Musings of a Crackpot

I just got done doing something that I hadn’t done in about ten years. I mowed my backyard. It didn’t take very long since I don’t have a very large backyard, only about 10-15 minutes, but it didn’t matter:-) I was just happy to be pushing the lawnmover in my own backyard, it’s a small thing like that that has made my day today. Overall, I’m still in the process of moving out of the old apartment and into this house. It’s amazing the amount of stuff that I’ve acquired over the last year and a half or so. A trip to GoodWill is definitely in my future. I’m just looking forward to being finished with all the moving and unpacking so i can take steps towards getting a dog. I wish that wolfhounds were easier to find.

Work is going sorta well, developing for Flash Lite is an adventure. It truly makes you take time to think about the structure of the application and create compact, functional code. At the end of the day thou it’s still pretty exciting to see your application being used and working as expected. Over the last week I havent’ been able to sleep so I dabbed into Apollo for a little bit. It definitely has some fun potential and I want to make time to develop a mp3 player application at some point. In addition, I need to revamp the photo gallery application that I wrote, porting it over to AS3 would be a good exercise for me.

Current Mood:  happy

since i’ve updated. A lot has happened since my last update. I am no longer an employee of Creative Explosions, Inc (CE). I happen to think the less said about that the better. However I may do a full writeup about those experiences at a later date. Today was my first day at my new job as a UI Engineer for 4HomeMedia. I’m extremely excited about both the new job and my new co-workers. I definitely think that this opportunity has a ton of potential.

I spent a long weekend in Atlanta last weekend. On my agenda was the Anime Weekend Atlanta convention and catching up with old friends. I was successful on both fronts. It was really good to see everyone and to reconnect with some special friends and reminicse about my college days.

My goal this week is to do a much more detailed update of how my last month as been and to really improve my blog so it’s more interesting to read. However for now i think that i’m going to try to sleep since I have to be up in about 6 hours for work.

I just finished up another pass through on the thumbnailing system that I’m working on. This latest pass involved incorporating a navigation system that i had previously created, so that each directory returned by the php file is created as a node in the navigation system. I also corrected a couple errors with loading a larger version of the thumbnail image. Overall the system is stil a work in progress thou. I still have to add a paging component so that if you have more images within a directory then there is space for you can select the next page of images. After i finish that piece v1 of the system will be ready for use and I’ll be able to post it to show the world, plus it’s already going to be used in a friend of mine’s website.

It feels good to actually write a flash app from scratch. It’s been a long time and it helps me realize how much i need to work on my process as much as learning different technologies.

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