Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for August, 2004
Alpha Fader for Flash MX 2004
Alpha Fader can be downloaded here >>
Example of Coded Example that took a couple of seconds to create!
One of the most common tasks done in Flash via ActionScript is the opacity fade, and when used cleverly can add a nice touch to your Flash projects.
I tend to use opacity fades quite a lot via ActionScript, and get pretty bored of typing in the names of Movie Clips, and adding the control code. Call me lazy? Nope, I just want to move on to bigger parts of a project, and those valuable seconds saved here and there really add up in the full run of a project.
I created this panel, to alleviate my pain, and it does quite a good job, simply select either a single or group of Movie Clips from the stage (doesn’t matter if they are named instances or not as the code will take care of unnamed instances), and play with the following parameters
Event Handler Checkboxes: The type of interaction with the Movie Clip
Start Opacity: The starting opacity for the effect
End Opacity: The ending opacity for the effect
Fade In Speed: Speed of fading in
Fade Out Speed: Speed of fading out
Once you …
Interview with Jon Morrow — Sitepoint Enthusiast and Successful Entrepreneur
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=188423
After writing the above blog (”How to raise money from investors”), Jon Morrow made a terrific post that showed he knows his entrepreneurial stuff. He was kind enough to let me interview him about his track record and success tips for Sitepoint readers.
Background:
Jon grew up in his family’s real estate business, where he still splits his time. Right now he spends half his time in real estate, and half on web development businesses. He applies the same business principles to each, and notes that his passion is web design and software development.
Listen to his achievements:
- He got into game design and development at age 12.
- He started his first game design company when he was 16, with a 22-year old partner.
- At 18, he developed a company to develop a virtual reality linguistics program. He attracted a world-renowned linguist to the company, beating out Microsoft, who also was trying to recruit this person. He won the recruiting contest by offering a small % of his company. With this person in place, he gained instant credibility and was able to attract venture capital as well as a $13 mm contract, and also interest from the President of Ecuador and …
Interview with Jon Morrow — Sitepoint Enthusiast and Successful Entrepreneur
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=188423
After writing the above blog (”How to raise money from investors”), Jon Morrow made a terrific post that showed he knows his entrepreneurial stuff. He was kind enough to let me interview him about his track record and success tips for Sitepoint readers.
Background:
Jon grew up in his family’s real estate business, where he still splits his time. Right now he spends half his time in real estate, and half on web development businesses. He applies the same business principles to each, and notes that his passion is web design and software development.
Listen to his achievements:
- He got into game design and development at age 12.
- He started his first game design company when he was 16, with a 22-year old partner.
- At 18, he developed a company to develop a virtual reality linguistics program. He attracted a world-renowned linguist to the company, beating out Microsoft, who also was trying to recruit this person. He won the recruiting contest by offering a small % of his company. With this person in place, he gained instant credibility and was able to attract venture capital as well as a $13 mm contract, and also interest from the President of Ecuador and …
Color Dodge Blend Mode
You may have caught on by now that Photoshop has “opposite” blend modes: Darken vs. Lighten, Multiply vs. Screen, and Color or Linear Burn vs. Color or Linear Dodge. So the definition in Photoshop Help for Color Dodge may sound eerily familiar:
Color Dodge: Looks at the color information in each channel and brightens the base color to reflect the blend color by decreasing the contrast. Blending with black produces no change.
Similar to Screen, Color Dodge will always result in a lighter image — except the contrast will be turned waaaay up. Here’s what it looks like:
I’ll start with my standard rose picture:
Then I’ll add my semi-standard pawprint layer and set it to Color Dodge:
The pure black area of the pawprint layer results in no change, but all other areas dramatically lighten the image underneath.
So I have to admit that Color Dodge mode is one that I’ve never used in an actual application before. But apparently a few other people in Google-world have used Color Dodge mode for lots of different purposes. A lot of people will use Color Dodge layers when making high-tech or grunge-style abstract images. But there were …
PHP Job Trends (?)
[Warning / Disclaimer] Dubious statistical “analysis” ahead (pinches of salt not included)…
Have to confess I’m an avid watcher of Jobserve.com, a job search listing primarily focused on the UK but with a growing number of blips from Eurupe, the States and OZ.
Jobserve is old (going back somewhere to 1994 if I remember right) and was originally focused purely on IT jobs. From the start, had the same principle as Google - keep it simple and, thankfully, hasn’t lost it. Those advertising on it tend to be “headhunters” / agencies, which means they’re generally tuned into the right keywords (even if they don’t know what they mean) which helps keeps searches focused while reflecting the going rate salary-wise. Listings tend to clear within a week so it’s a pretty good “snapshot” of the IT job market (at least in the UK) at any given time.
Anyway - PHPwise, Jobserve is telling nothing but good news…
Back in November 2002 logged the number of results returned for a search for “PHP” at 79. Two years later the result is consistently twice that - right now 155 matches for PHP. And things haven’t exactly been rosy for web developers the last couple of …
Another post about lousy service in the web design/dev field
It sure would be great to go just one month without having to rant about the lousy service your colleagues (and perhaps YOU) provide, but frankly this seems unlikely.
I now have three web designers/developers working with me on this project, specifically to back up one that has become unreliable.
I found the other two after pouring through tons of responses from a Craig’s List ad, most of which were great portfolios for music, fantasy, local floral stores, and pretty much anything but a professional business site — not to mention the most annoying, slowly downloading Flash intro pages.
Now the two new folks are starting and this is their first impression:
Designer One: I’ll take a look at your specs this weekend.
Me (on Monday): Did you look at the specs?
Designer One (Sounding depressed and hung over): No. The weekend was really busy and I’m finishing up something now. Give me an hour and I’ll call you back.
Me (Three hours later): Still waiting.
Me to Designer Two: When can I look at something?
Designer Two: I’m not sure. I’m trying.
Me: Trying what?
Designer Two: I’m trying to work on it as fast as I can.
Me: Right. When can I look at something?
Designer Two: I’ll email …
BlogWave 0.3
BlogWave is a great product written in C# that grabs a variety of information resources and publishes them as an RSS feed.
You can even write your own “adapters” so BlogWave can understand data from your own applications.
Certainly something to take a look at if you’re wanting to publish information.
What’s got you down?
I want to go off on a tangent here and break away from the ColdFusion related talk which you normally see here.
I’m curious as to what you see are the major hurdles for your web development business? Are you overcoming them? If not what do you think would allow you to overcome these hurdles?
And how about those of you just starting out. Or those of you who have been in the trenches for awhile. What was or is your biggest obstacle to get started? What did you find, or figure out, which helped you overcome this obstacle? Or what do you think WILL help you overcome this obstacle?
I know these are very broad questions but I think if we as a community can start to realize our obstacles, and find ways to overcome them together, we will be stronger and better business people.
ColdFusion and MS XP SP 2
Here is a link to a newly posted technote about overcoming the firewall in XP (which is turned on by default) when you install XP Service Pack 2.
Looks like there are a few things to “allow” and they give really good step by step instructions.
There is also a note about the cfhttp tag:
If you use the CFHTTP tag with the attributes Action=”Close” and StopOnError=”yes” you will get the following error:
java.net.SocketException: Connection reset
at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:168)
at java.io.BufferedInputStream.read1(BufferedInputStream.java:220)
at java.io.BufferedInputStream.read(BufferedInputStream.java:277)
at java.io.BufferedInputStream.fill(BufferedInputStream.java:183)
at java.io.BufferedInputStream.read(BufferedInputStream.java:201)
at coldfusion.oroinc.net.telnet.TelnetInputStream.__read(TelnetInputStream.java:93)
at coldfusion.oroinc.net.telnet.TelnetInputStream.run(TelnetInputStream.java:330)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:534)
To work-around this, change the StopOnError attribute to “No”
Anyways if you have SP2 on your XP box and are now having problems getting to it or working with CF check it out.
New SQL Server 2005 Homepage
Microsoft have launched the SQL Server 2005 home pages at microsoft.com.
Check out the “Top 30 Features” page to get ready for the future :)
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