A little over a year ago, I converted my then dormant domain, Mediadinosaur.com, into a gossip focused news aggregator (previously, it was a media/celeb focused community and blog). It now captures feeds from a number of high profile celebrity rags (Egostastic, TMZ, E!, WWTD, etc) and lets you get your fan fix in one centralized place. I built it in Flex to highlight the ease of use of the Framework and the power that the HTTPService and E4X gives you in getting and parsing XML. I’m using the site as an exercise for my Mashups and RIAs class as an introduction to developing with Flex and a easing into the concept of reading and using XML feeds and services for students that may have never used either of them. So let’s take a look at how this all comes together. (more…)

The movie lived up to the interent hype for me. The hand-held camera stuff did make me a bit queasy, I’ll admit. I am happy that it ended the way it did. Certainly creates some questions for me, though… Stop reading if you don’t want spoilers…

1. What company was Rob going to work for? Was it the company in the viral sites for the movie? Tagruato? Seems like it would make sense, but maybe be to convenient/cheesy.
2. What stirred the monster up? Offshore drilling? Is this an environmental statement?
3. Is the “hammer-down” a tactical nuke strike?
4. Was the monster destroyed?
5. How was the camera/tape not destroyed in the “hammer-down”?
6. What is in the parasites bite that causes the victim to burst/explode?
7. What were those air sac things on Clover’s head?
8. How much would a monster that size need to eat?
9. If the monster is living at a depth sufficient to hide it for millenia, what kind of food could be available down there?
10. Does it eat this stuff (used to make Slusho)?
11. Did Tagruato’s harvesting of the “Seabed’s Nectar” cause it to come looking for food?
12.  Did the monster actually come from outer space?
13. Or did the parasites come from outer space and wake the monster?
14. Did the parasites eat the monster’s food causing it to leave it’s habitat?

I’m really interested in hearing from other people that have seen the movie… What do you think? So many questions… Maybe Cloverfield 2 will answer ‘em… hmmm.

I’ve done a little looking around and can’t seem to find any files for adding AS3 and MXML syntax highlighting to GeSHi. For those that don’t know, GeSHi stands for Generic Syntax Highlighter and is a library of PHP scripts that allows for nice source code highlighting/coloring for many different languages when you surround the code with simple HTML elements (e.g <pre lang=”html”>my code</pre>). Actionscript 1/2 is currently supported and so is XML, but as far as I can tell (looking at the Sourceforge site, and doing some Googling), no work has been done on MXML/AS3.

Does anyone out there know differently? If it hasn’t been done yet, I may spend some time getting these going… I think MXML would come together quicky, as it could be made by hacking the XML file a bit… AS3 could be made from the existing AS file, but would require a bit more work.

If you know anything about the status of this work, please comment here. I certainly don’t want to build something that’s already done.

I can only imagine. At work we have a really nice CakePHP app built to generate XML and someother nice stuff for some offline Flash apps we use. It works great. The front end for the Cake app is HTML/AJAX and it’s nice, but works pretty poorly in IE6. Since some of our clients are on IE6, and probably will be until their IT staff gets a good virus or worm scare that makes them realize it’s probably time to move to IE7… it’s probably in our best interest to have an app that works well in the IE6 mess. I’m not against AJAX… I’m not really pro Flex. But the fact that the UI will look and behave the same in any browser with Flash 9 is pretty darn awesome IMHO. CakePHP has some AMFPHP support, just wondering if anyone has built some tutorials or examples out there using the three of them together… Flex, AMFPHP and Cake, that is… I’d like to get an idea of how to go about this before I jump.

I figure, if I’m going niche, I’m going niche. There’s probably like a couple hundred people out there speaking that kind of acronym soup, so I apologize to my family that checks on my blog from time to time. Please, check out the photo links on the right hand sidebar and forget the geek speak.