Friday Humor with MC Frontalot

This morning I had no idea what I would put in my Friday humor column until I cam across "It's Pitch Black". Who is Frontalot and what does it mean that it is pitch black. Back before games with all these pretty pictures, in fact before people started to make pictures out of ASCII text there was a game I remember playing on my Apple IIc and on my friends C64/128. The game was Zork. A text adventure game where you go room to room trying to solve puzzles and not be eaten by a grue. If I remember correctly, the game always started with "It is pitch black...".

Frontalot is a nerdcore hiphop artist. This is the first I heard of him, so I guess I'm not as nerdy as I thought. Of course I always thought I was more of a ( band ) geek. Anyway, read on for the video. ...

Where's the wellness list?

The most recent controversy for the WWE involves "The List". A list of wrestlers who purchased products from Signature Pharmacy. Signature Pharmacy is the pharmacy under investigation before the Benoit tragedy that now has many, many microscopes on it. The people on this list are either dead, fired, suspended or losing current pushes. Personally, I think the WWE could do well to take all the steps necessary for the public to believe in the companies wellness program. These suspensions and firings are a good start but I've been paying attention to politics enough lately that I don't think it is the right tact for addressing the issue to the fans ( and some intelligent non-fans ). ...

Where is the wellness list? Where is the list of wrestlers who just work their asses off day in and day out and entertain the fans? Where is the list of wrestlers who failed the program and have worked hard to get clean. Where is the list of wrestlers who are on prescription drugs and the medical reasons they are on them?

That last one is definately unlikely, due to privacy issues, but the idea is transparency. The wwe needs to create a website called WWEwellness.com ( it is currently available ) and not only be responsible ( which they say they are being ) but show it clearly and irrefutably. If people refute it, take the necessary steps to cover the point that was brought up.

Steroids and other drug use has plagued the WWE since before it dropped the "F" for and "E". It has probably been an issue since there was an extra "W" as well. However, in those days people didn't know the dangers of some of the drugs that are being found now. In some ways, the drug use is a tradition that has been passed down from a time when people didn't know any better. Now we know better and it is going to take some serious growing pains to get clear of it.

Having been a wrestler, I know many people who think you can only make it if you are big, and that you can only get big through steroid use. I don't agree, even though the widebodies do tend to take center stage at the WWE. Any changes for the better will be uncomfortable for the WWE writers. However, I have faith that the talent, writers and everyone else involved are more than capable of coming up with something even better than they have now. Even better because they don't have this cloud constantly hanging over their heads. Plus the psychology used in the sport will be even better because that will, once again, be the focus.

Quality Parkour Trip Documentary

A group of traceurs from England participated in a parkour pilgrimage to Lisses, France. As with many traceurs, they brought along a video camera. Unlike some, they actually put together a decent parkour documentary. Check out the video below. ...

For now I've got the links posted, but I may be making a way to see them all soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mzyvI3e2rA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0uLi4gHhfU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ4Nk8Cxim8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YoaLttVJns

Runtime CSS with Flex 2

At my work we haven't used CSS much. This is probably because in Flash there isn't as much call for it as there is in HTML work. However, cascading style sheets are used in many HTML type web apps because it makes it easier for a simple application to look dramatically different and thus be reuseable/resellable. With the power of flex, and the simplicity of building apps with flex builder I was wondering how to best go about it. In my modular applications post I mentioned using modules to mimic the functionality, but it is actually even easier than that. ...

Ted Patrick, Adobe System's Flex Evangelist, has a post over at onflex.org that describes how to use Flex's version of runtime CSS. Check out the article and have some fun.

A great tool for CSS in flex is the Flex Style Explorer. Just select something you would like to style and use the flex based interface to make the changes. Then on the right hand side you should see you CSS.

Friday Humor with Tom Wilson

A few days ago I mentioned that one of my favorite movies of the past is Back to the Future. One of the people I've wondered about it Tom Wilson, the guy who played Biff, Griff, and Bufor "Mad Dog" Tannen in the Back to the Future series. I hadn't really seen him in other shows / movies that I've watched. While I may have looked him up on the internet movie database at one point, I didn't see anything that I would remember other than BTTF. After following some links on bttf.com recently I found out that he is now a comedian. Read more for a video clip. ...

For more videos, you can check out his you tube page or his website.

I've always had a thing for comedians who make me laugh with music. Recently I featured Flight of the Conchords on my site. I grew up listening to Wierd Al Yankovic. I really do laugh out loud when I watch Wayne Brady make up a song on Whose Line is it Anyway. One of my teachers in college has a funny Country/Metal/Rap band called Travis Shredd and the Good ol' Homeboys. In fact he is Travis Shredd ( not a good ole homeboy ). All good stuff, I'd love to hear about more.

ATI Linux drivers going open source?

When I first tried installing linux one of my biggest problems was video card driver support problems. I have an ATI card and at the time had dual monitors. The open source drivers for my chipset didn't work as I would like with my setup. However, trying to get the binary drivers set up properly gave me problems as well. This was one of the big things that made me leave linux at that time. When Fedora 7 came out and I tried it again, I only had one ( much larger ) monitor to worry about so I was okay with the open source drivers that were set by default. Even though it bugs me that I use my CPU for my eye candy effects and the Graphics card just sits there. That is why this article on cnet news caught my eye. ...

So it looks like AMD/ATI wants to accelerate efforts in the open source community. The question on everyone's mind is what does this mean? Will the drivers be open source? Will they open up the specifications so that decent open source drivers can be written?

At this point nobody knows for sure. The best place to keep an eye would be phoronix.com that is the hub of ATI graphics card drivers for linux. All the articles I've looked at have pointed to the phoronix.com article on the acceleration of efforts in the open source community.

If ATI does open source the drivers this could be a big boon to Linux on the desktop. As more applications are able to tap into the full potential of graphics cards on the platform, higher end stuff will be made. Hopefully this will lead to one of the big downfalls of the linux desktop, games. If games can count on the ability to tap into the graphics card, more will be ported and written natively to the platform.

Silverlight's official launch

A couple weeks ago I tried to install Silverlight in Opera to no avail. Little did I know that the official launch hadn't occured yet. I see that today was the Official launch of Silverlight from Microsoft. The cool news is that there are plans for a linux version of Silverlight. The bad news, it still doesn't work in Opera. ...

Okay, so by cross browser compatible they mean that there is support for the main browsers that compete with them on Mac and PC. The ( currently ) tertiary competitor still doesn't work, let alone have support.

Thinking this might have been a version thing I tried to install it in the Alpha version of Opera 9.5, codenamed Kestrel. Faster browser :), same results.

Beyond the world of creating rich internet applications for work I am also an avid wrestling fan. I have constantly thought on the idea of a flash/flex based player for the WWE pay-per-views and weekly programming. Low and behold, the silverlight page has WWE right there as one of the examples. I obviously couldn't check it out in Opera so I had to hit my view in firefox button and check out WWE's silverlight launch page. Honestly, I saw this coming. Hopefully it will work better than having to watch a pay per view in the Windows Media Player ( upgrading if you haven't in a long time and missing hours of the show to technical issues :irked: ).

It will be interesting to see what happens with Silverlight. With Microsoft, it obviously has a whole lot of weight behind it. Do we really need another entrant into the field of rich media/rich application development? Will this crush flash( which works fine in Opera )? I'm amazed at some of the people putting their large eggs into the Silverlight basket. That will make a big difference in the short term.

Rent A BTTF Delorean!!!!!

I've written before about the movies from my youth that I still like. My wife calls these my young boy movies. One of the biggest, especially due to my love of Huey Lewis and the News, is Back to the Future. A friend at work is also a big fan and today sent me a link to a place where you can rent a Back to the Future Delorean! Most of his email was this

someone think of a reason why we need this:):)

Friday Humor with Iceman

My wife makes fun of some of my "young boy movies" that I still pay homage to from time to time. Top Gun is one of those movies. It's nice to see Val Kilmer making fun of his old movie and role. It just goes to show that he is a real genius.
...

And for more Iceman/Top Gun humor check out this video:

Creating Modular Applications

A common application type to create is one large application that has many smaller applications in it. With flex builder you can always build a monolithic application that could do that. However, if you ever want to edit, debug or even add more features you are just making modification more difficult. So before Flex 2.0.1 came out I was trying to create the framework for such an application and it took quite some doing to get it to work right. At that time, flex didn't support modular applications directly ( or at least not officially ) and I had to come up with a way that felt very kludgy. When it came time to implement the framework a little while later flex 2.0.1 was out but I still hadn't heard about modules. Now I have and it makes things much easier, especially with a little help from some other info on the web. ...

My application was a simplistic (web)desktop that allows you to open applications. Because Panels and TitleWindows are the most like applications on the normal desktop they were being used along with the PopUpManager. Using Panels in conjunction with PopUpManager allows the dragging of windows and a usable focus management system. This system worked well when the applications were written into the main application but broke down when I loaded an external swf.

To finally make it work ( before I knew about modules ), I had to load in the swf then listen for the creationComplete event of my application before I could use it. Then I had to take my application ( based on Panel/TitleWindow ) out of the display list of the SWFLoader object I was using and place it in the display list of my main application. At this point I could then drag the windows and it worked for the most part. However, I had problems with scrollbars and the file size was bigger because of the added overhead of the SystemManager for my application which got thrown away anyway. I also didn't like having to write so much clean up code. It felt like such a waste of resources.

Luckily during the implementation phase, while trying to figure out how to make the scroll bars work, I came across Modules. This seemed like the way to go, less overhead and made to work with the SystemManager it is loaded into directly. At first all I gained was the lower overhead and working scroll bars. I still had the same load - listen - remove - add - cleanup scenario that was quite kludgy. But it worked effectively so I left it at that.

Recently, while reading a flex coders mailing list digest I found a link to a blog posting titled "Popup Dialogs as Modules". It explained how to turn a TitleWindow into a loadable module directly. Following Alex's example I was able to do a little refactoring and clean up my code considerably. Not to mention, it seems to run a bit snappier now ( though I have no benchmarks to prove it ). Unlike some of the comments to his post, I was able to use my modules in their own namespace within my larger project.

The final minor annoyance was debugging. I kept having to copy the debug file and rename it to use debugging on my modules. Then I remembered another posting I came across during my module research. It was entitled "How I Debug with Flex Modules" and this simple fix worked to remove this minor annoyance quite well. All you end up doing is loading the module based on whether or not your main application url has the word debug in it. I went a slightly different route for my case that looked like this:

var modulePath:String = APP_DIRECTORY + this.fileLink;// Check to see if the application is the debug version, and if
// so then use the debug module...
if ( Application( Application.application ).url.indexOf( "debug" ) >= 0 )
{
  var debugFileLink:String = this.fileLink.replace( ".swf", "-debug.swf" );
  modulePath =  APP_DIRECTORY + debugFileLink;
}

I am very excited about using modules in many other ways as well. Some things that I have thought of, as well as read are:

• More Object Oriented design of large applications, allowing for easier updates and debugging ( I am doing this now )
• Creating new style sheets loaded at runtime
• Updating and adding complex algorithms to an application similar to dynamic link libraries
• Modules as config files for larger apps so deployment is quicker and easier.

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Daryl "Deacon" Ducharme is currently Director of Application Development for the Interactive Agency Provis Media Group, LLC which helps organizations enhance identity, connect with customers and increase productivity.