The Flash Turntable that Todd put up today is cool, and he was telling Nathan and I about it at dinner last night. The complexity of it is far deeper than you might imagine, it accurately tracks where the needle should be based on the length of the track.
I will be attending the Fusebox Developers Conference and Macromedia DevCon 2002
October 26-30 in Orlando and blogging, of course, both here and over at cfblog.
Sadly, I cannot count eating soup as one of the things that I do gracefully.
Last night, I went to our monthly Interactive Media Alliance meeting, which featured three members of the Cartoon Network Web Team based out of Atlanta. They talked about their site, team, community, and process. It was interesting to hear them talk about their redesign that launched over the summer, how they are building community through the use of their Orbit system, and especially the animation process they go through to get hand drawn animation into Flash. The one single thing that struck me is how much careful planning seemed go to into their community development. They even enlisted the help of an economics professor to help them design their “points” system. Unfortunately, there was no Samurai Jack swag to be had.
Some people I like a lot, others, not so much.
Last night, I was re-organizing my living room(nothing like a little cleaning to help you get over that cruel woman.) I was moving all of my DVD’s onto the sizable mantle in my living room. I can’t believe what poor judgement I have shown in the past when purchasing movies. Among the many classics in my DVD collection, there seems to be no shortage of absolutely awful films. Why I would have purchased this garbage is currently beyond me.
Make no mistake, I am merciless.
eWeek: Microsoft Adds XDocs to Office Family There is this quote from one of the beta testers of XDocs on the first page of the article; “The validation capability within XDocs enables us to check our data against criteria that we have set, improving the accuracy of data entry.” I don’t see how this would be a selling point for a product. We already have an easy to build form mechanism that allows us to validate against virtually any criteria imaginable, it’s called a Web page. In my current project, we are replacing a company’s legacy ERP system, which does everything from supply chain management to accounting, with a browser based system. ERP systems are form intensive, believe me, I should know as I have been developing an application module for the last two weeks that has hundreds of unique pieces of data related to a single item. So I am unable to grasp what sort of value this XDocs product delivers to Microsoft’s customer base. We already have tight Web/Database integration through several middleware products, you take your pick, and virtually all of them have solid XML support now. I just don’t get it. Why solve a problem that already has a fantastic solution? (Microsoft XDocs Page is here.)
I guess I was a little dramatic with yesterday’s post. I’m okay, everyone around me is okay. I’m just going through a rough period in terms of my affairs of the heart, and that is not stuff I want to or should discuss in this forum at a detail level. At the same time, I think it’s good to remind people every once in a while how important this stuff is. It’s easy to lose sight of that in the trenches of day to day life. The stakes with this stuff is usually pretty high, at least it is with me at this point in my life. I will now attempt to return to the regularly scheduled inane postings about other stuff.
I don’t really know what to post here right now. Normally, I’d be posting some comments about the Yankees season ending the earliest it has in a few years, or making some comment about a piece of software. This morning, all I can think of is how important love is in our lives, and how sad circumstances can be sometimes. It’s necessary in this life to treat every day of your relationships with urgency and with care because you really never know what will happen tomorrow.
Test post
Angels vs. Yankees Here we go again.
I should have mentioned by now that NetNewsWire Lite has become one of my favorite Mac OS X applications. I’m looking forward to the release of the Pro version so I can reward Brent for his work on this beast. I’m also looking forward to the additions he mentioned for the Pro version, including a notepad feature and Blogger API support.
mark notes The Onion’s link policy. This is especially odd to me considering the fact that most of what drives traffic to The Onion must be links that point out how funny certain headlines and articles are. I’ve probably linked to articles on their site hundreds of times over the last five years. I also have had them in my link box since the first version. Guess that is going to have to change now. It’s a shame really.
Jeremy Allaire has created something called Audio Blogger. Worth a look for sure. I’m not sure, however, about his use of Blogger in the name, I thought that was the name of a commercial product already.
I was thinking this morning about stories from my life, small experiences that changed me and have stuck with me which, from the outside, might not seem that important in the grand scheme of things. For some reason, something that happened to me in junior high school popped into my mind. Oddly, I can’t figure out why, because I don’t think it taught me anything that I refer to daily. It was my eighth grade year, and I was in science class. We were studying Centrifugal force. Mr. Sagnella, my science teacher, was my favorite teacher. He asked for someone to come to the front of the class to help him with the demonstration. I volunteered. I went up to the front of the class, and he handed me a bucket full of water. To demonstrate the power of the force, I was to spin the bucket around. No water would come out of the bucket due to the centrifugal force. No water that is, until the bucket attempted to occupy the same space at the same time as the 100 gallon fishtank that was directly behind me. The tank shattered, the bucket went flying, and I stood at the center where the force of the water from the fishtank and the remaining water in the bucket met. Needless to say, I was “that kid who shattered the fishtank” for several months. In my professional life, I don’t think I’ve ever given a presentation or demo that has gone worse. I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time I get up to speak in public.
Apple, IBM Team on 64-Bit CPU “Apple is testing the CPU, dubbed the GigaProcessor Ultralite (GPUL) on Mac OS X-based hardware” Who names this stuff?
I’ll be at the Atlanta Blog MEETUP tonight. If you are in Atlanta, stop by and say hello.
Nokia doesn’t like warchalking? I’m not surprised. (via 802.11b News)
eWeek: Apple Folds in Mac OS 9 Group. While this is the end of an era, a goodbye to a friend, I don’t feel particularly sad about Mac OS 9’s passing. I removed Mac OS 9 from my machine when I installed Jaguar. All of the applications I use on a daily basis have made the jump now, and Mac OS X is completely superior to Mac OS 9 in terms of both performance on the same hardware and stability. The addition of the chewy Unix underpinnings, and the software that has accompanied it, has actually meant that I am also using my Windows laptop less and less as well. If you use the Mac OS, I urge you to embrace the winds of change rather than fight them. You won’t be sorry, I promise.
A rainy day here today. There’s something about rainy days that makes taking a nap more pleasurable, and I took full advantage this afternoon. I also spent some time today going through the pictures from my trip to Nova Scotia and Maine last month. What beautiful country it is up there. There are a bunch of new links posted on kungfumaster.
I’m not exactly certain what happened to my copy of Radio, but it got out of synch with my Blogger entries somehow in July. I figured that I would have time at some point to troubleshoot the problem, but it has lingered on for a while. Today, suddenly, things started working again. Very odd. In other site news, I’m shopping for a new hosting company, and I think I’ve decided to go with Media Temple. They offer Cold Fusion MX hosting on Linux, which is what I desire. My current hosting company is living in the stone ages, and inertia has been my foe in leaving them. So Radio Bump is being updated again, as is my RSS file, although both will be missing the posts from July and August. As far as I can tell, the only way for me to get those posts into Radio will be to re-import everything.
Wow, this Flash E-R diagramming tool is amazing. The kind of real time collaboration that is possible with this kind of technology is going to change the way people work.
Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components. This has been something that I have wanted to have access to for a while, but I am just not far enough up to speed with Flash MX to do it for myself yet. Definitely something I will be keeping my eye on moving forward. (via Jeremy Allaire’s Weblog)