It’s not that I don’t love sitting in front of a computer…

I imagine I am the worlds worst blogger, because I’m not going to spend any time at my desk, describing my technical travails right now. I’m going shopping for pasta and salad components from the local grocer broker service.

if i was going to mention anything geeky, it would be :

passing static classes inside a dynamic class through Interface locked method signatures throws errors or pulls up nulls no matter how i try it. So what I did was use the various name lookup utilities, on either sides of the method call, to get the instance of the static class. but guess what ?

those getwhateverbyqualifiedsomething utility classes give you a class *reference*, this::thing, yo, not the actual.class, yo.  So, if you want to do more logic
that depends on typing, across additional method signatures or events or whathaveyou, well my friend,
DescribeType and it’s ilk don’t work no mo.
So. WHAT I IZZA THINKIN IZ. ah… well serialize the class essentials from a describeType, and send them along with this reference.
you can rest easy, because,
you can always look up type information on the hashed information wayyyy
faster than the original lookup, maybe make a hash on top so you could do uber fast lookup on thousands of classes based on Interface or properties or inheritance.

does that make sense ?
look, you can’t pass a static class around method signatures locked to an Interface in a dynamic class and I DOUBLE dare you to try it.

that’s all folks salad time. i tried.

back to the grind

I’ve been trying to diversify my arena a bit before returning to slave-hood.

Studies in python ( django ) and Java ( log4j ) have definitely expanded my view of flash-in-the-universe.

My as3 is coming together very well, thanks to the small Flickr gallery I just created for the new Young and Rubicam site.

Wishing I could make it to Google IO this week to chat with the Heads, but it looks like I’m going to have to stick around L.A….

I’m still quite staggered that there is no freeware osx actionscript IDE. I love FDT but it is *expensive* to be the only AS IDE for Mac ? Particularly seeing as I jump from machine to machine to machine. If someone ported Flashdevelop to osx, instant HERO.

I’m going to do some red5 experiments with a fridge-magnet widget… maybe try taking some bitmap snapshots, or capturing it’s state as XML. I feel a lot of pressure to get these learning explorations done, as I fear I can’t escape employment much longer….

other thoughts…

spending a few years on osx has turned me into something of a brawler. the latest dependency / install hell has made me so much more aware of unix internals and how it glues together…. it was grusome, but a lot of learning about NIX.

here’s the mac brawler application list I just cobbled up from the loaner laptop :

Adobe After Effects 3 SDK
Adobe Bridge SDK
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Flash
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Media Encoder
Adobe Photoshop
apache-log4j
Aperture
Apple QAdministrator
Applie Qmaster
arSync
AudioHijack
Blender
Chainsaw
Charles
Cinema Tools
coconutBattery
Color
Comic Life
Compressor
CyberDuck
DataRescue II
DiskWarrior
DVDxDV Pro
Eclipse
FCP Rescue 6
Final Cut Pro
Firefox
FlashPlayer
Flex_SDK
Flightgear
Flip4Mac
Fugu
GitX
GoogleEarth
HDDMaintenance
Image Capture
iMovieHD
Invisibility Toggler
Iserials
iSync
iTerm
Kdiff
MacPorts
MacStumbler
MacTheRipper
MacVim
MAMP
Motion
MySQL Tools
NetBeans
OmniOutliner
Open XML Converter
Opera
P2log
P2StoreManager
PhotoBooth
Porticus
Processing
Python
Sherlock
SmartSVN
Soundtrack Pro
SuperDuper
svnX
TextWrankler
ThunderBoltAs3Console
Toast8
VLC
vstsdk3
xray
xtrace

about actionscript adventures presently.

My first AS3 critter, aside from my early MVC testbeds, turned out to be a Flickr gallery.

No point in belaboring what everyone has said about AS3.

However.

I think it’s really interesting that asset sharing across CS3/CS4 and the MXMLC / FDT environments is,

so left-in-the-dark.

There turned out to be a number of nifty ways one could co-create with Flash 8 and MTASC, sharing assets.

Now, with SWCs and whatnot, you would think integration would be tighter, easier.

It just doesn’t seem so.

Let’s take the example of the humble On_The_Stage_In_The_IDE  Sprite, holmes_mc sitting in the IDE.

In the IDE, Sanjiv Actionscript has access to holmes_mc, and can do nifty things like : var mymc:Sprite = holmes_mc.

Now, in MXMLC, we use the tag to get physical stuff, jammed into the swf.

CS3 really doesn’t like classes that go about things that way; by MIRACLE CS4 actually comprende embede.

bottom line ? this hack doesn’t seem modular. it does work;

var myLogo;

try {

myLogo = new LogoMcMXMLC();

addChild(myLogo);

checkIfContained(this, myLogo);

} catch (e) {

trace(‘CATCH : sprite instance error -> ‘ + e);

myLogo = new LogoMcIde();

addChild(myLogo);

}

trace(‘ myLogo -> ‘ + myLogo);

and here’s the asset classes.

 public class LogoMcMXMLC extends Sprite {

 

//[Embed(source="/../deploy/image.jpg")]

//private var ImageMc : Class;

 

[Embed(source="/../deploy/zzz_logo__asset_00.swf", symbol="libraryclips.LogoMcIde")]

private var AssetMc : Class;

 

//

public function LogoMcMXMLC() {

init();

}

 

function init() {

//var myPhoto : DisplayObject = DisplayObject(new ImageMc());

//addChild(myPhoto);

//

var myLib : DisplayObject = DisplayObject(new AssetMc());

addChild(myLib);

myLib.x = 0;

myLib.y = 0;

}

}

//

// THE IDE CLASS BELOW

package libraryclips {

import flash.display.Sprite;

 

/**

* @author mobile1

*/

public class LogoMcIde extends Sprite {

 

public function LogoMcIde() {

}

}

}

ok…. back to work…

so. I had my vacation locally and did nothing. it’s very easy on the budget and i did get my eyesight and the use of my arms back.

i did tons of snowboarding and mountainbiking and raids around the l.a. area before it got too hot.

i drove random places in the middle of the night and went up onto tall things for dawn.

it was like going to an island in the indian ocean with warm blue water.

um… no. actually, wait. it wasn’t.

so, i could be bitter about not being able to take a real vacation;

what i will do instead is work my ass off yet again to see if I can get a good launch velocity.

murda.murda.

hmmm. ok…. here goes… something….

predictably, the rainicorn emerged from the forest’s edge.

i’m back . things suuuuure have been interesting.

this isn’t even a suggestion of a post. i’m just aware that i have a blog now….. hmmm.

on the first day of burning man, my true love gave to me…

ahem. anyhow. onto business.

http://fora.tv

“The world is watching. And wondering where these policy squid have drinks”

Let’s not forget the google widget universe. This is truly Kim Jong stuff folks.

http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/reference.html

sorry, did I say widget ? I meant gadget ! the fun part, is that you can stuff these things, directly into your spreadsheets. animated datadriven flying flash bubble charts right in the spreadsheet, running off of spreadsheet data – as you alter it collaboratively, complete with versioning.

sick ? could be starting to get sick. they got my attention with this.

so — paying attention to the union between salesforce, sap, and the google… with microsoft and oracle’s nose-shoved-in-the-groin, right in there…

in other news, I’ve been trying to make coffee with rss, no dice so far. but rss seems to be working everywhere else. how about a rss feed for flash facing web services without all that gory soap crap ? interesting, you say ? yes… indeed… hmmm….

This nation is so deep in debt that none of the presidential candidates should be proud of themselves.

They all failed to stop the train. All you candidates have been in power. So enough jibbering about how great you all are. You were all in power as this great nation got vampired like never before. Oh but now you’re going to save us. You’re telling me that ‘Kamikaze Mouth’ Biden is gonna save us ? Jeebus.

I have been showing my old Flash AS2 wizardry around town and I’m horrified how many people have made how much money with Flash – and they don’t know dick about it. It’s kind of bizarre that I’m some kind of Flash Godzilla. I kind of want to come back to the Bay Area where I’m not so radically different than most Flash peeps. Being really really good at something technical, doesn’t translate well unless you take the time to translate it well. I think I shall take up Word Processing and Desktop Publishing.

Does anyone have a copy of Corel I could learn from ?

sigh.

OH. Did i recap SIGGRAPH ? the leds wiped my memory. I’ll talk about SIGGRAPH next post…

love it, or love it

los angeles isn’t for the faint of heart….

but, the array of options can’t be beat.

currently i’m working on a realtime video auction rig based out of some other state.
sure, they lagged in letting me actually fondle the app, but i’m going in there today.
so, that’s interesting.

trying to understand and bridge the differences between,
FMSand Red5….

Working for a cat who designs for large scale Theme Park, Urban Design, and Insane Visions Made Real.
They need a website – but it’s not the App. The App is made out of the internet,
the website is the portfolio piece and the pdf hub. Shades of 1999 eh ?

finally engaging the social internet, somewhat:
my netvibes page…

I spent a lot of time in L.A. working on Custom Video Players. It turns out, two years later,
that anything an independent coder could cook up, is about to go the way of the dodo bird.
We’re not talking gocarts anymore. ABC doesn’t screw around, and there’s other heavy flash
players showing up – a few from Adobe itself, we may expect. With CS4.
But that’s a whole nutha story….

The blogosphere won’t buckle immediately…

Retro futurist rants can’t change your pants….