Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • asdf hyperlink in Flash goes to Microsoft Support Docs

    I can’t even think of a correct title. If you have a Flash hyperlink in an input text field that displays html with an href of “asdf” and a target of “”, and Firefox Preview Release 1.0 is your default browser, and you click the link, it’ll open the browser. The first tab will be blank. The second will go to a Microsoft Support Link, but it has a local path to your current working directory in the url field + “asdf” at the end.

  • Super Size Me

    Saw the documentary “Super Size Me” last night. It’s about this guy who eats McDonalds food, the entire menu, 3 meals a day which he has to finish, and has to get a super size if they ask, for 30 days straight. Effectively, living off of McDonalds, and only McDonalds, for a month with his vegan girlfriend stressing about it.

    The guy gained a considerable amount of weight in just 30 days, almost half the last week. It took him 14 total months to lose the weight he gained. God knows how bad his liver and kidneys were damaged through the whole process. He even suffered mild impotence because of restricted bloodflow. Aside from a myriad of other negative things, at parts it was just painful to watch, ecspecially when his new health problems became real and life threatening.

    My initial reaction was to never eat fast food again, at least McDonalds, but I was even having second thoughts about my bi-weekly Chik Fila excursions. The guys sources, in movie, are only half there, and he throws around mad statistics, but I have yet to hear a challenge to his claims, therefore, I’m taking it as sound info with questionable accountability for now.

    I really liked it and was really woken up to the nutrition problem this country faces in the form of obesity.

    All I have to say to non-US residents is see this movie, and keep our food franchises the f$)%* out of your country!

    Now, granted, to me Subway is a good one and is ok with moderation and responsible choosing of their menu. I, however, work out as a crutch for nutritional freedom, and even that is a stretch. I assume since I do strength training and cardio 3 days (sometimes 2) a week, that I can eat pretty much whatever I want. As I got more in tune with my body, I realized what made me feel bad, and what didn’t, so it got easier to tone down the blatantly horrible parts of my diet, mainly sodas. I merely switched to sugary, processed lemonaide though (not the Aussie kind, the Aussie-Pakistani kind), which has the same amount of sugar, or more, than sodas such as a Coke.

    Anyway, pretty crazy stuff in the flic. Real sobering, and another wonderful challenge I can’t wait (no really) to have when attempting to raise kids in the future with good habits. Parents have their work cut out for them. Heck, I still haven’t quit coffee, although, I’ve switched to tea midday so I’m making better progress than my cold turkey approach with ciggarettes. I don’t need ciggarettes, but I do need coffee.

  • Utilizing Focus in Custom Components

    Working on some side stuff Friday, and over the weekend, and had one hell of a time tackling focus in my custom components.

    First off, I use my own custom class as a layer between mx.core.UIComponent and my components classes. I do this because:
    – I like Grant Skinner’s GDispatcher better than EventDispatcher, although, I rarely utilize custom methods much, I still like the option to do so.
    – one thing not implemented into UIComponent was removal of the deadPreview movie clip like FUIComponent had back in MX; I implement this so I can include a dead preview in my components (since I rarely make an SWC’s for my own components), and I’d prefer to see something beyond a white dot to indicate what a movie clip is on the stage.
    – I “finished” the implementation of drawRect to have rounded edges. The drawRect method for UIComponent has radius documented as a property, but it wasn’t implemented.

    …however, after using this for …geez, maybe a year, I ran into a problem by overwrriting EventDispatcher’s addEventListener with my GDispatcher’s implementations. When a component gains focus, it fires onSetFocus, and when it loses focus, it fires onKillFocus. These functions inside of UIComponent add and remove listeners for key up and down. I didn’t know why my listeners weren’t getting fired until I realized I was overwriting the methods.

    After fixing that, it was pretty nice that a component already listens for it’s own events of keyUp and keyDown when it has focus.

    Secondly, I didn’t know until re-reading the class file for the umpteenth time, but you must implement pressFocus in your onPress function, and releaseFocus in your onRelease functions.

    Finally, the obvious of focusEnabled = true, tabEnabled = true, and tabChildren = false being set in your init. Additionally, the Halo rect (a green rectangle) won’t draw around your component correctly unless the width and height are validly set. I usually do a setSize as the last call in my init function with default sizes, and pass true in as the 3rd parameter to prevent an event from being generated.

    I haven’t figured out how to kill focus completely from everything yet, but these gotchas took a while to get used to.

    Oh yeah, and if you want to tab to components within a component, don’t forget:

    tabEnabled = false;
tabChildren = true;

    It’d pretty nice, once you figure this stuff out, how much stuff is done for you. Hope this helps you all.

    If anyone finds out about killing focus, let me know.

    var f = getFocusManager();
f.setFocus(null);

    …does NOT work, hehe.

  • The Grudge

    *** semi-spoliers via adjectives ***

    Just saw The Grudge, the USA version of Japan’s Ju-Jo or whatever. Brandy saw about 5 minutes of the whole 90 minutes.

    How come no one in horror flix today has any ballz? Seriously. If some kid meows and hisses at me, I’d bark right back. Cat vs. Dog… dog beats cat, I win sucka. I don’t know how it is in Japan, but we have a heirarchy here in the US. It’s called cat, dog, husband & wife. You twice removed, so I speak in your next in charge’s native tonuge to ensure you know I mean business.

    Secondly, any pop-lockin’ corpse that has to crawl because it’s so beaten is just a prime target for an additional one. You start gargling towards me because you haven’t drunken any water in 3 years isn’t gonna garner any sympathy. In fact, I’d army, steel toe boot smash your head like a burning bag’s on my porch, regardless of contents.

    There is a reason they don’t put people like me on TV on shows such as Fear Factor or the Real World. I’m not interesting, I merely do what real people would do. If there’s some jawless aberration coming towards me, I’d sock the rest of the head out of the park Babe Ruth style. If there is an evil house, you burn it and have a Rave with priests from every denomonation, replacing the Dasani with holy water.

    …I still watch my back and hasten my footsteps when I turn out the lights. I blame that, though not on the dark, but rather because of the fact I’m not packin’.

    Anyway, good flic if you like the rush like I do.