There are, literally, hundreds of vultures circling over our house and our neighbor’s house.

It is quite, quite unnerving.

Well, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do it again this year, so over New Year’s we’re off to the Grenadines. This time we have two boats and 6 couples, which will be awesome!

Just like last time, the 5 week mark turns some sort of mental corner that causes all of us to suddenly lose our minds, begin emailing in pirate speak (ye olde matey’s and stuff like that) and generally start the countdown. In honor of the last trip, I composed an old sea shanty about one day on the boat last time. You should have seen the GPS - it looked like a 2 year old attacked an Etch-A-Sketch.

“Ye Olde Leg’nd o’ Swab Kurt”
(or, “How Dead GPSs Still Tell Tales”)
————————————-

Said Cap’n John to deck-swab Kurt,
“Aye want a nap, so steer me boat!
See that fair isle miles to stern,
Aye want ye mates the boat to turn,
And find yon’ port before I wake,
Or else ye crew shall walk the plank!”

Swab Kurt said “Aye!” and told his wench, “Woman fetch me grog, my thirst to quench!”
And set about selecting crew:
Lorna, Jeff, Todd and Patty too!
“Aye’ll take the helm, ’cause ye are dopes!
Fit not for more than pullin’ ropes…”

S’ Kurt set out upon his plan,
Care’d not fer the safety of woman ner man.
“Prepare ye to tack” he’d growl and sneer, Nay lettin’ his crew enjoy their beer.
It passed this way for many an hour,
Bu’ twen John awoke his mood was sour!

“I left ye here with directions clear!
Go over there from over here!
Ye have created quite a mess!”

And then we all looked at the GPS…

Whar straight a line thar might have shown,
The history of how straight the wind had blown…
Nay thar instead a tangl’ed web,
Show’n tha’ boat — had turned and ebbed,
Buy made nay progress since John departed

…the boat what in th’ same spot that she started!

So let ye scurvy brains abserb yon tale,
What be sailin’ boats ‘er chasin whales.
Rule not ye swabs with iron fist,
Er else ye cap’n might be pissed.

I’m working on a project where I’m trying to skew a component (an Image, actually) by an amount set by the user. But I’m running into problems with the skew amount calculation…

The actual project is much more complex, but I could replicate by problem in this simple example. I’m assuming something either in [ my understanding of the Matrix(), the way I’m calculating the offset, or the trig functions I’m using] are where it’s messing up, but I can’t figure it out.

A cookie for anyone who solves the problem…

Okay. The demo is here, and the source is here.

The blue canvas, on the left, is the source of the image I’m trying to skew. I’m drawing it, on the right, with two Image components. The slider says how far the right half should be moved up or down (as a percentage of the height of the right half)… and the left half should stay put but skew so that its right edge matches up with the right half.

It’s almost working, but the edges do not line up. The right half IS deflecting the proper amount, and from what I can tell, I’m doing the math right…

Anyone care to comment as to what’s wrong?

Sorry, Mr. Cralle…

So it pleases me immensely to see richer experiences showing up all over the web recently.  (and not because I moved to a comany who is all about making that happen).

(well, not only).

I’m especially happy to see those experiences NOT target at geeky, internet savvy, uber-users.  When it reaches the general public, that’s good stuff.

Andy posted about how rich internet applications made a cameo on The Office.

And then Kellen forwarded us an email about the Sony Bravia website.  It’s very design-y and has a lot of interaction, feedback, and experience built in.  It makes you want to see what else is under the other areas.  Much MUCH more engaging than a flat website…  The cube and navigation effects are interesting, and the interface is catchy, if not intuitive.  We followed on the email with a discussion about how we get lots of requests for cubes, etc.  For serious, daily use applications, maybe not the best design… but for an occaisional, marketing, kiosk, emotional punch it works well.

Now, if you go play with the website, find the Rabbit claymation section.  Watch the commercial and then the making of.  Nothing to do with Rich Experiences… it’s just really cool.

… and my dad told me not to be an art major…

… you see how well Pre-Med worked out…

I’m not a Microsoft fan. I think the combination of their relatively crappy product(s), assuming their non-commercial customers are criminals and/or mindless drones, and the inaccessibility of their support system (I’ve found it far easier to Google for Microsoft support issues rather than using Microsoft’s support search site… and can you find a phone number on there anywhere?) make them a good candidate for technical hatred.

But the thing that really gets me is the lack of even remotely honest labeling. There was the instance where they upgraded everyone to the new (crappy) Internet Explorer 7 via the “Critical Updates” section of Windows Update… Which then followed on with future (actual) critical updates to fix the holes in IE7…

And now, this… I needed to sign up for Windows Messenger MSN Messenger Hotmail Windows Live whatever they’re calling it now since we use the Microsoft messnger at work.  It gives you a hotmail address, so now I have a hotmail address.  Fabulous.  I never use the Hotmail address, but occaisionally my messenger pops up an alert telling me I have email in my inbox.  It’s always marketing crap from Microsoft, so I found my way into the preferences to turn off all communication from Microsoft, other than the required “Updates, changes to the service, or information vital to the service.

I’m okay with that…  “We have a security flaw”, “Your storage just got upgraded to X gigabytes”, “Here’s your lost password” — all relevant and useful information that I am totally willing to accept.

Then this arrived this morning…

Now, I’m sorry, but I seriously doubt that getting Spooky haloween packs, Getting Sweet Stuff Now, and getting marketing emails for Windows Live OneCare counts as “Updates, Changes, or Information vital to the service”.

I think it’s especially telling that they REMIND you that this email is being sent under those pretenses, and that if you don’t like it, don’t let the e-door hit you on the e-butt on the e-way out.

Most people have heard that China maintains the Golden Shield, a state firewall run in order to censor unapproved websites from the Chinese people, and to survey who is trying to access them.

Picidae is trying to change all that, with a very interesting, and relatively simple idea.

• A person in China surfs to a website run off of a pici-server — a computer running Mac OS X, which is outside of the Golden Shield. The URL to the server could be found by talking to someone outside of China, by word of mouth, etc.
  • There’s a whole network of these, and the network can be grown by adding an inexpensive new computer anywhere in the world, so it would be nearly impossible and massively labor intensive to Shield them all
  • The individual servers do not know that any other servers exist, nor does the main organizer keep a list, so literally anyone, anywhere could be running one of these, and there’s no away to find it.
• That website has a simple text box and a button.
• The person enters the website they want to see, that may be censored.
• The page, locally on their computer, encrypts the URL so snooping eyes can’t see what they are requesting.
• The pici-server decrypts the data, surfs to the requested website, and generates a single image of it — one huge JPG. It also looks where links are, and maps those areas of the image to be clickable, linking back to the pici-server. It’s called an ImageMap, and has been around forever…
• The image and its maps are sent back to the person — nothing incriminating other than a JPG image that the firewall can’t read…
• The person reads the information off of the image, clicks an area of the ImageMap, and the cycle continues

Here’s a link to the main site.

Here’s how it works.

Here’s what the user in China will experience. I tried it on this blog and it looked identical - you’d never know unless you looked at the code behind the page…

Obviously content shown in Flash (Flex) or any other dynamic content (Javascript, AJAX, video, etc) will not work on this type of network, but hey, a big fat hole in censorship in a great thing.  It also looks really easy to set up your website to proxy to a server or to use your webspace as a server if you’re so inclined — you can even use your Mac to run the server over your cable or DSL connection!

I hired on have really enjoyed working here (at Cynergy… as well as out of my home which is where I’m located).  Fortunately, the demand for our time hasn’t slowed down, and just the other day Carson posted yet another plea to the community to send us your best and brightest.

Just thought I’d pass it along…

Delta just called me.  One of the repair shops that is an hour or so away is going to come to my house, haul it out of the basement, pick up the saw, take it to their shop to repair, and then bring it back to my house.  That’s a lot of lugging around a 300 pound hunk of cast iron!

It took me a while to get to the right person at Delta to handle this, but I have to say I’m pleased with the result (assuming it goes through as planned).  The people I’ve spoken with have been very nice and seemed eager to help me, and (honestly… not “you’re supposed to apologize when the customer complains”) apologetic that their product had problems.  Their official policy is that it’s my bag to get the saw to them — it’s my fault for living in the boonies so I could drive it to them or ship it to them on my dollar.  But since I called, told them what I have been dealing with, they had the power to change the policy to make me, the customer, happy.

I’ll keep you posted on Act 4: The Extraction (I think she’s too big to get out the door, so they may have to disassemble it…)

I was working on a project where I needed to draw a colored rectangle using the drawing API, then mask it into a non-rectangle using a user-selectable PNG file. The transparency in the PNG would determine what parts of the colored rectangle shows through, and at what alpha.

Easy enough…

After an hour or two of screwing around with it, I finally figured out that you need to set the CacheAsBitmap setting for BOTH the mask image as well as the masked object for the transparency to be used in the masking.

So do this:

myRectangleComponent.cacheAsBitmap = true;
myMaskImage.cacheAsBitmap = true;
myRectangleComponent.mask = myMaskImage;

Here’s an example flex application (with source) showing all combinations of cacheAsBitmap for the rectangle (Canvas) and the mask image. Notice on all but the last one, the Canvas is masked by the extents of the PNG image and not the transparency.

So the takehome message is to set both the mask-er and the mask-ee to cache as a bitmap. I’m not sure exactly why this is necessary, framework-wise, but it mentally makes sense - when the player internally represents it as a bitmap, it can examine the transparency of each pixel and use that information in the mask. I’m less warm and fuzzy about why the masked object needs to be cached as well — I guess it’s for the same reason so the player can evaluate the pixel being shown through the mask, but hey, it works and that’s 99% of what I care about…

Oh - for my friends and family — this is what I do at work. Sorry to be geeky in front of you, but expect more coming soon.