A colleague pointed WinFF out to me, a nice GUI for FFmpeg. No more worrying about command line options, long life laziness! 
PS: No need to download FFmpeg, it comes packaged with WinFF.
Video Converter
January 22nd, 2010wmode=”transparent”
January 21st, 2010I never knew/realised this, but it’s very useful to know:
The background of a Flash movie can be set to transparent. This allows the background color or image of the HTML page that contains the Flash movie to show through and allows the layering of Flash content with DHTML content.
Very useful when your Flash is on a layer in HTML that could be covered by something else when you’re scrolling the page.
Wmode not set:
Wmode not set
Wmode set to “transparent”:
wmode set to transparent
Source: Adobe TechNote
PS: Never mind the awesome (ahem) colours, this was just a quick test. 
Phidgets / Arduino
January 20th, 2010Flex IRC Client
January 14th, 2010Just came across this when browsing around a bit. This Flex IRC client is a port of the Java-based PircBot.
Flex IRC Client aims to be a Flex / Flash based IRC Client. Currently most browser-based chat solutions are either proprietary or applets. Flex IRC Client wants to bring the power of IRC to the majority of the Internet-users without requiring a download or an install.
I know this client is still under development, but it could really do with a window showing some progress when connecting to a server. Also, a proxy of sorts would be nice since I get a lot of Security Errors when trying to connect to a server: “SecurityErrorEvent type=”securityError” bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text=”Error #2048: Security sandbox violation: http://ansuz.nl/toys/irc/FlexIRCClient.swf cannot load data from irc.efnet.nl:6667.”", probably due to no cross-domain policies being set on the IRC servers. Connecting works when running this locally
Links
- Project page: http://code.google.com/p/flexircclient/
- Demo: http://ansuz.nl/toys/irc/
- Server: irc.servercentral.net
- Port: 6667
- Channel: #flexnet
Hello Robots! :)
January 4th, 2010Just thought this was funny.
Welcome the robots, just click the link using FF and say hello to the robots
Glaze: game and physics engine
December 15th, 2009Just stumbled upon this one. 
A game and physics engine for Flash including:
- Rigid Body Dynamics
- Scene management
- Line of sight
- User Input
- Scrolling
- AI
Project home: http://code.google.com/p/glaze/
Example: http://home.planet.nl/~borst595/glaze.html
Blog: http://yaa-blog.blogspot.com/
AS Frameworks
December 15th, 2009Recently I’ve been looking into different frameworks, just to get some experience with other interesting frameworks out there. I’ve compiled a list of some of the frameworks I’ve found. I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of other good ones, if you know of one, please let me know.
Gaia
A framework package as a Flash component. Handy for designers, but it kinda made me shrug… Though reading through the docs a couple of interesting features showed through, like the generation of the navigation through the context menu.
Link: http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/index.php
Cairngorm
Used this framework / micro architecture a lot already. Nice Event-Command pairs as well as delegates for calling all (web)services.
Link: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cairngorm/Cairngorm
PureMVC
I’ve been working with a PureMVC project lately and looked at it before, quite similar in some ways to Cairngorm, just different names.
A nice resource for pureMVC: http://puremvc.tv/
Link: http://puremvc.org/
Swiz
Swiz is a framework for Adobe Flex that aims to bring complete simplicity to RIA development. Swiz provides Inversion of Control, event handing, and simple life cycle for asynchronous remote methods.
Link: http://code.google.com/p/swizframework/
Dawn
Dawn is a lightweight framework for ActionScript inspired by Google Guice. In addition to Dependency Injection, it provides type safe notifications and helps you to build apps which are loosely coupled, easily unit tested, and less error-prone.
Link: http://wiki.github.com/sammyt/dawn
Mate
Mate is a tag-based, event-driven Flex framework.
Mate framework has been created to make it easy to handle the events your Flex application creates. Mate allows you to define who is handling those events, whether data needs to be retrieved from the server, or other events need to be triggered.
In addition, Mate provides a mechanism for dependency injection to make it easy for the different parts of your application to get the data and objects they need.
Link: http://mate.asfusion.com/
I think I’m going to give Dawn a try soon enough, of all the above it looks the most interesting to me.
Exclude files from Flex PMD
December 1st, 2009You can exclude files and/or packages from Flex PMD by creating your own rule set, use the "exclude-pattern" tag to exclude files.
XML:
-
<ruleset name="myruleset"
-
xmlns=...>
-
<description>My ruleset</description>
-
<exclude-pattern>.*/some/package/.*</exclude-pattern>
-
<exclude-pattern>.*/some/other/package/FunkyClassNamePrefix.*</exclude-pattern>
-
<include-pattern>.*/some/package/ButNotThisClass.*</include-pattern>
-
<rule>...
-
</ruleset>
Link: http://pmd.sourceforge.net/howtomakearuleset.html
Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts
November 5th, 2009Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (English: Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts) was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements and revisions in 1772, 1777 and 1780 and numerous foreign editions and later derivatives.
Have a look at http://diderot.alembert.free.fr/ for loads of nice and old images, like the one above.
htaccess trickery
November 4th, 2009I was looking the other day for a way to make a directory that is behind a .htaccess password protected directory accessible for anybody. Does that make any sense? For instance: www.somedomain.com/protected is password protected directory. I wanted anybody to be able to access www.somedomain.com/protected/notthisone/ without a password. After a little searching I found the following trick:
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Anybody"
AuthUserFile /path/to/some/autfileRequire valid-user
Allow from All
Satisfy Any
I'm actually not sure if I need all of the above or if I can just get away with "Allow from All" and "Satisfy Any".
So basically by adding "Allow from All" you say anybody is allowed to access this directory. The "Satisfy Any" makes sure that you can access it either when you have already entered the password or when you don't have a password.
A nice way to circumvent .htaccess directory protection.
