Featured Posts

The Value of Feeling Appreciated as an Employee in... Whether you’re a new employee or the vice president of the company, everyone wants to feel valued, even appreciated, in the workplace. Not only does it improve morale and make the workplace a more pleasant...

Read more

The difference between classic and motion tweens in... Here it is: If you're used to doing things "the cs3 way" then you can continue to do so with the classic tween tool. It works the same way as you remember, using key frames as normal, but you cannot...

Read more

PHP: If (equal to AND not equal) - eliminate form spam... Just learned a great function of PHP thats already made my forms a lot better. A while back I wrote an article about eliminating form spam without captchas by using css to hide a text input box for bots...

Read more

Drop Downs, Fly Outs, and Accordion Site Navigation: This last week I was in a meeting discussing a client site. It was a typical business meeting that was going into overtime on a Friday afternoon, and then things turned for the worst... someone suggested...

Read more

twitter

Breaking News

  •  

May

24

2009

Conundrum of Life: Solved – Morning vs Night

Posted by hattersworkshop | Comments : (0)     

Category : Humor, Social

Happy Memorial Day; my thoughts on that aside.

I figured out a wondrous thing tonight while I was driving home from Springfield this morning: The best way to determine the morning/night status is to look at the street lights. If they are still on – it’s still night. Once they turn off (about 5:33am this morning in case you were interested) then, and only then, is it considered morning by civilized people.

The normal argument would say 12:01am; but that’s only if you want to be a dick about it – of course you’re not wrong, but practically speaking I’d say that I left the party at around 5:20 last night and got home at about 6 o’clock this morning.

May

08

2009

PhoneGap – An open Source HTML/JS framework for SmartPhone, Blackberry, and iPhone applications

Posted by hattersworkshop | Comments : (0)     

Category : Coding and Database, SmartPhone, Technology

Ever wanted to create a program for you iphone but didn’t want to write it in C+?

With this new framework you can develop programs for smart phones and their kin using native hardware features (screen shake or tilting for instance) with nothing but HTML and JS. This is currently a free and open source project under the MIT licensed and should hopefully stay that way.

5 Years ago you could sound really cool by talking about flash. 2 years ago you got to sound cool developing flash programs that worked on the odd Nokia phone. (deploying these programs in any sort of a meaningful way was a whole norther task all together, but being able to do it at all was step 1.)

I think the next milestone is looming overhead: learn JQuery or MooTools well enough that you make flash developer’s jealous and deploy your program in a way that actually works. SWEET!

May

07

2009

10 Transition Effects: The art of Showing/Hiding Content

Posted by hattersworkshop | Comments : (0)     

Category : Art & Design, Great Tutorials, Slick Code

Great archive of different show/hide effects using JQuery, which I gotta say is quickly becoming the new “Flash” of the internet. You dont need a special player for JQuery and it interacts (and even plays nice) with other non JQuery elements, something Flash can never do.

http://devsnippets.com/article/10-transition-effects-the-art-of-showinghiding-content.html

Check out whats possible and then start learning JQuery.

May

05

2009

Guest Host on WWUH 91.3 – Dawn of Chaos

Posted by hattersworkshop | Comments : (0)     

Category : Around West Hartford, Politics, Social

I got to guest host on Dawn of Chaos, a weekly radio show on 91.3 WWUH. We had a great time talking about politics (Piracy & the British TV tax). I shit you not; its illegal to watch TV it Briton without a license – how sick is that? I have to pay someone for the privilege to watch ads? The real winner this week though was a story about how the French are kidnapping their bosses if they threaten to ship jobs over seas. THATS A UNION IN ACTION!

From there the conversation digressed into Ultimate Warrior – a show I’ve never seen from beginning to end. It pits fighters from all around the world against each other in mock battles that would never happen (Pirate vs French Knight). I’ve seen clips from it – but I never get through the whole thing. The scripting seems lame and the match ups moronic. (Ninja vs Spartan? Ninja would never fight a spartan head on… kill him in his sleep. Done.)

Anyway, I was happy to get some good ol punk into the mix. Most of the time the show plays metal but I brought in some T.S.O.L. Decedents, Exploited, and the Necromantics and we had a ball…

Ill be back next week Tuesday 12-3am on 91.3 WWUH with more political discourse, ramblings and rants.

May

04

2009

Last Week of Classes – Message to Students

Posted by hattersworkshop | Comments : (0)     

Category : Around West Hartford, Social, Teaching

To all my students: Thank you for all your hard work this semester. I hope you got as much out of the classes as you could. If you have any questions in the future – please dont hesitate to ask me. Just because you’re no longer in my class does not mean my door is closed.

Reflections:
Im only going to teach one class a semester from now on. I wanted to able to go in deeper with both classes and I think I could have if I was clearer about the class objectives and what I was expecting. This was my mistake. A demo reel of examples I had found to go with each assignment would have been instrumental in achieving this.

I’m glad I did it though, I learned Flash CS 4 in 5 days and met some new people who I hope to be working with int he future. Actionscript 3 is still greek, but I’ll have to learn it evenutally to begin working with
AIR.

The easy road isn’t rewarding… It’s easy.

download free wordpress themes