Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Category: Personal

  • Motion Man, No More Statcom Neihbors, Bling Bling, LCService Stalemate, & Lack of Follow Up

    Dude, I used After Effects most of the day. Talk about a serious change of pace. After a long time (really long) of Flash MX, Dreamweaver MX (for coding), and Visual Source Safe, it’s just a totally different feeling. May not last long, but gonna lay down the funk as much as possible so the peeps at the meeting my co-workers and I have Tuesday with the another dept. are impressed and inspired enough to really get hyped up about what we are working on, therefore making collaboration that much more positive & constructive. Naturally, as much as I loved what I was able to accomplish in a day after such a long absence from using AE, I seemed to have failed once again in my Typography. Her majesty gave me some great suggestions, but I don’t think I can just stick to being an Animator when I’m not coding (or mixing audio); I really need to take a Typography course or two so I can at least get a good jolt in the right direction. It’s gotta be my weakest point next to networking in my skillsets. Thank God for geek friends!

    <a href=”http://www.statcom.com/”>Statcom</a>, a sister company of sorts, had some devs working nearby me (across from my cube, in what I call no-mans-land, QA is on the East Side, I’m on the West SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE with the managers and Vice President of SIS). Erik, the other Flasher that works in my department, said farewell this week as well as the Java guys who I also love to hang with. They headed to the 5th floor (it’s pretty pimp when I went up there), but man, I’m gonna miss just knowing they are there. Yeah, we can still play DoD together, and go to lunch, and play pool in the break room, but… the same reason I miss them is the same reason I love tech-conferences; MORE GEEKS! Change is good, though, and this is for the best as they grow as a company.

    Her majesty <a href=”http://mediadiva.net/mt/archives/000303.html”>scanned the rock</a> I got her… no, that is NOT glass…

    Dude, 2 new features I GOTTA implement into my blog somehow:
    – comment subscriptions & management so you can unsubscribe from a post’s comments (that’s it on the management; wanna keep simple). I have a hard time continuing discussions with people on blogs longer than about an hour as I usually garbage collect my windows and close what I’m not using anymore, thus, closing the blog’s post I was discussing with people (cept for <a href=”http://www.oscartrelles.com/blog/”>Oscar’s</a>… that mofo has a sweet system, I’m so jealous…).

    Sent off the sample app I developed to learn Central to my man <a href=”http://www.darronschall.com/”>D</a>. Got my arsed kicked by LCService (App to Agent I smoked, Agent to App I befuddled). Tomorrow evening, I’ll read <a href=”http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/central/articles/lcservice.html”>that article</a> <a href=”http://www.markme.com/mesh/”>Mike</a> pointed me to, and hopefully I’ll see the error of my ways. I did everything in Central and had NO problems with any of the code, so didn’t really care about my battle with the Central debugger. That’s what bothers me about LCService… I must have been tired, because I just couldn’t see what I was doing wrong in my Agent. Didn’t matter, the elated high of getting my LCDataProvider to work was a good painkiller.

    Off to code Flash for the potential future of my country… :: dun, duh-daa, dahhhhhh!!!! ::

  • Timeline, Central SDK, & Target Hamper

    Driving back 8 hours is always easier with sleep… imagine that.

    <b>Timeline</b>
    Saw Timeline last night. Pretty good movie. Wasn’t a blockbuster, but I still say money well spent on a flic. I certainly enjoyed it. I’ve always liked the “bardic” qualities the character Marek (<a href=”http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0124930/”>Gerad Butler</a>) when he was in <a href=”http://video.movies.go.com/reignoffire/flash.html”>Reign of Fire</a>, so it was nice to have him in such a role in this one. Additionally, with all the schlack the French have been getting in the US, this was a great way for you to rally around the French, going, “Rock, the French kick ass!”.

    <b>Central SDK Thoughts</b>
    Curled up with my laptop on squishy couches and chairs amongst family animals at the in-laws with coffee & OJ, and read the Central SDK. Found some inconcistancies (getURL doesn’t use cached assets even though it said it did in one spot for example), but overall, very informative, and certainly brings up a lot of best practice questions. I couldn’t shake the feeling <a href=”http://www.markme.com/mesh/”>Mike Chambers</a> was sitting there pretty much reading me the docs verbatim. I mean, I don’t know if he even wrote them, but since he seems to be the front-man for it, it was just hard to get past. Didn’t complicate or slow the process, just once you have a face for a company, you personify that onto a lot of what you use from said company.

    At any rate, good stuff, and will have to correspond with my homey <a href=”http://www.darronschall.com/”>D</a> about how to go about putting our ideas in such an infrastucture. I guess my hypothetical question (which I’d love to have answered) is why Agents? Here’s what I mean: Although Agents, App, and Pod have no clue if either is initiated before he, nor does any of them guarentee it’ll still be running… then really why the push for Agents? I understand the server/client metaphor, but even though they are but a 3rd of the power in the triumvirate that is an app for Central, I don’t see why he has the Controller position for apps IF any of the other pieces need him to function correctly? Regardless, I’ll do what I always do and aim for what Macromedia suggests to do.

    Oh yeah, already have wish-lists for it: Agent wars. I have flashbacks to elementary school when the teacher would punish the whole class because one person acted up. The concept of one Agent’s script becomming too processor intensive shuts ALL agents down. BS. I mean, granted, I’ll naturally rally all the other Flashers to immediately travel to el developer’s house and promptly beat the living crap out of him, but still, that’s such a destructive way of enforcing good playing field rules. Still, at least give us a frikin’ event, like, “onSomeLosersAppHasShutdownAllAgents”. I mean, Agents are the integral piece of a Central app, and yet they are so fragile AND can be turned off. Heck, can you make it any harder? You know me, I love a challenge, but damn… We’ll figure it out, I’m sure, though. I’m really excited to figure out how Darron and my idea is going to work in it. Forgot my other wish, but it’ll come back.

    <b>Target Hamper</b>
    The lack of furniture meeting the highest standards known to women-kind has forced once again a Target binge. Found a laundry hamper in Virginia and put it together here in 5 minutes. Nice little thing, and fun to put together, but does not seem to be the <a href=”http://www.transportermovie.com/home.html”>Transporter</a> house style… but then, what is?

  • Star Wars Galaxies & The Real World: She Said “Yes” in Both!

    Sunday night I popped the question… in two different places. First, in SWG, and then immediately in the real world.

    First, I struggled to purchase a program online via PayPal that captures your computer screen activity and saves it into a video file for later viewing. …no dice, PayPal takes 2 to 3 days to validate, and I wanted to propose before we went up north (she would get a lot of love and praise from her family, and I wouldn’t get capped via a 22). I tried using her PayPal after much annoying running back and forth between the bedroom (her office where she plays SWG) and my office. Turns out, her PayPal default email was sent to a no longer valid email address. After purchasing the program, I had no way to download it. Contacting the geek who played geek games and made the geek program… I didn’t receive a response till Monday morning. I guess he has a life, but most geeks I know are on their comps on Sunday night.

    At any rate, in depression, I wallowed in self-pity at my failed plan. Then, I suddendly came up with the bright idea of using demo software. Found a link to a site a friend recommended a long time ago, downloaded their demo of HyperCam, and went to work tweaking my settings as low as they would go so I could get the best framerate. I ended up settling for 1 fps… Even after a fresh reformat and a screamin’ video card, my comp still could barely handle SWG and the capture going at the same time. So, I logged in, travelled to the planet my fiancee had moved to, and documented the journey.

    I’ve posted the footage. If you wish to cut to the chase, simply select “The Proposal” from the controls. Video of the real ring is at the end.

    …the least I can do, I believe, is to purchase HyperCam since they saved my arse. Don’t know what I am going to do with two video capture programs, though…

    SWG Proposal – Main (html) | Scalable (swf)

  • Does this site work now?

    Ok, does my shite work now? Looking to see if I fixed the visual issues I was having with IE with different text sizes as well as text selection, Mozilla, and Safari on the Mac. I’m just caring about the front page currently, as I’m aware the rest of the site (archives, comments, etc.) are foobarred, however, the comments should work enough to allow you to comment on whether the front-page works, hehe.

    BTW, is there someplace I can go (I’ve seen it before) to see if …uh.. my site “validates” or whatever it’s called? I wanna make sure I’m doing it correctly. (No negative comments about the use of Table tags; I couldn’t get my DIVS to work even after looking at other sites, and my gf suggested it, and it worked, so BLEH).