Musings of a Crackpot

So i’ve been working on creating a thumbnail gallery system within Flash. I ran into an issue where I wanted to automatically generate an xml file that will contain the paths to the images. I knew that i could probably find something online that will fill my purpose but i decided that I was going to write my own. So the last two days, I have spent time writing my own php file that will recursively walks through my folder structure and generates an xml based on that.

I’ll be the first to say that I haven’t had much experience writing in php and my biggest hurdles were trying to get the syntax correct. In addition, arrays are treated a little bit differently than they are in actionscript so for a bit i was floundering around. However by the end of the night I got my php page correctly generating the xml that i needed.

Off to the flash side of things, on that front I still have quite a bit of work left to do. I need to incorporate the navSystem that i wrote a while back so that i can just load thumbnail subsets. In addition, i need to research the best way to autosize the thumbnail images on the flash side. Currently I’m just dynamically masking the large images but this is just a quick fix so that i can finish the other core pieces.

As a side note, i was watching a vh1 rockdoc that was about LL Cool J. It was pretty cool to see his timeline. It was pretty amusing to see LL Cool J at 15, and then realizing that being a rapper has been his main job for this whole life. Then i learned that he’s made 12 albums, with basically only one flop. That’s pretty much just incredible. I hope to be that successful with my career, actually not with my career, i hope to be that successful with my life.

Current Mood:  thoughtful

Keith’s blog is chockful of goodness. He posted about integrating AS3 support into FlashDevelop and I didn’t want to forget to go through the tutorial so I’m posting a link here to remind myself.

Current Mood:  okay

Apparently my cookbook app has been ruined. I’m not sure what happened actually. Since I didn’t remove the ability for recipes to be deleted someone may have just deleted everything although i’m not sure why anyone would do that. I’m thinking perhaps I’ve managed to somehow delete all the recipes out of my database eventhough I’m not sure when or how i would have done that. Regardless, I’m going to make some edits to the app so that recipes can’t be deleted and hopefully people will add recipes again, especially you beca! I didn’t get a chance to make your pie recipe that you posted before. Everyone add a recipe!

Current Mood:  morose

Man things have been in a flux these last 3 weeks back from my vacation. Events at work have been on both a downward turn and an upward turn at the same time. Unfortunately i feel that the downward aspects are far outpacing the positive ones, so I continue my search for the next horizon, the next phase of my career while trying to make the most of the current one. I hate being cryptic and I hope to be able to fully divulge everything at a later date.

Other than work things have been going well. Falco and his wife had their first child. He’s a proud dad and I’m really happy for him. To Thaxton, i say hello and welcome into this crazy world young man. Old friends have resurfaced which excites me to no end, I don’t know what’s to come of it all but I’m always glad to reconnect with people. My move out west has taken me so far, both physically and also in my development as a person. College is years behind me now but I continue to make the effort to keep the connections forged then.

I’ve also continued my attempts to learn more about Ruby and Rails. I created an online cookbook. Hopefully everyone that visits will leave at least one recipe. Feel free to use this as place to store and share your recipes. Thanks goes out to Rebecca for being the first person to truly put my app through it’s paces. My goal for the next version is to have a section for ingredients so that people can eventually sort through the recipes based on what ingredient(s) they want to use. I also have another round of improvements in store for my todo-list app as well.

This weekend I’m going to set aside some time to truly dive into AS3 and even more of Flash 8. I’m got these incredible tools at my fingertips and I’m just short changing myself by failing to take advantage of them. It’s time for that to change, if for no other reason than I really do need to put together a portfolio of some sort. At times it’s hard to be a Flash Developer that’s worked on closed systems, it makes it rather difficult to show off what you can do.