If you’ve done any Flash/JavaScript interaction then I’m sure you’re well aware of the different approaches you can take.  There’s getURL, fscommand, and the JavaScript Integration Kit.  While I’ve tried all three my new favorite is Flash 8’s ExternalInterface class.  This is by far the cleanest way to do Flash/JavaScript integration.
While this article goes into [...]

This morning a good friend of mine invited me to watch a Dallas building get demolished. Unfortunately I didn’t get to witness the event in person, but was able to catch it on channel 5 news. Luckily I was able to Tivo the implosion and am posting it here for your enjoyment.
The implosion took [...]

I’ve been digging around for a while trying to find a way for Ruby on Rails to access the command line. To be more specific, I’ve been trying to get RoR to kick off an FFmpeg process. My objective has been to allow video uploads through a rails app and then kick off [...]

It’s been a good while since I’ve imported data into mysql using the command line.  In the past I’ve used the load data infile syntax, but this time decided to use the mysqlimport client instead.  The raw data from the csv file looked like the following:
“Microsoft”, “MSFT”
“Macromedia”, “MACR”
“Google”, “GOOG”
and to actually parse this data and [...]

I stumbled across this ZDNet article talking about the beta versions of Microsoft’s next generation of designer tools.  While I’m a huge fan of Macromedia’s and Adobe’s web tools, I decided to download Microsoft’s Expression Graphic Designer.  It seems to be very functional and have all the sorts of features you’d expect in a graphics [...]

I recently posted about extracting jpeg frames from video files. I received an email from a reader who was having problems with the singlejpeg argument. It turns out that the latest version of FFmpeg doesn’t support this argument, which has now been replaced by mjpeg. I haven’t had the opportunity to upgrade, [...]

Ruby on Rails does something fairly intelligent that I’ve found to come in handy. Let’s say that you have a model named “Dog”, this will map to a table named “dogs”. It’s even smart enough to know that the plural form of “company” is not “companys”, but “companies”. I’ve generally accepted this [...]

I’ve been experimenting a good bit with Ruby on Rails’ file upload capabilities. Overall I’ve been very impressed with the ease of use when it comes to uploading a file and writing it to disk. Of course anything is easy once you know how. Ruby’s syntax is very different than what you’re probably used to. [...]

I really don’t understand blog spam. For that matter I don’t really understand spam. I know what it means, but I can’t seem to believe that it’s the least bit effective. Maybe I’m not the ideal spam recipient, but I’ve never talked to anyone that’s fallen into a spam scam.
A major problem I dealt with [...]

I recently posted about SensorLogic receiving another round of funding.  I was led to believe this from the following Dallas BizJournal article:
http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2006/01/09/story6.html
It turns out that the article is completely inaccurate and that the initial round was completed at $11 million.  Thanks to Ray for clearing that up.