The spot welds between the cable ties cured for about a week before my next weekend trip out to the farm. At this point I secured the tops of the side panels to the frames of the basket mold and removed the framing (as mentioned previously). For a little bit of extra support I’d also added a few strips of fibreglass tape on the outside of the hull to hold the seams together.
When installing one of the Macromedia web players in IE have you ever selected the “Always trust content from Macromedia, Inc.” checkbox and now you want to re-enable the dialog?
(pre XP SP2)
From the Tools menu of Internet Explorer 6, select Internet Options.
On the Content tab, click Publishers.
From here you can view and remove trusted publishers.
You can find the digital certificate chapter from the IE6 resource kit here.
One of the bigger issues with adding flash to your authorware piece (through the asset xtra) is the performance hit caused by anything more complex than the most basic of swfs. In most cases setting the #directToStage property of the flash icon is a necessity. Sometimes however, sections of the piece contain media that need to overlay the swf, for example, in the case of a glossary. Here’s a simple, flicker free way to toggle the property (picked up from some of the wise folks on the aware list):
my_swf.DirectToScreen = false;
my_swf.SetIconProperty("#directToStage", false);
And of course to toggle it back again (while working in the ide it’s wise to do so or the next time you test your piece the swf will no longer be directToStage):
my_swf.DirectToScreen = true;
my_swf.SetIconProperty("#directToStage", true);
Macromedia recently added rss feeds and email notifications to livedocs. It seems that currently the rss links are only available on pages containing an existing comment. However, by taking a cue from Christian Cantrell’s suggestion (linked above) of fiddling with the feed urls it seems to be possible to subscribe to an entire “book” as well. So I’ve added the Authorware 7 and Flash MX 2004 feeds to my reader to try it out. I actually dropped a small (legit) comment on an Authorware page as a simple test and it came up in the rss reader. I’ll probably unsubscribe if information overload sets in (or worse, some cretin realizes they can feed spam us by dumping their garbage in the docs).
Christian and the rest of the IMD(?) team have been providing us with some nice alternative ways of getting up to date information off the Macromedia servers.
There are interesting parallel discussions happening on a couple of mailing lists I subscribe to. On both Aware and Flashcoders folks are pointing out the shortcomings of the text rendering engines in the respective products. There is no question that Flash is miles ahead of Authorware in this respect and the main complaint with Flash is the lack of right-to-left (RTL) support. While 8-ball (the version of flash currently in development) will include a new Saffron based text rendering engine (source: one, two, three, four, five, six) it would appear that RTL will still not be supported. David Mendels, who manages the Flash product groups, mentioned that the main obstacles are getting it right (apparently it’s a big challenge and therefore risky) as well as the filesize it would add to the player.
Authorware complaints are a bit less “focused” in that there isn’t one single feature everyone wants to see supported. Honestly speaking the text handling in Authorware is quite antiquated and probably in need of a complete overhaul. Even some of the (considered) basic stuff such as dynamic formatting isn’t possible. In the light of all this, the Authorware solution sounds simple - how’s about “dropping” Saffron into Authorware 8. Hell, I’d settle for the Flash MX’04 engine using the better the devil you know argument. I make it sound trivial which it most definitely is not, but if something’s going to be done then what I suggest may have advantages.
Anyhow, all this to make the suggestion that perhaps Macromedia has some cross product shortcomings?
Once I was happy with how the frames and bulkheads were sitting and the hull had taken its’ proper form I went around and tightened up the cable ties holding the panels together. I also taped along the exterior of the seams with duct tape (right over the ties). The sight of the hull sitting there all “sealed up” with duct tape provoked a few more “are you sure you know what you’re doing?” type cracks from the peanut gallery. The mess it prevented during the welding and filleting process made the good natured ribbing a little easier to take though. Besides, the odd looks my “no, not really” responses got sort of gave me a chuckle.
The Current on CBC radio ran a segment this morning on the blogging bill of rights. They discussed a couple of the recent cases of bloggers being fired for writing critically of their employers. I find it interesting to see the differences in reaction various companies are having to blogging. It should be interesting to watch as the technology and the way it is used evolve. Personally, I feel that the organizations which have embraced the trend are reacting more effectively. But I would say that, wouldn’t I.
You can read about the piece here (scroll to the end of “Part 2″). You can also listen to the program archived in Realaudio format:
Part 2
Part 3
I can across Brajeshwar’s nice External JPEG file preloader and thought I’d make a few modifications to use it as a photoviewer to display a collection of images I wanted to share. Ideally I was hoping to be able to simply point it at a directory of jpegs and have it enumerate and then load them one by one. The auto-enumeration requirement however became a bit of a sticking point so I wound up just reading the jpeg count from a text file using loadVariables(). Of course it would also have been just as easy to cobble together a bit of php to do it dynamically on the swfs behalf. Thanks to a pointer from the wise folks on the flashnewbie list it appeared that it might be possible to use a loadVars() hack to achieve the file count as well. It was rumoured that loadVars() would allow me to check if a file existed without initiating a full download of the file so I could then just name my jpegs consecutively and loop until a mising file error on loadVars(). Unfortunately my tests seem to show that loadVars() loads the entire file even while only a portion winds up in the object.
Anyhow, see it in action here. The source is here.
Thanks Brajeshwar!
Some fella is selling his entire collection of the Sub Pop Singles Club (both version 1 and 2) with the exception of one Luna 7″ on ebay. The singles club was a brilliant publishing move that subpop began back in 1988 with a Nirvana 45. Brilliant ’cause it provided an opportunity to showcase bands like Nirvana without their having to get a full length album together and at the same time it was an way for music fans to take a chance on some unknown bands without risking a big chunk of their record buying budget.
Man, for the want of a decent turntable. Well, that and the $5000 plus it’ll take to win the auction.
I picked this up from boingboing.
