I just discovered that all of the Breeze live presentations that Macromedia has with user group managers and Team Macromedia are available to the public. Ed Sullivan just sent me the links, so I wanted to share them here:
In particular, I recommend Chris Georgenes presentation on animating in Flash. Really cool stuff.
First of all, I am sorry that I have not been posting much for the past couple of months. As I posted earlier, I was on sabbatical and vacation for two months, and more recently I have had some personal issues I had to deal with and have been trying to buy a new house. Things should settle down soon, and I will be posting a lot more (there is a ton of cool stuff coming down the pike to talk about).
Just a quick note to let everyone that I am back from vacation and sabbatical (2 months total). I had a great time off, but am ready to get back in and get my hands dirty with all of the stuff we are working on.
I am currently catching up on email, so if you sent something important to me in the past 2 months and didn’t get a response, you might want to resend it. I have a ton of email to go through and want to make sure that I don’t miss anything.
Just a quick reminder, but I am currently on a 6 week sabbatical, which among other things means that I am not checking emails or voice mails.
So, what have I been doing thus far? Playing with my daughter a lot, reading, playing video games (World of Warcraft and Mercenaries on Xbox), and teaching myself some electrical engineering. I have been having a blast.
I will be back around February 14th (at which time I am off to MXDU).
This hack / mod shows you how to create a USB adapter that can plug into the expansion slot of your Xbox controller. Among other things, this allows you to easily use off the shelf USB flash drives as a memory card to save Xbox content / game saves.
For example, after doing the mod, I was able to use my 128 Meg Lexar Jumpdrive Secure as an XBox memory card.
Note, if you use a USB Flash drive as an Xbox memory card, the Xbox will first erase all of its contents, so make sure to remove anything that you cannot afford to loose. Also, not all drives will work. Check this page from the Xbox-Linux site to see a pretty comprehensive list of which drives are known to work.
Here is a quick tutorial on how to modify the headset adaptor (manual)for Xbox live in order to illuminate the volume control. This makes it much easier to see and use when playing in the dark.
Note, you can easily break your headset adaptor, and possibly your Xbox by doing this hack. Furthermore, you might be voiding your Xbox warranty by futzing around with the headset adaptor. Do this tutorial / hack at your own risk.
Macromedia has a really great sabbatical program. For every four years you work here, you get a 6 week, paid sabbatical. Well, I have been at Macromedia for about 4 1/ 2 years now which means I am finally eligible for my sabbatical.
So, today is my last day in the office until February 14, 2005 (in additional to the sabbatical I am taking a week off next week, and we get a week off for Christmas). What does this mean? Well, my weblog probably wont be updated much if any, and I probably wont be checking my Macromedia email that often (if any). I will still be on IM, so if you want to chat, feel free to ping me.
Here are the winners for the Halo 2 Application contest.
First Place : Marshall Beachy
Second Place : Eric Dolecki
Third Place : Tim Walling
I have held a bunch of these types of contests in the past, and this was was the toughest of all of them to judge. We were really impressed with the creativity of the applications, and especially blown away by how useful they actually are.
Thanks all of the developers / designers. If you submitted an entry, please send me an email with you contact info (mesh@macromedia.com). In addition to the prizes the winner’s receive, all participants will get a Flash t-shirt sent to them (let me know your size).
I have just posted a new version of the Macromedia News Extension for FireFox and ThunderBird. The latest version is version 0.9.6 and includes a number of changes, including:
However, I think that the coolest new feature is that the extension has been localized into 5 new languages! Here are the supported languages and the people who did the localization.
