Hello to the five or so people who accidentally find my blog.

If you’ve been here before you may notice that I’ve switched the design back to the standard theme and also changed the name of the blog.  Basically I’ve realised that although I am a web developer I can’t always post about developer stuff.  Writing tutorials for example, if you want to attempt to do them well anyway, takes bloody ages and I don’t have time to do that regularly.  Also although I may find a cool bit of code or nice way of doing something 9 times out of 10 I think about popping it up here and then realise that it’s probably going to be of interest to a very small number of people who have probably either discovered it themselves or come up with their own fix.

While I love my job as a developer I also started this blog because I’m interested in writing.  I used to write plays, sketches and I’ve got a couple of unfinished film scripts and novels knocking around that will probably never see the light of day.  But to be honest if they turn into anything that would be a bonus as the real purpose of them is for my own personal enjoyment of writing.

So I’ve decided that while I’m still going to have techy stuff on here, which would be impossible to avoid with the job I do, I’m not going to limit myself to just writing about code.

I’m also going to *gasp* do a bit of work on the site by actually doing a design and implementing it to fit in with my new content.

Right now I should probably apologise to the many readers of this blog which would be disappointed by this approach, but I see the stats – adding blowing tumbleweed would be an improvement.

Hopefully this new approach will get me writing more, and hopefully there’s someone out there who may be interested in what’s here, but realistically guys – I’m doing it for myself.   Sorry.

Here’s an interesting widget from www.nseries.com/vine.

Right – I’m pretty grumpy! Very grumpy in fact.  I’ve been working on a project and needed to use tweening.  So I thought no bother, quick job I’ll just use the standard Adobe AS3 tween classes.  Nice.  However all of a sudden I noticed that some of them started to hang.  Not all the time, I couldn’t replicate it consistently and also as the app relied on using the animations finishing to trigger the next event it was breaking the app.

If you’re having this problem check out this blog post and there is a fix in the comments.

That’ll do for now…..

Sorry – I just realised……. Will fix soon as!

I’m putting together a video player and I wanted to test the scrubber (the little button you use to drag the playback) was working.  More importantly I wanted to test it couldn’t be dragged further than the video had downloaded.  So I uploaded an flv to my site and tested the player.  This was fine the first time and then the stand alone player cached the flv, so I couldn’t test it anymore.  A quick google and I found this really handy tip.

Ok, this morning on the way to work I stopped at my normal coffee place, grabbed my coffee and sat outside so i could have a ciggarette and wake up before a hard days coding (note that employers – a HARD DAY’s CODING).

I was watching the world go by and enjoying the Diggnation podcast when a deliver truck pulled up.  The blokie driving got out and walked round to the back smoking a fag himself (note to American readers this mean having a ciggarette, not shooting someone who’s made a different lifestyle choice) and when he got round to the back of the van he pocked the half smoked ciggarette up the exhast pipe for later while he made the delivery.  OK, I suppose it wasn’t high tar enough.  However the next bit really confused me – to make clear this guy was a normal bloke, wearing normal clothes, I’m pointing this out so you understand he had pockets.  He had his lighter in his hand.  Obviously like the ciggarette he needed to put it somewhere so he could load up the little trolley for his delivery.  So he stuck it in his shoe.  Not down the side next to his foot, in the sole…….. What sort of mental gymnastics do you make to decide that this is logically the best place to put it, bypassing all pockets on the way down?

Anyway – thought I’d share.

(Also had a wierd dream that Tor (the wife) died Charlie’s (the baby) hair and it all fell out.  It’s been a strange start to a Friday)

OK – so they forgot to tell me it was for flash player 8.  Oh well.  So I’ve done it for ActionScript 2 with some controls for testing.

Papervision 3d AS2

Have fun!

Just a quickie, but I thought I’d share this.  Basically all of a sudden Flex Builder stopped showing me errors in the problems panel.  I couldn’t work out what on earth was going on, I was being show the visible warnings on the actual lines of code that were wrong when I was looking at the file and I was getting the alert box pop up to let me know there was an error when I compiled but nada in the problems panel.  I paniced and reinstalled flex builder.  That didn’t work, I went through everything and eventually found the problem.

A few days ago I had loads of projects I was working on and so I started using working sets to limit the number of projects I was seeing in the resources panel.  Somehow the problems panel reset itself to filter the error reporting to just the working set selected.  I didn’t see this and that is when I stopped getting my error reporting.

Solution, click on the filter button to the right of the problems panel.  Select the “on any element” radio button and then ok.  Should sort the problem.

Ok – I’ve popped some advertising on the site.  If it gets too intrusive I’ll take it off, and if google can’t work out that I’m actually in the UK and NOT spain then I’ll definately take it off!!

I hope that the ads don’t detract from the rest of the content. but hey – I’m a freelancer now and I need to fund my website hosting habbit somehow (I’m hosting 5 sites and this is the only one really doing anything – I’ve got a blog for my 18month old son for goodness sake!)