Archive for the ‘About Me’ Category

Out of no-where I designed a new look for my website. I had been playing around with a few designs for the last few months, but at the end of last week, I finally hit a new design a liked, I hope you like it to.

I also have a few more blog posts planed and maybe even some new Flex code for the lab.

I am still selling the .fla template I used for my last site. I have no plans to re-sell this template at the moment.

I also must apologise for what I consider a usability flaw with the site, and that is that it doesn’t reset the scroll position when you change pages, but I had to disable that functionality because of a really bad redraw bug with Firefox on the Mac. – gee I hate Firefox on the mac! As always, I recommend Camino – but it is afflicted with the same bug because it uses the Mozilla engine. If anyone has any tips for a work around please share. (basically if I reset the scroll position using javascript, the flash movie goes white, except for any areas which have redrawn – like a button, or loading icon, but the rest of the movie remains completely white!!!)

For new visitors, this is a flash blog, which uses a WordPress backend. I have developed my own php scripts to extract the data (which you can get for free from my lab), and just incase you are wondering why I don’t use XML-RPC, I plan to write about my reasons soon… hopefully.

Enjoy the site

I have just returned from a 3 week holiday through the US. I traveled through LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York and Washington DC.

It was an amazing trip and I hope to put some photos up on Flickr at some point.

So what do I make of 2007?

Playstation 3- I bought a PS3 1 day after it was released. I did try to hold out to that first price cut, but only made it a day. (I feel better thinking back as the price cut didn’t come for over 6 months.) Games I bought this year include: F1, Call of Duty 3, Rainbow 6 Vegas, Dirt and Assassins Creed.

HD – Even though I bought a HD TV at the very end of 06, the big tv shows didn’t return till early 07, and even then, channel 7 didn’t start broadcasting proper HD (1080i) until mid-year. This and my PS3 really made 07 the year of HD.

Europe – I travelled to London, Amsterdam, St Goar, Lucerne, Innsbruck, Venice, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Nice, Monaco, Paris and had a great time. (even though I caught the flu). I saw some amazing places (see photos in about) and met some cool people too. The big question is, where, if anywhere will I go in 08.

iPod Touch – Since there is no iPhone in Australia, I settled for the next best thing. The iPod touch is amazing, the touch interface was just so nice to use, and having a web browser at my finger tips at all times was brilliant. Unfortunately, my iPod touch didn’t make it into 2008, as it developed a fault and is with Apple now. Hopefully a replacement or repaired version comes back to me soon.

My Website – I released some of my code which runs this website, and got lots of great feedback. Hopefully there will be more in 08 too!

My Job – Amazing Technologies decided to shut down its Australian operations, and with it my job, however I had a new job with in seconds, as my boss at Amazing took me on straight away in a new business.

So that’s my 2007 wrap.

I have just returned from a 3 week trip through europe.

I did a Contiki tour through 10 countries in 16 days, and then I had another couple of days in London afterwards.

It was a very cool tour and I met lots of great people and went to lots of great places.

Jump across to my photos section or click here to view photos from my trip.

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Playstation 3 was released in Australia today, I can’t decide if I want to buy it. I have already resisted going out this morning to buy one. The question is, will I hold out till the price drops to around A$600 or will I crack and buy sooner. I would have thought a price drop might occur quickly to catch up with the XBOX 360, but I don’t want to wait more than 6 months.
The main reasons for not rushing out and buying one are 1. Price and 2. Go really great games to buy.
If I did go out and buy, I would probably get the Formula One game, or maybe even Call Of Duty 3.  I would hope to be one of the first 20 000 people to register in Australia so I can get Casino Royale on Blue Ray DVD for free. (Just that is very tempting)

Also If anyone reading this has a Mac and an IPod, I would like to know if the PS3 and the mac can move files via a network (I don’t even know if this is possible for a start) and if a Mac Formatted IPod can be plugged into a PS3 and used.

Over the last few months I have really enjoyed the Rick Gervais Podcasts.

Unfortunately they finished up their 6 Episode Second series this week. I don’t know if I could possibly describe the show in words. You really need to hear it to believe it.

I will miss them. But if any one else out there hasn’t heard them yet, go to RickyGervais.com to find out more.

I have finally placed my new website online.

It has been months of weekend work, countless redesigns and the creation of some new technology to get it up and running.

My aim was to integrate my Flash Website with my WordPress Blog. My flash site has my own content management system for its content, but I had also started a blog using WordPress and I wanted my wordpress blog to fully integrate into my existing site.

How did I do it?, well, my content management system uses XML to store page information, therefore I created a PHP script to get the Blog Entries from the MYSQL database and Format it into my Content Management’s XML layout. Therefore the Flash movie thinks this is a page from the Content Manager.

I then show the comments on the right hand side, (please someone leave a message!!!) and when you write a comment, it is sent to the WordPress Post Comment script, and goes through the ordinary WordPress approval process.

Over time I want to add a Search feature and the ability to filter Posts by Date and or Category.

I hope you all enjoy the new site

Finally Apple have opened their iTunes Store in Australia. I have been waiting for this moment for so long.

I have had to suffer ninemsn music (terrible interface, I mean terrible!) and also at BigPond music (the preview feature doesn’t even work!). Then there was the performance of getting the songs from Windows Media Player to a CD. It would sometimes take me an hour to get it to work, Media Player wouldn’t always make the Burn CD button available to click, I would have to keep erasing the cd until it appeared. I tried using another application but it just killed by computer.

All we need is Sony-BMG to join, so until then, I am effectivly boycotting Sony-BMG artists.

I can’t focus on what I want, I have already purchased a few tracks, but the ability to look at Albums released a few years ago and get one track is so mind blowing. I even started looking a Movie Soundtracks, which tend to be expensive in the stores, especially when I only want a couple of tracks or so.

And a BIG thank-you to Apple for the new Store, even if it did take you this long.

I have been thinking about starting a blog for a while and here it is.

I downloaded a free solution from wordpress, (link at bottom of the page). I was going to make a Flash based Blog system but it would probably take to long to get to this point.

My thinking now is to create a Flash front end to this, especially for Posting to the blog.

All I need to do now anyway is to ensure that I write lots of interesting things.