Randy Troppmann

I have listened to CBC Radio 2 in the morning for a long time. Tom Allen is teh(sic) awesome. This fall CBC really shook things up and changed the format of Radio 2 Morning and Radio 2 Drive. LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT. Were Tom Allen and Rich Terfry separated at birth? There is definitely some overlap between their shows but it seems to me that Rich sticks to more recent fare. Hey Tom. 70’s era Stampeders and King of the Road … er … doesn’t really turn my crank. But hey, those are just a few bumps. Wait! Hold the click publish button! I googled Rich Terfry to get the spelling of his name and I discovered he is Buck 65. I DIDN’T KNOW! (I didn’t know). Explains a few things … especially the comment that he was not used to a regular paycheque. His interviews are stellar especially the one he did a few weeks ago with Beck. Rich stated that a recent Radiohead concert was the best concert experience of his life and followed this bombshell up with some Weird Fishes.

Rich, you mentioned that once you turned down a chance to meet Neil Young because you didn’t know what you would say. I think you should have met him just to say “Old man, look at my life. I’m a lot like you were.”

I play on a team in a recreational men’s masters soccer league. We played in the season end tournament semi-finals against a really tough opponent. We were down 4-2 in the second half and came to tie the game. Extra time. Penalty kicks. Due to a bad back I have not played much and was a sub for this game. The penalty kicks go on and on until almost all the players have taken one and it is my turn.

I am a striker. I have a hard and accurate shot. I know how to kick the ball and can do it with either foot.  This is a moment you dream about since a kid practicing penalty kicks. 100 people watching, team chanting my name. If I put this ball in, the game is over and we win. I walk up to the ref and he gives me the ball to put down. He is very particular about where and how it is placed and it takes a moment to get it right. I take a few strides back, wait for the whistle and begin my approach to hammer it home. I am stiff and cold and I get away a semi hard shot more or less right at the goalie. I walk away. Boy I screwed that up. Why didn’t I use my left foot? Why didn’t I do a power shot? Why didn’t I try to place it? Arg. A lot of guys missed. So did the next guy. But not defenceman Al after that. We won. Below is a pic of me taking the shot. Next week is the finals.

Episode 84
Taped Aug. 10, 2007 and aired Sept. 28, 2007

My site Runningmap.com was Dugg recently. Head over there and give me a vote!

The video controller is done (well … in beta stage) and using the FlexComponent kit it was easy to bring it into Flex where it indeed acted as a “first class citizen”. Events, traces, setters …. the works. One problem was that when I selected the VideoController movieclip in the library and then selected the “Make Flex Component” command it changed the base class to “mx.flash.UIMovieClip” which caused it to break since the videoController needs to be bound to my custom VideoController class. I ended up putting the VideoController movieclip into a “wrapper” movieclip. This worked fine, but required an extra level to dig into it from within Flex. Example wrapper.video.clear();

Macromates is working on an official AS3 bundle for TextMate. You will need a Subversion client installed. Then you can grab the bundle using this example:


mkdir -p /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
cd /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
svn co http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/
Review/Bundles/ActionScript%203.tmbundle/


I released a minor update (ver 2.9.9) to RUNNINGMAP. The new feature is a dot that will appear on your route every mile or km. I have tweeked the rollover/rolloff states of the points and added proximity logic so that points really close together don’t all show distance values and thus avoid the visual mess of many textfields on top of one another.

Consider the following code:

if (undefined || true) trace(“true”);
else trace(“false”);

if (undefined || “true”) trace(“true”);
else trace(“false”);

if (“true”) trace(“true”);
else trace(“false”);

In Flash CS3 (have not tested with other versions) if you publish this for Flash Player 7 or later your output window receives these traces (as expected):

true
true
true

If you publish for FP6 you get:

true
false
true

That is some strange behaviour. This can be a gotchya if you are writing AS2 code that targets the FP6 because chances are you may be use to writing conditional statements like this.

Google Maps is about 2 years old now, but it still doesn’t seem like old news to me. Google continues to amaze me with the work they are doing with this web application and their free desktop application Google Earth. Yesterday they launched a new feature on Maps called “Street View” which is available on select US cities. Panoramic images (such as Quicktime VR) have been around for a decade. Street View is again proof that old data given a geo-context takes on new meaning. My friend sent me this link to his apartment building in New York.

People around me know that I think AJAX is generally an abomination. With Street View, Google is overlaying Flash on top of AJAX in a way I have never seen before. Astounding!