g.wygonik's flash experiments

Finally coming up for air after being deep in work.

To start with, a site that I've been working on for a couple months went into "beta" mode and is publicly available online -- Around the World For Free. A Flash-based social network revolving around Alex Boylan (winner of Amazing Race Season 2) traveling around the world with nothing but the clothes on his back (and Zsolt, who's the producer/cameraman/editor/et al). Alex's success or failure will depend upon the interaction with people all around the world via the website. It's a pretty interesting concept and he seems like he'll be able to pull it off (or at least make for engaging video updates).

The site makes use of Yahoo Maps for Flash which has made this one a really fun and sometimes frustrating project. We have a long way to go to get the functionality we envision working correctly, but there's something simply cool about being able to show all the people in the on-screen map area who are signed up, and jump to their profile, their user-generated media, their friends, etc. It's much deeper than it appears at first-glance.

Recently my boss came to town to have meetings with Alex and Burton Roberts (from Survivor - Pearl Islands) to pitch Around the World For Free to some sponsors. After their meetings they all came back to my house! It was kind-of strange having three reality TV stars sitting in my living room. Luckily I lost most of my ability to be "star struck" a long time ago, so there was no making a fool of myself or anything.

A while back I had posted asking if anyone knew of good photography sites for dealing with stock work, as my wife was looking for an outlet. Well, a couple years later, I recently saw a mention of PhotoShelter. I read some good things about them, looked them over and there was just something about them that seemed better than some of the "old standards"; much more "hip" and seemingly more in-line with our 30-something, tech-oriented, "Web 2.0" lifestyle. So, she took the plunge and is setting up her site there. You can take a look-see at what she's uploaded so-far, but I know it will take some time to upload everything. (I do wish TimeWarner would boost upload speed from the so 2001-ish 384k. Even 1Mbit at this point would be heaven! )

On a more personal note (for family, friends, anyone who cares), we set up a LiveJournal account to act as a "garden diary". Since we have never gardened in Texas before, it seemed like an easy way to keep track of what worked, what didn't, and to interact with others in the area who have more region-specific experience. Most everything we planted did well, but some things were just "off". It also allows for some pretty pictures of vegetables. Check it out.

While I use Firefox 99.7% of the time, there are those rare times that I'll open IE7 to test a site or to check to see how something runs in it compared to other browsers.

Well, if you've ever tried to access a SWF (or MOV or MPG) file directly in IE7 and expected the file to load and open, you'll know that by default it doesn't. Instead it will seem to download and then you'll get an "Object Expected" script error.

There are many many posts clogging the tubes asking about "why is IE7 broken?" when this sort of thing happens. After much searching, I finally came across a reply to a forum post that had a solution that worked perfectly.

Obviously the first "solution" people state is to wrap the object in HTML or JS. All well and good, and proper best-practice, but there are many sites that just have too many media objects to do that with (including some fun time wasters). This is the only solution that will work without making your users do something to their browser or registry.

Second solution is to add each and every media URL to the "Trusted Sites" zone. No.

Third, and the one I went with, is to add a registry key to your machine that turns off this annoyance and makes it work like IE6 does (just open the damn SWF! )

I take no blame if you edit your registry and muck something up, but here's what you do:

• Open regedit
• Drill-down to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl
• Add a new key: FEATURE_BLOCK_LMZ_SCRIPT
• Add a new DWORD to the key: iexplore.exe
• Give the DWORD a value of: 0 (zero)
• Re-open IE7 and go to the URL of the SWF (or MOV/MPG/et al) in question

I'm sure that this could, perhaps, in some obscure way make your browsing less secure (even though IE6 did it differently for years), but on the flip-side, it makes it more usable and less annoying.

Surprisingly, there is no option in IE7's preferences (even in advanced) that let's you change this setting; it has to be done via registry key.

I've been trying for three days to get connected to our SVN repository via SVN+SSH from both my Windows box and my Mac. While it's no problem for my co-workers who are savvy with Terminal or command line linux tools, it was a complete pain for me since I'm used to the Visual SourceSafe "Right-click->Check Out" method (read: simple GUI).

After going through several free/OSS clients on Windows, and a few on my Mac, I finally saw a link to one I hadn't heard of before -- SmartSVN. It said that it would do SVN+SSH so I gave it a whirl and lo-and-behold it worked first time through!

While it will still take me a day or so to come to grips with the SVN workflow, at least just connecting isn't an issue anymore.

So, for future reference for anyone searching for an EASY way to use SVN+SSH on a Windows box (though the same client is available for OSX and Linux) I would recommend skipping all the Putty/PuttyGen/TortoiseSVN/pull-your-hair-out methods and try this way. (I really can't believe the convoluted way you need to set things up to use SVN+SSH... seriously.)

I love to see all the real-time flight tracking tools that are on the web these days. My wife is returning today from two weeks in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina, and due to some nasty weather near NC I wanted to see how her flight was progressing.

I've used the simple "here's a map and here's where the plane is" trackers before, but today I saw a site that I had not seen before. This site, Aeroseek, allows you to view a flight's status on a 2D map, or import the flight into Google Earth with auto updates every minute!

Here's my wife's flight getting close to Richmond (she has to fly from NC to Jersey and then to Austin -- a weird flight path this one).

Now I can almost see what she can see (and quiz her on it later). I love technology.

g.

Thanks to a post on Joystiq, I've created a new avatar in a fan-created, Flash version of the Nintendo Wii's "Mii" avatar creation system. While it's not as far as I would have taken it (server-side PNG creation), it's a fun app with a very easy to use interface (which of course speaks to the Wii's interface that it's based on)

I'm actually debating about getting a Wii, just because it's nice to sit down and just jump into a game every now and then -- without going on "missions" or waiting for 9gigs of environments to load. There are a few games on XBox Live Arcade that I play for that reason, but not many "real" games have done that for me. It seems like the Wii will have more of those kind-of games. But I won't do it at launch; we'll wait til Spring or so to see what's really out there for it.