this music.

In January of 1938 Barber sent the piece to Arturo Toscanini. The conductor returned the score without comment, and Barber was annoyed and avoided the conductor. Subsequently Toscanini sent word through a friend that he was planning to perform the piece and had returned it simply because he had already memorized it.[1] It was reported that Toscanini did not look at the music again until the day before the premiere. [2] The work was given its first performance in a radio broadcast by Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra on November 5, 1938 in New York.

The composer also arranged the piece in 1967 for eight-part choir, as a setting of the Agnus Dei ("Lamb of Go

Learn a language for free

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iTunes has a One Minute series of podcasts where you learn phrases and sayings in whatever language you'd like. Me, I'm going to learn some Polska so I can order properly at Cafe Polonia here in Boston. Reading and writing I will forget about until I get some basics down. I didn't even think of looking to iTunes for this kind of stuff, but there is plenty there.

Amazon SimpleDB

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This looks super cool... Amazon is preparing an online database that you can use with ease. SimpleDB is a database built on Erlang that is accessed via REST and SOAP calls.

CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
GET, PUT or DELETE items in your domain, along with the attribute-value pairs that you associate with each item. Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data as it is added to your domain so that it can be quickly retrieved; there is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. Each item can have up to 256 attribute values. Each attribute value can range from 1 to 1,024 bytes.
QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators: =, !=, <, > <=, >=, STARTS-WITH, AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION. Query execution time is currently limited to 5 seconds. Amazon SimpleDB is designed for real-time applications and is optimized for those use cases.
Pay only for the resources that you consume.

Read up on this puppy... this looks like it could be really handy!!!

Whenever I get mad...

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There is something so calming and relaxing and set to a specific order that calms me down, keeps me from throwing good code away, forces me to tear out and eliminate code and design clutter, and something that quickly grounds me. And that is Apple's website.

I don't know what the voodoo is, maybe is subtle CSS techniques paired with great Quicktime integration and layouts that are elegant and offer up its data without working hard. But its a zen spot for me without question.

I go to Adobe's site, a destination for creative professionals, and it angers me. Right now on the PC in Firefox most of the homepage is rendered in faulty CSS black. I assume that means a background image is missing. The fact that its smooshed to the left leaving a HUGE empty gap on my widescreen monitor is frustrating. Even if Apple's site doesn't use much more width than Adobe's site, it feels a lot better centered on my monitor, keeping my eyes in a more central scanning location.

So if I get mad, I need to steer clear of Adobe's website and pop over to Apple's. Ahh... the new Aperture section is indeed calming. And makes me want to organize my piles of digital assets. And blog nonsense for a bit longer. Back to Photoshop comping up some UI. Think clean.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Wow Safari is gonna be fast

Saturday, February 9, 2008 1 Comments

I am running Webkit r30090 and its wicked fast. Many sites are loading and rendering nearly instantly for me. This is going to save a boatload of time throughout a day. When OS X is updated, I imagine that Webkit will be updated for Safari and all will get the speed benefits... even on older hardware. A site that has always rendered a little slowly for me in Firefox and Safari has been ESPN's home page. With Webkit, it renders in under 1 second, everything, including the separate bits of Flash interactivity.

After having used Webkit for a while, I can't go back to my stock Safari... and while I love how Firefox extensions work, etc. I prefer the rendering Safari offers. Now with Webkit speed, its going to be hard to go back to Firefox unless there is a serious reason.

I'm not even using a very current version of Webkit here either. If Safari is going to be fast, then Adobe's AIR is going to rock even harder too.

Update:

Well, GMail loads completely under 1 second, and blogger loads and publishes in under 1 second as well. A HUGE increase in speed.

Update 2:
Well, RSS renders much better in my opinion in the new Webkit builds. I wish that RSS items rendered in a menu like in Firefox instead of blindly hitting an aggregate chunk of RSS and then see whats in it, but I generally think things are moving in a good direction.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Mental Masturbation Season

Thursday, February 7, 2008 0 Comments

I was out sick for a flu days, succumbing to a particularly nasty strain of "the cold" and in being holed up was able to surf at my leisure for extended periods of time. Every political season brings with it opinions, theories, and fanaticism. Never before have I seen so much blatant mental masturbation in my life. If one were to take a single post on its own merit, I would be able to get past a lot of the holier-than-thou attitude. But when you read through various articles from the same blog that contradict one another, simply report some theory as their own a day or two after having read about the same the day before, and writing as if they were the foremost authority (when some of the basic facts of their articles simply aren't true), then you've got a mean case of mental masturbation going on. I just hope easily-influenced people (of any party affiliation) don't get caught up in those political circle jerk sessions and become swayed on misinformation.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Photoshop CS3 Bug

Wednesday, February 6, 2008 0 Comments

Taking a 24bit PNG and SaveAs a WBMP (8-bit) with 5-6-5 results in a BMP that shifts a bunch of pixels to the left (and wraps that part over onto the end of the right side. Is this indeed a bug? I would say yes, but I don't know everything about the internals of different image formats, etc.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

The very earth has rumbled and is shaken

Saturday, February 2, 2008 0 Comments

A day past the earth shuddered, the epicenter being Mumbai, India. An introduction by the late Winston Churchill lead the charge. Somewhere Back In Time will play to over 1.5 million people. And I shall be there as close as I can get.

Friday, February 1, 2008

I miss you

Friday, February 1, 2008 0 Comments

Babcia