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’
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’
Well, it’s been over a year since I released my Wordpress MyBlogLog plugin, and I’m still getting emails about it. Honestly, I’m very surprised that this thing still works. If you’re using the plugin now, or want to, let me know! I think it is time for a big code overhaul, and perhaps some new features but there is no sense in developing this plugin if there’s no demand. If you’ve got an idea, post it up and I’ll do my best to get it out there in the wild with the next release. I did notice the guys over at MyBlogLog have been hard at work improving the JavaScript and their own feature set as well which means I should probably update the plugin pretty soon. Also, I am aware of the missing readme file! Please, I know about it, and I’ve posted about it. I promise, next release, you all will get an extensive readme!
Anyways, it amazes me how far MyBlogLog has come since the day I registered and alpha tested it. Really, you have no idea how simple the idea was at the time. Todd, Eric, Steve, John and the rest of the crew over there at Cloudspace and Yahoo, my hats off to you guys.
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
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.
An aside for any web developer who is frustrated with not being able to have IE6 and IE7 side by side, take a look at this Free IE6 Virtual Machine with Pre-Activated Win XP (yes, legal, yes from Microsoft!).
Enjoy.
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.
Great article via Digg.com, Developers are from Mars, Programmers are from Venus, is probably the single best description of the difference between developers and programmers. I am proud to be the former. It took a year of experience to get me there, but I’m on the right track. Kudos to the blog author.
Subversion
Subversion is the CVS done right. Now, I know many web developers who sware by FTP and their own voice as a means of controlling their source code. I for one believe that method is by far the easiest, and usually most efficient way to manage source code in a small business. Yes, it is dirty, and yes it can get ugly. The upside is that everyone knows what is going on in the company, and everyone knows what they can edit at any given time. The downside is that one slip up can cost you several hours, if not days of precious development time.
Continue reading ‘Free Source Control and Blissful Workflow’
