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Sunday, November 30, 2008

Pittsburgh vs. New England

Sunday, November 30, 2008    2 Comments

What a game!

In fantasy-land (CBS Sportsline) I have the Steeler's defense and my week's opponent this week had New England's defense. This is how that broke down:

Steelers DST: 10 PointsAgainst, 267 YDS Allowed, 2 Int, 3 DFR, 5 SACK: 23 fantasy points.

New England: 33 PointsAgainst, 333 YDS Allowed, Int, SACK: 3 fantasy points.

Between McNabb and the Steelers defense alone I was able to win my week. Awesome, and the game started off a little poorly with that interception. But New England didn't do squat after those points after the INT.

The Steeler defense gave up some long runs, then there was that missed FG by NE and the wheels fell off for NE. The Steeler defense was amazing. And the Steeler offense got things going compared to last week.

Go Stillers!

We have some tough games coming up. However, this team is being battle tested and can only benefit from it.
 

Friday, November 28, 2008

Mac Pro Nightmare: kernel panics on startup.

Friday, November 28, 2008    3 Comments

A note: this is ongoing. 

I noticed a few days ago that I didn't have an option for a translucent menu bar anymore in Leopard. Hmm. I thought maybe I did some command-line thing in the past to remove it, so I searched online and found an application that said it restored it.

I ran it and it erred at the end of the process, stating some error about not having root access or something. I launched System Preferences - and it wouldn't open. Hmm. Not good. I then read in a forum thread before restarting the system that the application hosed someone else's Mac. 

Oh crap.

I restarted. At the grey screen, a slow grey shade came down and kernel panic. Restart, again. Every boot results in a kernel panic. I didn't change hardware or anything - this app did something terrible to my Mac.

I tried to boot from the Leopard DVD... nope... a panic before it got to do it.

I put the Mac Pro into target disk mode & used a Firewire cable to have my wife's Macbook see it as a drive. It saw the Leopard DVD too... so I installed Leopard on the Mac Pro from it's own superdrive to it's hard drive. It took forever... because the disk was in the Mac Pro itself and not in the Macbook. Afterwards Leopard on the Mac Pro showed on my wife's laptop... so I was running OS X on the Mac Pro on the laptop and it booted and I could see the desktop and everything. Strange. 

Rebooted, same damn thing. I tried safe boot mode and fsck... said it repaired stuff... rebooted, same thing.

I just ran Disk Utility on the drive in TDM, and it gave me this:

Verify and Repair volume “Macintosh HD”

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Checking Extents Overflow file.

Checking Catalog file.

Incorrect block count for file pcscd.pub

(It should be 16 instead of 17)

Checking multi-linked files.

Checking Catalog hierarchy.

Checking Extended Attributes file.

Checking volume bitmap.

Checking volume information.

Repairing volume.

Rechecking volume.

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Checking Extents Overflow file.

Checking Catalog file.

Checking multi-linked files.

Checking Catalog hierarchy.

Checking Extended Attributes file.

Checking volume bitmap.

Checking volume information.

The volume Macintosh HD was repaired successfully.


We'll see what happens. I think I'll zap PRAM right now. Cross your fingers.

Three chimes. Restarting... seeing dusting of pixels on the grey screen... got to blue screen after grey - kernel panic. CRAP.

Gonna try to reinstall OS X on the Mac Pro in TDB from the Macbook again. This could be hardware maybe?


 

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thursday, November 27, 2008    1 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving
...especially to all the military families out there. We thank you.

Have a wonderful day full of happiness, cheer, thankfulness, delicious food, donations, family, football, and online game play late at night.

There are like 15 articles and tutorials I am dying to read today, but it's not a day for that - so that will have to wait. See you tomorrow drawTriangles and Dictionary.
 

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Up for some Thanksgiving weekend Live!?

Wednesday, November 26, 2008    0 Comments

Thanksgiving is nearly here, and I know that come late evening, I'll be firing up the Xbox for some Live! action: NHL '09 and Gears of War 2. Maybe a little Halo 3 in there just because matchmaking there seems pretty quick. '09 is even quicker - like very nearly instant.

Anway, my tag is "edolecki" - and it's not ed•dolecki -- as I have heard it called. But I can see how that mistake could be made.

If you're kicking around sometime, I'll probably be around. We could do some horde or just some slap shots.

Oh, and yes that's my avatar over there to the left. I wish there was an option of brown with a some grey in it for the hair color, but especially for the goatee.
 

Electronic Arts picks FLV for it's video format (NHL'09)

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I have been playing a lot of EA's NHL'09 - it's a pretty great game. Yes, I suck at playing defense but it's not as much fun as shooting on a goalie, is it? Anyway, the Instant Replay feature of the game is pretty sweet - you can set markers and playback speed, etc.

When you're done, you can save the clip and you can also upload it to your account on easportsworld.com - and there is the option to download it... in all of it's FLV glory. To be honest I would have preferred H264, but FLV works well enough for us.

Nice choice EA.


 

Friday, November 21, 2008

The impact of AIR 1.5 already...

Friday, November 21, 2008    0 Comments


I just blogged about AIR 1.5 and warping windows. I stumbled upon the Adobe AIR Development Center for Ajax and HTML (link)  and noticed that many examples there have been updated to use the updated AIR runtime.

The screenshot above shows the BlackBookSafe AIR application - which has integrated a bunch of PixelBender effects. When you select a person in the list, the main interface curls backwards in space and the user's detail card pops out of it.

This is a pretty dynamic and amazing effect -- brought to us by the inclusion of PB support in the new AIR runtime. It's kind of what I had posted about earlier. 

Well done, I love it. It's very creative and not over the top.
 

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Warping Application Windows

Thursday, November 20, 2008    0 Comments

Something I hadn't thought of until just now. We can author AIR applications that have custom chrome. And we can use PixelBender filters within AIR 1.5 now. Besides used on images and for audio computation (and more), they can also be used on the application itself. 

I know this breaks the mold of traditional operating system applications, but you could warp in dialog windows, notifications, the application itself could do all kinds of visual fluctuations to a very cool effect. I haven't seen anyone actually do this yet, but I'd hope someone gives it a try.

I am inclined to try it myself. It could be a lot of fun, used for state transitions, notifications, dialogs, an application launch visual (imagine a burst animation in the center of your monitor and the application itself warps into view like a Klingon Bird of Prey coming out of it's cloaked status). That sure would be different.
 

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

1180: Call to a possibly undefined method stop

Wednesday, November 19, 2008    1 Comments

Since I've been using AS3, I don't remember the last time I actually extended MovieClip. It just never needs to happen. I started getting a strange error - methods being rejected in a DisplayObject from a while back. A timeline script on a symbol set to export... as a Sprite. The original intent.

The symbol itself was edited and some frames of different artwork added to it. And a stop() on frame 1. Since Sprites don't have timelines, a stop() call on frame 1, the compiler barfed. However it didn't actually say what was going on.

It would be nice to have: symbols set subclassing Sprite not having code or frames added to the symbols. It would also be nice if the error message stated why the method was undefined. 

Not a huge deal, but it did have me scratching my head and checking the properties in the library for the asset. Took me a little while to figure out what was going on. Thanks compiler for catching that anyway, next time around maybe a little more verbose? (CS5?)
 

The CS4 Master Collection has landed.

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I am extremely excited right now. 26.3GB of available hard disk space required for installation. Now that's quite the meat pie right there. 

I am very happy that the packaging has been reduced in size over the years, and this year's MC is no different. It comes in a metallic silver ink flood-coated box thats the size of a large paperback novel (let's say Shogun only a big taller and wider). 


This disclaimer is on the outside of the box:
As part of Adobe's commitment to environmental sustainability, the outside packaging was specifically designed to minimize environmental impact. It combines recycled board stock and a die-cut production method with folding inserts to minimize glue use. To minimize use of materials, the packaging is smaller in size and manuals are no longer included but are available online.
Way to go Adobe. Well done. Now, this little box being worth the price of an older-used car isn't lost on me. 
 

Xbox 360 update

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The update went very smoothly and perhaps as a testament to my FiOS connection, was pretty quick. I can't compare it to anything else, but the initial download took about 10 seconds, the update after reboot of the box only took about one minute. Not bad considering probably a ton of people were updating the same time that I was. 

You start off to create an avatar to use -- that took me about five minutes and wasn't too difficult. My goatee is bigger than what's available, but I had lots of choices for everything else.

I didn't think I'd like the new navigation system, but things are surely NOT cramped anymore. You don't get lost in columns of items. Getting around is very easy now. A lot more information is displayed at all times.

When zipping through friends avatars, etc. the only hangup I get is exiting that section. The box hangs for about eight seconds, and then I can navigate up/down properly again. Everything else has been silky smooth. As updates go, this was well thought out and worked great.

Well done Xbox team.
 

Adobe Labs is raving

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Get your glow sticks and run down to Avalon (does that place even still exist?) 

Adobe has thrown open the doors to it's lab's technological E for the masses to get down on and freak on. 

A lot of new technologies have been announced and released in various forms. It would take quite a long time to read through them all and become properly informed. Below is a cavalcade of links for you to peruse and feast on.
That's a decent list for now and I am sure there will be some more to follow. After all, raves are supposed to go and go and go, right? Personally I wouldn't know, but it's a little geek to talk about it all.
 

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Cocomo Yahoo! Maps app posted up

Tuesday, November 18, 2008    1 Comments

image not found

I can't be sure what's going on, but I have been unable to actually get my webcam to work properly through Cocomo so far. Has anyone else gotten it to display? It might just be this webcam I am currently using on this Mac at the moment, I can't be sure. I need to read up a little.

Anyway. I got the example Yahoo! Maps application up and running pretty quickly and you can check it out right here.

Update:
I am not sure why, but it suddenly just stopped working. Perhaps Acrobat.com is having issues or getting an upgrade or something back there.
 

My 1st Cocomo Application

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It's just an example application, but it's up and running and it really only took about 1 minute in total to get compiled and online -- including set up of the room itself through the development panel. So it's essentially my Hello World application, so to speak.

It has a whiteboard, A/V chat, text chat & a fileshare. I'm sure you've seen these already.

Adobe did a great job so far in getting this SDK rolled out. It's very easy to use.


Come on by and drop a note, a sketch, or whatever.

Update:
Add the AS3 Growl classes, and Cocomo gets even cooler in my book.
 

Monday, November 17, 2008

Under the MAX radar: Versions out of beta.

Monday, November 17, 2008    0 Comments

In light of all of the things pouring collectively out of MAX, Versions (SVN client for OS X) is out of beta and can be purchased for around $44.00.

Link to Versions. 

It's put out by Pico and Sofa. I do have a beanstalkapp subversion repository that I keep some code in (nothing too major since I was just trying the service out). 

It's not as cool as having SVN integrated into your OS (TortoiseSVN for the PC and SmartSVN for OS X) -- but it is a very capable and beautiful application. You should give this one a go if you're into SVN at all on the Mac platform.

I think it's perfectly good for the casual SVN-user, but if you're hardcore, I'd opt for SmartSVN or command-line. 
 

Northcode saved my buttocks today

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AS3 fscommand exec failing for me, found out it's a known issue, and used the proxy from Northcode to get things rolling again. Thank you.

Link

Snippet:
For years Flash has allowed any valid Windows executable to be launched via fscommand EXEC from a Flash projector. That has come to an end with Flash CS3. Flash 9 projectors fail to launch BAT files on Windows 2000, XP and Vista but it still works on Windows 98 and ME! This is major inconvenience but it's not the end of the world. First I'll show you why it's broken, then I'll show you how you can still launch BAT files from your Flash projectors, with a little help...
 

Flash Player 10 for ARM devices in the future!

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Adobe Flash 10 in combination with hardware acceleration opens for some real Web browsing on mobile devices - in late 2009.

Adobe and ARM today announced a technology collaboration to optimize and enable Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR for ARM powered devices, ranging from smartphones to set-top boxes, mobile internet devices, televisions, automotive platforms, personal media players and other mobile computing devices.

The joint technology optimization is targeted for the ARM11 and Cortex A-series of processors, using ARMv6 and ARMv7 architecture, respectively. The partnership stems from the Open Screen Project, a broad Adobe sponsored initiative set to address the challenges of Web browsing on a broad range of screens.
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Chipset makers such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Broadcom and NVIDIA all use the ARM11 and Cortex A-series of processors, meaning that Adobe Flash 10 will practically be optimized for all future smartphones.

Adobe Flash 10 in combination with hardware graphics and media acceleration on smartphones sounds compelling. The recently released Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 for instance, already come with hardware acceleration, but of course, you'll have to wait until the second half of 2009 to get some Adobe Flash 10 action out of it.
 

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Two hours debugging...

Thursday, November 13, 2008    0 Comments

I ran into a bug today that cost me two hours of debugging. I was calling a method multiple times, and in certain circumstances some of the code in the method failed to work. 

pseudo-code:

private function foo( indx:uint ):void
{
   doSomething( indx );
   // rest of code
}

Now, when I was accessing something on the DisplayList in the doSomething method & it failed, the code under the method call in the foo method just didn't fire. No compiler error, no runtime error box, and I'm running the app as a projector - so I'm using mainly Arthropod to debug.

I know I could have done plenty of things to track this down a lot sooner, but I was surprised that the code after the method call with the bad bits just wouldn't get called at all, but the app would run fine regardless. Only in edge cases was the indx out of range for the DisplayList. And I've fixed that since (good thing too). Just never ran into a bug that behaved like this one before.
 

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

OT: My son dancing to Zep

Wednesday, November 12, 2008    0 Comments

OT. If you're not fond of OT posts, please don't follow the link.

I've known for nearly three years now that my son Ryan is one of the coolest kids around. He's very polite, he's very gentle and loving with his baby sister, really likes his sleep, etc. The kid is just awesome.

He's been into dancing after dinner to that Rascal Flat's song "Life is a Highway" on the AppleTV (he loves the movie Cars, and that's where he picked it up).

Tonight he upped his game. It was bath time, and I had the "Portable" going. I put on Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy" and the kid went nuts. For the whole song. Dancing and smiling and falling down. He was cracking himself up and having a wonderful time. He wanted to hear it again.

I have always said that hundreds of years from now, someone or something will still be enjoying Led Zeppelin. It's just something you have to come to grips with and understand as truth. Zeppelin shall transcend time itself.

Anyway, having my son enjoy Zeppelin without any prodding is really quite the cool thing. Oh, and I think he's a Penguins fan too (at least he seems to like hockey anyway).
 

Google brings out video chatting. Thanks Flash!

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Yes, thanks to Adobe Flash technology, you're now able to video chat from within GMail.

Check it out, install the plugin and get going.
 

Friday, November 7, 2008

Do you live in Massachusetts? RMV changes you should know about

Friday, November 7, 2008    0 Comments

Effective immediately the Registry of Motor Vehicles will no longer be mailing out License renewal applications or reminders to renew your driver's license (http://www.mass.gov/rmv/ under 'Alert').

It is now the drivers responsibility to know when their license is expiring and renew it on there own. This may be a surprise, there has been no public information sent out about these changes. This idea could change in the future but as of right now it's a huge cost savings and they (MA) plan to run with it.

Mailings Eliminated

The RMV will no longer mail out the following materials to customers:
  • License renewal notices 
  • Mass ID renewal notices
License reinstatement letters:
  • Letter sent to a licensed customer when his/her license is reinstated, provided that the license is still active
  • Letter sent to an unlicensed customer when his/her right to operate is reinstated 
Registration reinstatement letters:
  • Letter sent to a person or corporation whose suspended registration has been reinstated
  • Letter sent to a person or corporation whose revoked registration has been reinstated 
  • Vehicle Inspection reminder letters for vehicles that are overdue for inspection 
  • Inspector license renewal notices 
  • 7D license renewal notices 
  • Driver's Education Certificates 
  • Junior Operator Brochures for parents (still available in branches) 
  • Change of address labels (customers can create their own)
 

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Balmer: Biden being Biden? Manny being Manny?

Thursday, November 6, 2008    0 Comments

Link to Balmer inserting foot.

He bashed the iPhone, sounding completely ridiculous when doing so. And now Balmer has again inserted his foot into his mouth by stating that Android won't make Google any money and that they are starting "way behind."

I'm sorry, how much has the XBox cost Microsoft? How much does Google make from online advertising again? Imagine an OS on a mobile that wasn't Windows Mobile... the horror!
 

Nigel Pegg

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The man of Macromedia Flash Components and Breeze stuff fame is blogged (probably has been) - but I just found him again through a comment he left about the NHL Center Ice thing.

Here is the link to his blog "Collaborative Methods"

Glad to see you again virtually Nigel, haven't seen you in person for a long time™.
 

NHL Center Ice - let the brandy flow begin

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I just pulled the trigger on the NHL Center Ice package with Verizon's FiOS. I could not be happier. My wife is probably worried about being a hockey-fan's wife even more now though. 

You see, I am a displaced Pittsburgh fan: Steelers, Penguins and yes, even the Pirates. I live in Boston, so I don't get to see my teams very often. When they are in town, I get a chance, but they are almost never on the tube.

Up to 40 out-of-market games a week and select games from the first two rounds of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Every game broadcast in HD will of course be served up in HD to package holders. 

All for $169. When you break it down, that's a darn good deal. 
  • That's the price of going to a game for two with decent seats and maybe a beer.
  • No more sitting next to the laptop listening to a live internet radio broadcast on NHL.com's game center.
  • No more hoping for a free night on NHL.com's game center.
  • It was added to our system in under fifteen minutes.
  • No need to do the sports bar thing. It's nice to use your own bathroom & not have to pay a 300% markup on suds.
  • I can DVR cherry pick whatever games I want. (Update: Right now I cannot set a game to record -- perhaps you aren't allowed? That's lame if true. Maybe it's still being set up).
I was just told that in September, Verizon is adding The NHL Network - which will bring 75 games in HD... and this is just getting added to the lineup (ie. free).

I hope my boys can do well in the playoffs again, and have Mike Lange say again, "Lord Stanley, Lord Stanley, get me the brandy."
 

Saturday, November 1, 2008

MVC: Controller classname of Koharski

Saturday, November 1, 2008    2 Comments

If you have been a fan of the NHL for any amount of time, I think that you should understand the reference to Koharski.

Here is a hint: a referee.

I am going to code this up on Monday morning.