Nice. Ben Forta blogs about how proud he is to be employed by Macromedia after the company pledged to match employee donations to the International Relief Fund.
Inspired, I’ve decided to forego extravagant New Year’s celebrations this year and will donate what I would’ve partied away to the Canadian Red Cross. If you’re still looking for some way to help out too I invite you to do something similar. Heck, come on over for a low key get together as well.
peace.
One of the first challenges to boat building on the second floor is getting the materials into the loft. Specifically, the 40 odd sheets of 4′x8′ marine plywood that are used as the core material of the vg23’s composite hull. I spent hours contemplating a method to easily get the sheets up and down from the loft and finally settled on a simple pulley mechanism which seemed to do the trick. One sheet of plywood at a time. I’m not the most patient of people and after hoisting 5 or 6 panels into the loft it was gently pointed out to me that the front-end loader on the tractor could reach to the height of the hayloft. An hour or so later the plywood was safely stacked in the loft and my rope and pulley system hasn’t been used since. I took it as a perfect lesson in over thinking a problem and have made a point of not repeating that kind of waste of time and energy again.
Brandon over at devnulled.com blogged about a simple way to improve firefox page loads in this post. I just made the suggested tweaks and had to join the clamour. A definite improvment! It would appear that the suggestion originated here.
update: To shed some more light on how this tweak works John Dowdell points to a mozilla.org FAQ item on pipelining: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/pipelining-faq.html
Last week I needed a way to detect the presence of the Authorware Web Player version 2004 on user’s machines so I put together a javascript isAwWebPlayer2004() function to be inserted in a html page. You can download the AwWP-04_detector.js here. It contains the one function which returns ‘true’ if version 2004 of the web player is detected. I’ve tested it in Firefox 1.0 and IE 6 on a couple of windows machines. I did have offers from mac users via the aware list to give it a go but never heard back from them (hope it didn’t knock ‘em offline). So I’ve also put together a little debug page that provides a bit more detected player information rather than just true / false. That page is here if you want to try it out. If you find it’s mis-reporting please post in the comments with what it reports as well as your actual player / browser / os configuration.
Hayloft VG23
That’s what I’ve been calling the boat project until I can decide on a real name and she is properly christened. My mom and step dad operate a horse stable outside the city and have been kind enough to let me build in the stable’s hayloft. It’s actually the perfect spot for it - I’m spoiled by all the space. Getting the finished boat down from the loft is obviously going to be a challenge but I have some ideas (some good, some hilarious) so am not too worried. Yet.
Anyhow, the first step was to build the basket mold. When I assembled the frames for the mold I initially only put vertical supports at the two mid frames which I eventually realized were too few. I later added some support to the bow frame which helped to align the panels quite nicely. That was probably lesson number one - the better the basket design, the easier it will be to align the long side and chine panels. It all worked out for me but if I’d planned a little better I could have avoided some frustrations (and cursing) when attaching the panels.
I’ll write some more about the construction process when I get a chance.
peace.
A few months ago I wrote a WinCtrl constructor function for Authorware 7 that makes using the winctrls.u32 from javascript more straightforward and I thought I’d share it here. Basically you create a WinCtrl object and all the properties and methods of the windows control are accessible through that object. I set it up so that any properties you’d get (or set) via the wcGetPropertyValue() of a particular control are added as property members of the object which means you can reference them like so: combobox1_wc.Visible = false; I made an effort to support all the members (properties and functions) of the winctrls and to make using the WinCtrl objects intuitive to those already familiar with working with winctrls in authorware script (aws).
Here’s some example js of setting up a listbox control:
// listbox
myLB_wc = new WinCtrl();
myLB_wc.wcDisplayControl(100, 100, 250, 200, "ListBox", "");
myLB_wc.Items = "Item 001\rItem 002\rItem 003\rItem 004";
myLB_wc._3D = false;
myLB_wc.Border = 1;
myLB_wc.Color = "#CCCCCC";
myLB_wc.FontColor = "Navy Blue";
myLB_wc.FontName = "MS Sans Serif";
myLB_wc.FontSize = 9;
myLB_wc.FontStyle = "Regular";
myLB_wc.Focus = false;
You can grab the WinCtrl.js file here. If you have any questions or comments feel free to post them here.
One thing to note, I’ve found creating a whole bunch of controls using this method is a little bit slower than other approaches. This is due to the way the properties for each WinCtrl object are being attached - the extra call to wcGetPropertiesByControl() means another trip to the u32 which seems to be the bottleneck.
Judging by George Bush’s not so subtle behaviour during his visit to Canada a couple of weeks ago it seems the missile defence squeeze is on. Clearly the Bush administration are very serious about getting a Canadian flag on their missile defence shield. It would appear that they’ve taken a cue from the New Mexico based T-ShirtKing.com who are offering a “go Canadian” disguise for Americans traveling abroad. Canada’s support of, and participation in, the missile shield program would bring it a sense of legitimacy and prevent the United States from appearing to once again be acting unilaterally. Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, I don’t think Canadians are just going to chuckle and crack ‘eh’ jokes about this “disguise”.
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Check it out!
(image credit bateau2.com)
The vg23 is a 23 foot sailboat constructed of a plywood-fiberglass-epoxy composite, also known as stitch and glue. I bought the plans for this sailboat from boatplans-online.com this past winter and began construction in the spring. I’ll blog about the building progress in posts to follow, but for now let me introduce you to the design a little bit more.
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Joel on Software blogged this gem. Its a command line utility to remove some of the unnecessary data from a jpeg, thus making the files a bit smaller. More info and download here:
PureJPEG
