So, I was checking my mail today and a mysterious package arrived from Amazon. Now, it could have been anything but to my complete shock and awe, it was from Mike Potter at Adobe. Here are some blurry photos from my phone:
I had added the cookbook to my Amazon wish list shortly after Flex 3 was released, as I wanted to dive in and learn everything I could about the newest version of Flex. I really appreciate the gift, and to all of the Adobe team, thank you. You guys have delivered a great product, and you really know how to reach out and touch the community.
Just updated the blog to WordPress 2.3.3 and figured it was time for another post. Today on InsideRIA.com they posted a rather interesting post about Flex graphical filters. Now, I’ve wanted to do this sort of thing for a very long time, but only today had the down time to give it a try. Basically, the application I’ve attached shows your regular web cam feed on the left, as well as a filtered feed on the right. I’ve only scratched the surface with what you can do with filters, combining filters, and the like but the demo serves a very useful purpose.
When my boss saw my little demo running his first comment was, “Wow, that’s fast.” and he was right. Flash was rendering the filtered stream in real-time; side-by-side with the regular output. Granted, blurring and practically inverting the colors isn’t rocket science, but the applications are limitless. Personally, I’d love to see a background subtraction library for Flex with other real-time video processing effects. My guess is that someone over at Adobe already has something to this end for working with YouTube Remixer and similarly powered applications.
Code and source after the break…
Continue reading ‘Flex Web Cam Effects Demo’
The MyBlogLog WordPress plugin is receiving a very belated face lift and a few bug fixes (thanks to those who reported them). Now, as a disclaimer, this code is relatively untested and was dug out of a very old archive from my days at cloudspace (the company who initially partnered to create MyBlogLog), so use it at your own risk. If you find any bugs, just drop me an email using the contact form and I will try to help in any way I can. This release has been activated on at least 2 WordPress 2.3.3 installs, so yes, it works with 2.3.3!
Check the project page to download the latest plugin file.
Oh, and still no readme.txt. 
This post is kind of a stub, I’m sitting in the Fox Theatre ready to live-blog.
The event started awhile ago, and I’ve been blogging it as it happens. As always, you can always hit the live video feed instead of reading my transcripts & witty commentary as well.
A special thanks to WeatherFlow Inc. for flying me out to the tour.
Information: http://onair.adobe.com/schedule/cities/atlanta.php
Live Feed: http://onair.adobe.com/live/
Live blogging after the jump…
Continue reading ‘OnAir Bus Tour - Atlanta’
The chumby is a compact device that displays useful and entertaining information from the web: news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs — using your wireless internet connection. Always on, it shows — nonstop — what’s online that matters to you.
I just got an email from the guys over at Chumby.com and they’re about to run a 50 person beta run of sorts. I’ve applied to get on the team, and I’m looking forward to it. The work I’ve been doing recently really would look amazing on one of these, as I’ve been working on a flash version of our companies’ wind graph. Basically, it’s a real-time, on site wind graph of our weather stations. So, the Chumby is really the perfect vessel for this thing, albeit a strange one.
Chumby
Okay, the WWDC keynote is over and all I have to say is, finally.
Games on the Mac. From two of the largest, most well known development companies ever devised.
Oh, and new MacBook Pros have the 8600M Nvidia chipset…
Via Gizmodo
Well, I am almost finished moving all my data onto my brand new MacBook Pro 15″ when I realized I needed to move my Subversion repositories. I’m not an expert on Subversion, nor will I ever claim to be but this might just help a few people out. When I made the backups of my repository I went with the trusty ’svnadmin hotcopy old_repos new_repos’ option and had a plug and play backup to restore when the time came. Now, I couldn’t find a single reference on how to restore from a hotcopy, and it certainly wasn’t obvious to me so… Here’s what I did:
- Download the OS X SVN Installer from Martin Ott’s Site
- Install the package.
- Make a .profile file in your home directory and paste the following into it: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
- Issue a ’svnadmin recover repo_hotcopy’ to start the BDB again.
- Ta da, it’s done!
Strangely, that seemed to have fixed everything! Now, that might’ve been the most obvious thing in the entire world to a SVN guru, but it wasn’t to me. I did issue a ‘killall svnserve’ and then a ’svnserve -d -r repo_hotcopy’ before testing it, but it checked out with SVNx and everything looks good.
Today in my CIS4361 Secure Operating Systems class I was drifting off as the professor was doing a quick review of filesystem attacks when I heard the strangest phrase since the BouncyCastle provider for JCE: Smurfing. Apparently this smurfing, as it were, is when an ICMP echo packet is spoofed from the target’s IP address to a router, called the smurf amplifier, which then sends the request to all of the nodes attached to it who then send ICMP echo reply packets to the target. Essentially, this inundates the router and target with echo reply packets and should lead to all out network outages. Pretty neat, and with a name like smurfing, it has to be good.
Resources:
Here are a few links relating to a project I am working on for my Vision class. Basically, I’m building an automated facial expression classification system. Sounds nifty? Well, that’s because it is:
SVM-Light: Support Vector Machine
DFAT-504 Facial Expression Image Database
Well, its been awhile since I’ve had a chance to post. A lot has been happening with my work and college. All leading up to the probably graduation in May 2007, so I’ve been unable to post as often as I would have liked.
So what’s been going on? Well let’s see…
- The web speculates that MyBlogLog is in acquisition talks…
- Apple updated, well, everything in their line yet again
- I have left my position with FuJ Tech, and will continue to work on freelance projects
- I recently learned that MediaTemple’s Grid service is actually not a grid. So much for that idea.
- Sony’s PS3 has about as many issues as the Xbox360 had at launch, but with almost double the initial pricetag
- The Nintendo Wii is selling like crazy, as predicted, and I for one will be buying one once I raise some funds.
- Windows Vista is practically out, and Acer is saying not to bother with the ‘Basic’ version.
Did I miss anything? Oh well, check the Digg section or my ma.gnolia for daily link updates and news stories.
