Sunday, December 28, 2008
Steeler Eat 'n Park Cookies are here
Sunday, December 28, 2008 
1 Comments
off topic: It's that time now, the playoffs are here.
You can order your special black and gold Eat 'n Park cookies and have them delivered right to your door.
Eat 'n Park started sometime in the late 1940s as a carhop restaurant and has been a Pittsburgh staple ever since. It's quite 'burgh.
Go Steelers. Or as some say, Go Stillers!
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Mac Minis are quiet!
Thursday, December 25, 2008
3 Comments
While waiting to see what to do about the Mac Pro repairs, I have a new Mac Mini sitting beside me. One thing that is incredibly obvious is the lack of fan noise. None. Pure silence.
It's actually a little creepy & disconcerting to be honest. I don't know if I'd be able to work as well without some of the white noise brought on by mechanical cooling processes or not. It's almost as if I am just waiting to hear something kick in. These Mac Minis are pretty amazing, I will admit.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
5 Comments
We've seen some amazing stuff these past twelve months, and here is hoping for some more wonderful updates to the Flash platform and RIA in general.
I have a new site template I have completely coded by hand, and I am working on migrating content and features, while adding a lot of new capabilities. This will go up sometime in the new year, when I've gotten around to proper completion. Making it live and continue to work on it is something that I really don't want to do. And yes, I'd like to finally flush out the resources section properly. Anyway, back to Christmas...
My son has been asking about Santa Claus for a while now, and when I asked him this morning when Santa was coming, he said, "He's coming in two weeks!"
When I told him that Santa is coming tonight, he turned to me, his eyes grew big, and he exclaimed, "Santa is coming tonight?!" and then he began jumping around with joy.
God bless.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Santa covered with Steelers
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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Brightcove is beefing up
2 Comments
This news might be a little stale (about two months of french bread stale), but I just discovered it myself. I like to keep tabs on these guys, as they are a really big-time, enterprise-level purveyor of tasty Flash video. They suck up a ton of talent in the Greater Boston area.
David Mendels, who was SVP at Adobe and Macromedia has joined Brightcove's Board of Directors. That's a powerful move for Brightcove, and a really cool one for David. David is mad smart and a very cool guy, best of luck to both company and contributor in that move.
Brightcove has gone away from free on-demand services (myself included there). But I mean, bandwidth and service isn't free. In this economy, it makes sense. Maybe they will offer a smaller service sometime in the future. It's all going premium/paid accounts for now, and they hired Mike Quinn, Mark Harpur, and Robert Fisher to get sales rolling.
Yahoo! goes Flash with StatTracker!
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I am in a Yahoo! Fantasy Hockey league, and you can pay extra to get something called a StatTracker... which shows up to the second stats for your players, the players you're up against that week, other matchups in your league, and a general scoreboard. Up until about a week ago, this was delivered in a vanilla, painful Java applet. It worked, but it was lacking. It's been replaced with Flash. Thank you!!
Now, we've got some decent Flash UI and they split the NHL/League scores so you can view both at the same time. Now based on points gained, you can see where you fall in line in the league standings (not having to wait until the end of the week for the points to shake out -- it's all real-time now).
Now, we've got some decent Flash UI and they split the NHL/League scores so you can view both at the same time. Now based on points gained, you can see where you fall in line in the league standings (not having to wait until the end of the week for the points to shake out -- it's all real-time now).
Just another case where Flash greatly improves the user experience. Well done.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Throttling your applications?
Monday, December 22, 2008
2 Comments
A long time ago, one of our dreams came true. We could get and set a SWF's frame rate like so: stage.frameRate = 30;
Now, a long time ago I was working at Convoq where we had an application that had tons of nested Movieclips in custom component controls, driving the CPU up quite a bit even at rest (while those things sat idle, they were constantly being updated in their rendering).
One of the things (outside of using Sprites instead if we had them) we really could have used was application throttling. When the application isn't processing data, isn't fetching data, and isn't animating any UI, you could throttle that application down a lot to save CPU on the client machine. When you needed horsepower, you could hit the FPS switch, dial it up, and when done, dial it back down. We didn't have that, but it's available now by adjusting the frameRate.
Has anyone come across an application or anything really in a SWF that has used this approach? Have you worked on something that implemented it? I am about to try this out for some things I am working on, and I am coding up some classes to make it basically transparent. You can turn the functionality on or off and set your bounds, but beyond that, it will just work.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Apple Computer's hardware is failing me
Thursday, December 18, 2008
7 Comments
Recently my CPUs died on my MacPro - I can fix the thing for $700, but that's a lot of money to drop to fix it. In light of how expensive it would be to buy new, I will probably still opt to pay the $700 eventually to repair it. Sucks, but it was out of warranty and also no AppleCare on it. I thought there was some on it, but nope.
So a week later, I wake my wife's Macbook up and it's kernel panic'd. Okay, restart it using the power button. Boots to a grey screen and nothing else. WTF. Repeat, same thing. Then I get a flashing question mark on the folder thing... looks like this hard drive is starting to die. It's not that old, and we did get AppleCare for it.
We have an AppleTV, so all of the media is backed up on that, and we do have a TimeCapsule... but it never was able to do a full backup over the network.
So two machines have basically given up the ghost. I am typing this on a Dell something-or-other laptop and I am hating every moment of it.
When it rains, it pours. When it snows, it avalanches.
Update:
Macbook - problem with logic board... being replaced. Guys couldn't have been nicer.
So a week later, I wake my wife's Macbook up and it's kernel panic'd. Okay, restart it using the power button. Boots to a grey screen and nothing else. WTF. Repeat, same thing. Then I get a flashing question mark on the folder thing... looks like this hard drive is starting to die. It's not that old, and we did get AppleCare for it.
We have an AppleTV, so all of the media is backed up on that, and we do have a TimeCapsule... but it never was able to do a full backup over the network.
So two machines have basically given up the ghost. I am typing this on a Dell something-or-other laptop and I am hating every moment of it.
When it rains, it pours. When it snows, it avalanches.
Update:
Macbook - problem with logic board... being replaced. Guys couldn't have been nicer.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Coolest NFL jersey I've ever seen
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
3 Comments
Dwight White recently passed away, so it's not like you're going to see a whole lot of these around anymore. Perhaps Steel Curtain II, but I don't want to jinx anything.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Amazon's Windowshop is beautiful
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
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Sunday, December 14, 2008
Bob Smizik has retired
Sunday, December 14, 2008
0 Comments
Today Bob Smizik penned his last column in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
He is retiring after over 39 years of sports reporting. While I am not in the 'burgh any longer, I liked reading your take on things every week while getting ready to head to Southpointe for some late night pickup hockey.
Enjoy your retirement, you did a great job and I enjoyed your craft.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Apple advert can thank FP10 / tire
Friday, December 12, 2008
2 Comments
- You can read about the pretty interesting Apple advertisement placed by Apple on Yahoo!'s game portal page. And it owes some to the Flash Player 10's playing card 3D capabilities. The ad is a little annoying for my tastes, and it's certainly not that elegant, but it's creative. And technically pretty interesting... if they did all that with code. If it's just pre-rendered video the whole way, then that's almost cheating ;)
- This morning Boston was loaded down with driving rain and cold temperatures. On a road I drive every day was a deep puddle of moving water. Within this puddle was the huge cap of a piece or road pipe that shredded my left front tire. I pulled into Callahan State Park's parking lot and called AAA. A few minutes later, pop! and another car pulls into the same parking lot with a flat. Pop! now another joins the party. The same AAA guy came out and changed three of our tires because of that hunk of metal in the road this morning, in the pouring rain. I called the police so they could move that thing in the road. Think they will pay for me to get another full-sized spare? Ya, I doubt it too.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Free Cocoa framework for Flash implementation
Friday, December 5, 2008
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Flash'In'App is a free Cocoa framework that lets you load and fully manage Adobe® Flash movies directly from your own applications for Mac OS X. Flash'In'App contains a set of classes, which provide any application with the abilities to play SWF files, manage their playback, communicate with them via External API, FSCommands or Variables, control external resources loading, and much more.
Flash'In'App classes enable your applications to interact with Flash Player.plugin and SWF files themselves.
Your users will need at least Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Flash Player 8 or newer to run applications that you develop with Flash'In'App. Note: transparency will only work correctly on Intel-based Macs (sorry, it's not our limitation, but Adobe's one).
Flash'In'App classes enable your applications to interact with Flash Player.plugin and SWF files themselves.
Your users will need at least Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Flash Player 8 or newer to run applications that you develop with Flash'In'App. Note: transparency will only work correctly on Intel-based Macs (sorry, it's not our limitation, but Adobe's one).
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Adobe cuts jobs of many incredible workers
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
7 Comments
Sad news here. Because of financials, Adobe had to take some measures and cut 600 full-time positions world-wide. Right before the holidays, this has to come as a steel-toed boot to the nuts for many. Poor CS4 demand? Really? I think CS4 kicks TONS of ass.
Mike Downey is out, which was shocking for me to find out. I don't really know who else is out there shocked, packing up their Adobe stuff and looking for work. Is there any kind of list of known kick-ass Adobeians who were laid off?
Sorry for all of you out there. What a sucky day.
Mac Pro woes continue...
2 Comments
Tonight I went to the Natick Collection Apple Store and was greeted by my Genius at my scheduled time. The guy could not have been nicer, and since he was over the age of 26 and knew a ton of deep-level information.
It still boots to a kernel panic. We tried the RAM - seems like all the RAM is fine. We pulled the drives out and booted with another machine, drives are fine. Tried the diagnostics, kernel panic before the CD can be read. It's not faulty firmware, we pretty much rules out any software problems.
Tonight they took my machine, they had to download a special image to burn and run diagnostics on my Mac Pro -- which won't include any OS for the test. It's going to take a few hours to run the test and I pray to God that it finds out that one of the Superdrives is bad or something like that.
Otherwise a logic board is going to cost $1,300 and anything regarding CPUs is going to be really expensive too. AppleCare? Nope... I got the machine as a gift and I didn't pull the trigger on it because I thought it already had it (I think I did). Warranty? Ran out last November.
So if it's logic board or CPU, it's a dead box. Time to think about getting a new one, and there are new processors around the corner I think. But it SUCKs.
Praying Apple finds a cheap component or something that can be replaced.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
No Adobe booth at Macworld Expo 2009
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
1 Comments
Adobe is forgoing a booth on the floor of Macworld Expo, but will instead focus it's energies on education and demo sessions. This almost makes sense to me, as CS4 was just released -- I'm sure that there will be spots on the floor to actually purchase boxes? There will be a full day of CS4 demos.
It is a little curious, as the Mac community is large for Adobe's creative products. Perhaps they are focusing dollars on MAX initiatives. JD, could you chime in?
Pownce is dead
2 Comments
I received this email today:
We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts.To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export. Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.Please visit our new home to find out more:Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,The Pownce Crew