Tuesday, December 14, 2004

One of the real bonuses of living in a warm country like Australia is the open air cinemas like the Moonlight Cinema in Centennial park but even better check out the photos of the Open Air cinema in the Royal Botanic Gardens what an incredible backdrop for enjoying a flick!

Jon 3:54 PM Permalink

I have recently started playing around with streaming flash video, this is due to the fact that I bought a digital camera that also records movies a few months back and the fact that it is a great way for my family on the opposite side of the planet to keep up to date with my life. Last night using standard V2 components and PHPObject I managed to make my life a little easier.

When my swf loads the media playback component and comboBox component are loaded onto the stage. Then I initialise my PHPObject and call the getFlvList function from my php class on my web server. This opens my flv directory reads the contents and returns the filenames. Then I populate the comboBox with the filenames and add a listener to detect the onChange event, this then concatenates the filename with the baseURL variable and tells the media player to open and play that file. So now all I have to do is drop my .flv files in the correct directory, easy!

Jon 9:03 AM Permalink

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Check out this Flash app that shows the diatone and quadratone progressions in John Coltrane's 'Giant Steps' whilst playing the music in the background. Now I studied music at uni and I don't ever remember discussing diatone and quadratone progressions? Maybe my memory is failing me 7 years on...

While on the muso tangent, I just found a link to a new UK mag Acoustic Magazine and it appears my old teacher from my Conservatiore days, Simon Dinnigan, is one of the writers! If you ever get the chance you should go and see Simon play, even if you don't like classical guitar his technique is amazing and he makes John Williams look just ok. Now I just have to find the mag in Sydney...

Jon 1:35 PM Permalink

Monday, December 06, 2004

Whilst perusing my live bookmarks I noticed this little gem from Gizmodo

Summed up in this brilliant quote, "Thank you, Toyota. I was afraid there for a while Japan had stopped being suitably weird."

UPDATE: just realised the link was broken, sorry I have just fixed it.

Jon 4:50 PM Permalink

Thursday, December 02, 2004

I'm from England so I'm used the temperature changing 1 degree (c) a day (usually on a downward slope!) but yesterday here in Sydney it went from 42 degrees C to 22 degrees C between 4pm and 6pm. I can't get my head around that...

Jon 10:21 AM Permalink