I’ve never been exceptionally good at keeping up with the blog here, even though this year started out fairly well. So in order to keep my momentum going, you know an object in motion tends to stay in motion, I am going to be writing these smaller updates in addition to when I get out my long tutorials and other long form posts.

I’m still working at Digital Primates and loving what I do there. I haven’t had much time while on the job to study up for the Flex Developer’s Certification, so I do that as much as I can from home. I need to take a practice test or two to see where I would score if I took the actual test, and where I need to focus my studies to make sure I pass.

Over the last several months I have worked more with the Flex Framework than I have ever before. I am so used to doing things in pure AS2 an AS3, that I had to retrain myself to look for things in the framework that were already waiting for me to just use them. Some of the people at DP also have been a great help in this. I’d thank them all here, but I’d really be thanking everyone at the company, so thanks guys.

Moving on into the late summer, I am still working on my augmented reality project. My friend and now co-worker (he’s an intern at Digital Primates), Joe, is helping me work through the FLARToolkit. Making things make sense, and finding out where we can speed things up. Optimization was the main topic last week. This week it was me solo, but I was able to get DAZ3D models into our app. Definitely need more optimizing there (15 Meg for a model! jeesh!).

Oh, and I am also now a contributor to the FLARToolkit’s repo. Haven’t submitted anything yet, but I should before the next post. So with Podiobooks.com, this is the second open source project that I am currently active in.

I may get out another post before Gen Con, so stay tuned.

I recently read again for one of my favorite podcasts Pseudopod. I thought some of you might enjoy it too.

By Michael James McFarland

Read by David Moore

I won’t go into the details surrounding my dismissal from a well-known East Coast brokerage firm. other than to say I inadvertently let slip some information of a rather sensitive nature and, when it came down to drawing the line, the firm was more interested in maintaining their reputation than my livelihood.

Of course they were. But I didn’t exactly walk away empty-handed. They were all very civilized. There were no black marks on my resume; hell, they even found me another job. At a much smaller firm in Seattle.

And that’s where I met Mira, who this tale is really about.

Links mentioned: Closing music by Hopeful Machines, a side project of Ego Likeness Promo for Crescent, by Phil Rossi, rushing Amazon charts on July 9, 2009

 

 Standard Podcast [36:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Getting these episodes out to you has been difficult lately, so I am going to be doing a little less production work on them to get them out faster. What that means is that I will be doing less intro and getting straight to the speaker, and also not doing quite as much with the questions. If they aren’t listenable, I will cut them. Getting the speaker’s content out to you is my primary concern.

This third episode is from the session by Kevin Schmidt, and he gave a talk about uploading files in Flex. I’d say more, but really, his title says it all. It was an informative and detailed demonstration, and I recommend you take a listen.

 

 Standard Podcast [40:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I was inspired recently by a man who doesn’t even know I exist (probably). That man is Saqoosha, and he lives in Japan. Some of what he does is develop the FLARToolkit.

If you haven’t seen or heard about augmented reality or the FLARToolkit, I suggest you head over to his site and take a look, or Google about it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

So about three weeks ago I started looking into this technology and it just grabbed me. It grabbed me so hard and was shoving thoughts into my brain that I had to do something about it, thus, the summer project.

I roped another developer, Joe Adkins, into working with me, and together we are digging into the toolkit, looking at other libraries that people are creating, and in general right now getting our hands dirty with code. Right now I have code under my fingernails, code in my hair, and I dream about the toolkit at night.

You might be wondering what it is that I am actually doing with my summer project. Well, I am not going to tell you, yet. It’s still too early. Though as the name implies, I expect to have the first version done by the end of summer.

Stay tuned though, since I intend on posting some work in project shots, and maybe even a few working demos.