Steven's Weblog

I’m sure this doesn’t need any more linkage, but I’m just a bit amazed sometimes at how well Google’s new features come out. Google movies

I’m thankful for… the fact that I can get directions from someone and end up at the geographical location intended…

Dasher is an interface to allow for text entry via ‘natural continuous pointing gestures’. I’ve played with it a bit and it’s kinda neat, although I don’t yet have a use for it. In any case, it points out some nice techniques for getting information through narrow channels. Grab it and play with it.

Don’t forget to attend the Iowa State HCI Forum on April 15.

Stirring: Theory and Practice is one of those books I’d assign one of my clones to read. I mean, if I had clones, you know.

But I’d settle for a good answer to the following question: does juice mix better if there’s a little air in the bottle, or not? I have a belief that it does, but I haven’t yet come up with a really convincing experiment to try…

‘Real numbers’ are sorta fascinating when you try to meld the mathematical view, the physical view, and the computational view. Chaitin has an interesting (and slightly weird, of course) article on the subject: ‘How real are real numbers?’

Good interview (if you’re into mathematics):
MathForge.net :: Michael Atiyah and Isadore Singer on the state of today’s mathematics

Metapost (main page, nice tutorial) is pretty cool.

In doing some homework for a class that’s heavy on mathematical notation, I had to get beyond the world of the word processor, so I decided to have another look at TeX. Good stuff.

I wanted to embed vector images. Additionally, I was biased toward PDF output rather than PS. That all led me to MetaPost.

Overall, it’s been a pretty big learning curve, but I’m having fun with TeX, MetaPost, and the general world of freely-available typesetting software.

[Note: This is only useful for historical reasons now, so I deleted the binaries and left the patch. But the patch doesn’t work for 3.3, even though the problem still exists, and I’m not really wanting to spend the time now integrating it. The patch is public domain, anyone may integrate it with or without my permission or some damn signed contributors document, by the way.]
Don’t you love open source?

I spent some pleasant time tonight adding a new feature to Laszlo, described below. If this is useful to you, please drop a comment here telling me what you like or how it could be better.

The patch, for 3.0b1, is in laszlo-video-patch.zip. (prebuilt binaries were in laszlo-video-patch-bin.zip).
The problem

Laszlo, as of 3.0b1, does not support directly embedding SWFs with Flash 6 video into views, and a client of mine needs the capability.The problem, in more detail

• You have a video, transcoded to SWF format via Macromedia Flash MX 2004, via the ‘Import->Import to stage’ function.
• You’re building a standalone, self-contained, single SWF from Laszlo, and you want to embed the above video.
• You’re using Laszlo 3.0b1 or older (or possibly newer).
• You get an error from the compiler: “Can’t import something.swf, 1 >= 0” or another similar error.
• This is because the SWF parser/generator used in Laszlo does not recognize or handle the tag types 60 (DefineVideoStream) or 61 (VideoFrame), from the Flash 6+ specs.
• Your video does not get embedded and your client is disappointed.

The solution

• Apply this patch and rebuild, or use the rebuilt .jars provided near this readme.
• Laszlo can now handle the above tag types.
• Compile your Laszlo source again.
• Your video gets embedded and everyone is happy.

(FYI, this patch was developed on my time, not my client’s.)

To apply the patch:
cd <lps-home>
patch -p1 < video.patch

I’m starting again with the blogging thing. Enjoy, if possible.