Category / Log

Created a TextMate theme this past week. Download it and try it out if you like. Looks really good with Actionscript and PHP looks pretty nice as well. If you think another language’s support is lacking, let me know!

Picked up a power source for serato this week. I highly recommend it. It allows you to use serato control discs and switch to straight vinyl. With the power source, you don’t have to have your computer plugged in if you want to just mix records (because the serato unit is powered via USB). In case you were wondering, the exact product ID at Radioshack is #273-1767A (9volt, 300 mA). You will also need to grab an N tip adapter to plug into the end of the universal power source.

So, here’s my first mix blending mp3 and vinyl. The levels are decent but there’s some weirdness still towards the end. Overall, I enjoyed this mix. The second half was just grabbing records so it turned out kinda funny ;)

Download Liquid Hacynth Volume Sixteen
(right click and select “save link as…”)

I’ll be honest. I don’t really want to learn Silverlight all that badly. I cannot get excited about technology that forces me to develop on a specific platform. So, I found it pretty exciting to hear recently that there’s quite a modest effort being put forth to creating tools to facilitate cross-platform development.

Enter the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK. The SDL is a bridge between Silverlight and the Dynamic Language Runtime of .NET (which includes IronRuby, IronPython and others). What this means is you can develop Silverlight apps in Ruby or other languages without needing all that zany Visual Studio/C# stuff and Microsoft Technology.

What follows is my first foray into Silverlight development on a Mac - a quick sample that plays a video. To recap before I start…it kinda sucks :P There’s no development tools - cool, I can use TextMate, but creating XAML by hand would definitely suck. Maybe this is where Expression Studio (seems to be available for Mac) is really going to be necessary.

The ComboBox component is neat because it automatically determines if there is enough space for it to open down and if there isn’t, it’ll tween upwards instead. However, I came across an issue recently where I needed to force it to open up or down. Unfortunately, the displayDropdown method is private, so overriding and re-writing the code is out of the question. You could override keyDownHandler, close, open, and downArrowButton_buttonDownHandler and then replace displayDropdown with a custom function in each, but that seems annoying to me! I’m not sure why the displayDropdown function is private, but anyway, here’s a simple solution to force direction.

When I first started using the Flex framework I figured it would be really easy to work with in Flash and vice versa. The truth is, it requires a bit of work to get both to play nicely. For example, if you’re used to the Flash API, you might do something like:

var container:Sprite = new Sprite;
var sprite:Sprite = new Sprite;

container.addChild(sprite);

to add a sprite to the parent container. You can do this in Flex as well. But say you wanted to add this container to a Flex Component. You can’t directly add Sprites and the like to components because their children must extend UIComponent or implement the IUIComponent interface (From the documentation … “The IUIComponent interface defines the basic set of APIs that you must implement to create a child of a Flex container or list.”). Workarounds for this include wrapping a Sprite in a UIComponent: