Monday, July 31, 2006

My brother just made me aware of an interesting post in Wikipedia about the local region that I was born called 'The Black Country' - the name is best explained by this quote from Wikipedia - Charles Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop, written in 1841, described how the area's local factory chimneys "Poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air".

Anyway one of the funny things about the Black Country is the local dialect which my Aussie fiance has trouble understanding when we are back home!

eg. "I haven't seen her" becomes "I ay sid 'er"
"Where are you going?" becomes "Where'm yao gooin?"
"No I can't" becomes "nah I'cor"

Maybe I should write my blog posts in Black Country?!

Jon 4:48 PM Permalink

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

I'm sooooo close to completing my upgraded Threadless widget but one thing has me stumped! I'm loading an image from an RSS feed, then onLoadInit I'm resizing the containing mc to the correct dimensions for my widget, then I'm drawing the mc to the bitmap object. Sounds good so far right? except the original size image gets drawn to the bitmap object even though there is a delay before the .draw method is called?! I think I'll call it a night and think about this one tomorrow, if anyone has any suggestions please leave me a comment and save me from a day of headscratching!

Jon 10:32 PM Permalink

I think I have put it off long enough, the Threadless widget is in need of a Flash 8 overhaul and a bug fix in case anyone hasn't noticed to the xml descriptions, I need to modify my xml code slightly to make sure I'm reading the nodeValue so that special characters appear correctly. I am also now going to use the BitmapData class to copy the bitmap to a new holder behind the loaded image rather than loading another copy in, then use the tween class as before to fade the loaded image in over the top. I think my description makes it more complicated than it really is, I will post some code examples once it is finished to illustrate how much code I had to use in the player 7 version in comparison to 8.

Jon 10:29 AM Permalink

Sunday, July 16, 2006

I have just spent the last couple of hours taking my first steps fiddling with Code Igniter, as I have previously mentioned I have been looking for a framework to use on an upcoming project.

Well in 2 hours I have installed and connected the framework to my current freaksauce site database and created a portfolio section which links through to individual pages using the item id. I have used a model, a controller, a couple of views and a helper and I think once I delve deeper into this incredibly intuative framework I will wonder how I ever developed without it! The documentation is excellent, the tutorial videos are very good (although it would be nice to have a few more), and the wiki and forums are full of excellent advice, code examples and tips. If you are familiar with php and you have dabbled with php classes it doesn't take very long to get your head around Code Igniter and certainly makes your code much more readable. I will post more as I learn more...

Jon 10:28 PM Permalink

Saturday, July 15, 2006

It really pisses me off when I go to sign up for a website and someone has already used what is really a very unique username I think. Now I go and try and set up a last.fm account and some teenage girl who can't think of anything original has stolen my online identity. Now you may say that I don't have any more right than she does, and I suppose I don't but I have a website called freaksauce.com, I have a flickr and delicious account called freaksauce, I have an email address jon@freaksauce.com and now when someone sees freaksauce on last fm they will think I listen to Weezer!!!???

Jon 2:18 PM Permalink