Posts

Yep, the big job I’ve been working on is now finished, the only problem we had was trying to upload a Toast file of the finished hybrid CD to the client’s FTP server, so we had to send it express mail instead. It’s good to have it finished and the client is happy with it too, nice.

To celebrate getting it finished I gave Annie an iPod Shuffle to say thanks for putting up with my general stressed, tired, absent self whilst working on this project. She was happy as I know she’s wanted an iPod for a while, it’s good to have a happy wife ;)

Well, in order to counter-act the general geeky nature of this blog so far (I did warn it would be like this!) here’s some family pictures (I’ll add stuff about CSS, PHP, XHTML and other acronyms another time!).

Nat, Mom, Dad and Cake. My birthday, 27/08/05.

Nat and Daddy read a book.

Natalie and Pooh bear. (I think Pooh was talking too much!)

Well, that’s all for this post, oh, apart from one last bit of geekiness. I’ve been trying out the new Firefox 1.5 Beta and it’s pretty good, you can drag tabs to re-arrange them which is pretty useful. Also, for Apple Mac users like myself it’s good news as keyboard commands like up/down arrows for scrolling pages work now too, it generally feels more responsive too. Anyway, good night!

~Rick

Yep, did a little work on the layout of the site so it’s looking a little bit better. A bit more tweaking to do, plus I haven’t checked it in IE on windows so I’m not certain it’s all sitting the way it should, I’ll get round to checking it soon.

So, what else? making good progress on the Flash/Director project I’m working on, hopefully get that all finished on Thursday and get it sent to the client for final approval, it’s been a tough job with quite a few challenges. It’s one thing to get up to speed on new software but it’s another thing to deal with unexpected bugs / glitches, it’s been one issue after another on this job.

I said I’d talk about this project so I might as well start, the project is a piece of software that is used to choose and assemble individual PDF pages and assemble them into books. The framework for the software is made up of Director MX 2004 and uses a Flash MX 2004 movie as the main interface aspect. It also uses Tabuleiro’s Arca database Xtra and Integration New Media’s Impressario Xtra for PDF processing.

One of the biggest issues I faced (right near the end of the project!) was a weird issue with a Flash movie with several MM listbox components running inside the Director projector running on Win XP. I had no problems in any other OS, Win 98 / 2000, Mac OSX/OS9. The application would freeze when clicking on a listbox item, I figured out that it only happened on machines with slower processors running XP which is why I hadn’t spotted it as my main test PC was obviously able to cope.

There was no solution other than to change the listboxes, so I bought a set of Ghostwire Studios components and they fixed the problem. The only drawback was that it meant I had to recode a fair bit as they don’t share the exact same API as the Macromedia components set, however, they’re more lightweight and don’t cause the problem!

It’s been good working with Director again, I haven’t used it much for years so it was interesting getting into it again. It was weird working with Flash inside of it as it meant using a mixture of Flash Actionscript and Director’s Lingo syntax, plus Director lets you use Javascript syntax too now so there’s so many ways to do things, it get’s kind of confusing though!

Well, I’m going to leave it there, time to go and sleep! Oh yeah, I did say this was a place for me to geek out!

~Rick

Well, finally I’m going to start blogging, I’ve had this site sitting here for ages but hadn’t got round to doing anything about it. It still needs a visual identity but I thought I’d just get on with posting anyway.

So what’s my blog about? well, topics will revolve about the things I’m interested in, it’s part technology blog (web development, graphic design), part family diary (photos, stories) and just a place for me to write about what I’m thinking about, it’s as much for my own enjoyment as for anybody else to read.

Suburbia is definitely a place for me to geek out though! Currently I’m working on some development using Flash / Director and it’s raised a lot of challenges, so I’m hoping to throw in some of my experiences there.

Also, the actual blog engine running this site is one of my own projects so I’ll be actively developing that more over the next few months. You can see another couple of blogs based on it, www.musthavemore.com, which is my friend Alyn’s blog and also www.dundeeconcrete.com which is a blog site documenting the construction progress of a concrete skatepark being built in Dundee just now.

So, that’s it for this first blog post, next step is sort it out visually and get it looking better.

~Rick