Getting into Java... I'm starting to make my first Java applications with the aim of being able to program cell phone API and other handheld technologies. I see this as a huge market in years to come and can wait to get my...
Teaching Intro to Flash at Tunxis Again Looks like I'll be teaching at Tunxis again this semester. Can't wait to get started again as I have a lot of fun the last time we did this. The class is going to be restructured slightly to showcase the...
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...
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...
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...
In their infinity profit seeking wisdom, the owners of Myspace (should be called TheirSpace) have opened the floodgates to CPC advertising which can target based on location, age, interests, or gender. Its a matter of time now before a stampede of companies throw their ads on Myspace and make the site one more step worse than it already is. Contunue Reading
Great video I saw this weekend that really puts into words so well some of the common themes and ideas I have about torture. Former Gov. Ventura is the man! I love how he is able to simply talk over the people on TV who I normally see bully their guests (Bill O, Hannity and the like). Whats even better is that he is speaking sensibly. This is one of the most “Common Men” logic arguments I’ve heard in a long time and Thomas Paine would be proud.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Fliers cost money and everyone throws them out. Myspace and Facebook take too long and you have to know a college kid with enough time to do nothing other than friend 8000 people on each service and then spam them day and night with messages, comments, and bulletins every time you throw an event.
Twitter is the next step. It’s like word of mouth with instant gratification and all the linkable goodness the web provides. Event pictures, videos, and reviews are all done via text message style communication and from the promoter’s prospective it’s even better because it’s public.
Spris in Hartford is already on this trend, but I think they can go further. You don’t have a lot of options to customize your account’s appearance in Twitter, but you can customize the background a little bit to add some function in there, like contact info for bottle service, emails for djs to send a demo, the flier for the month’s party, etc.
I see this going a lot of different ways. Makes me think that the next hot wave of ideas will be ways for people with huge Twitter lists to make better use of their lists and manage them it ways that makes sense.
Technology, Social, Politics, Photography, Humor, and Gardening are now nested categories.
Clicking on any of them will get you the posts for that and its child categories.
The last month or so I’ve been kicking about on some seemingly off topic posts, from police brutality to community organizing and gardening. These are things that are important to me, and if they are of interest to you I encourage you to read the posts and share your thoughts.
In the near future Ill be CSSing the begeezuz out of the ul and li items, but for now just know that they are nested, renamed, and reordered. My next step is to add a ton of helpful widgets that Ive found over the last week working on another blog and finally to come full circle with a redesign. More on that later.
More than 3 years after the chain closed all their doors they are back open again. About 30 stores have reopened with the theme of “retail-2.0″. Modeled after the every so successful website mash ups in the 2.0 revolution CompUSA and their parent company (owner of TigerDirect) seem to think that if they connect every computer to the net and let their customers do their independent research in store, people might be more informed and because they linger for a longer period of time looking at reviews they just might buy more too.
This has never been tried before. Kudos to CompUSA for trying something new in the old world of retail. Rather than dealing with some pimpled 14 year old at Best-Buy who trys to hustle me a service plan before checking inventory (one of their favorite tricks) I can see the inventory of the story Im in from any screen in the store. This is really handy and I hope it manifests into sales for the “new” company.
