Here is the source .fla file  - (right click.. Save Target as)

My friend Greg mentioned that he was working on a flash design that had to incorporate a large number of items falling inside of the movie.  Instead of trying to tween everything by hand, it might work to have a script generate the scene for you.  This was a quick proof of concept. 

Via:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryankennedy/1342796210/in/photostream/

"We got some bad news this week."  

My heart sunk and I immediately felt a pain in my stomache.  I've heard this phrase from my Mom only a few times in life and everytime I did, it was serious.  "Your uncle Chuck just found out that he has stage 4 cancer and the doctors are only giving him a couple months."  What?  I was completely shocked by the news.  Cancer had once again reared it's ugly head with a vengence into the life of somebody that I love.

My uncle Chuck was a role model for me growing up.  I always looked forward to seeing him at any family gathering and he would take time asking me what I was up to in my life and was quick to offer a word of guidance or encouragement with no judgement.  My fondest childhood memory is how he knows all kinds of pressure points and whenever you shook his hand, he was quick to apply a pressure point on you and make you drop to the floor.

I could go on and on about how great my Uncle Chuck is but I found an interview that he did with the Milwaukee Journal a couple years back and if you read that, you'll read about a business man that worked hard and cared deeply for the people around him. 
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4196/is_20050926/ai_n15617934

I'm planning a trip home to Wisconsin in the next few weeks to pay him a visit, shake his hand, give him a hug, and make sure he knows how much he impacted my life.

I ask anyone that reads this to keep my Uncle Chuck in your thoughts and prayers.

I walked in high expectations after reading some fairly good reviews in Wired magazine and online.  I walked out of the movie with my eyes hurting from rolling them so much.  I should've waited until it came out on video.  I think my exact words walking out were, "I feel bad, I would've preferred watching my kids play in a pool than sit through that."

I'll give the movie props for it's visuals as the special effects were top notch and almost to the point of overload.  But all the eye candy didn't make up for the dissappointment I felt regarding the storytelling.  They only spent about 3 minutes discussing the great back story of how the Autobots soceity disintegrated and their civil war started.  They should have taken a page from the original Superman that showed us specifically the circumstances that led to packing Superman up and shipping him to earth.

I walked out of the movie knowing more about Sam (Shia LaBeouf), his parents (and the fact that his dad was a nut about his landscaping), and that his love interest's (Mikaela) dad was a convicted felon and that they use to steal cars together than I did about any of the Autobots and why they were on earth.  Granted, having watched the original Transformers cartoons and movies of old, I already knew what was going on but why not retouch on these important concepts and spend quality screen time telling that story than worrying about the school bullie's love of his Hummer.

One other aspect that got very little coverage was the story of Megatron.  They got us all caught up on that storyline in about 3 sentences.   All the flashbacks focused on the Shackleton-esque escapades of Sam's great grandfather "stumbling" across the cube and Megatron.  If you're going to utilize a flashback then I personally would have preferred to see Megatron coming to earth and "somehow" getting stuck here and taken into custody and reversed engineered. 

Everything that I disliked about Armegeddon was in full effect in the Transformers.  I love going on an emotional rollercoaster during a movie, but it's best when it's not shoved down your throat to the sounds of  a Top 10 soundtrack and GMC ad.

Maybe my disappointment comes from how great this movie could have been.  All the elements were there to make it one of the best movies I've ever seen and that seriously bummed me out.  Now I'll have to wait until the sequel comes out on DVD before I get to see what happens next.  I was at a party this weekend and told a few friends that I saw it and they asked if they should see it.. my response was, "Did you like Armegeddon?"

I just watched a NASA press conference on CNN stating that they had no knowledge of any of the shuttle astronauts being under the influence of alcohol during or prior to the launches.  Really?  In the interest of science wouldn't it be a good idea to obtain as many vitals on a human prior to space travel? I'm sure there is some sort of pre-flight physical that astronaunts undergo where bloodshot eyes, cotton mouth and the stench of "morning dew" would  be noticed and recorded.

Instead of lying about it, why not just come and say, "Look.. have you ever seen a shuttle launch and do you what can happen when things go wrong?"  I can't imagine anything being more stressful than sitting around the night before you strap yourself to tons and tons of explosives that get ignited to propel you into space.  These people are professionals and putting their lifes on the line, so if they decide to raise a glass to keep their nerves in check then tell it like it is.  It also would make sense that NASA would contol their diets in the 24 hours leading up to the launch, so keep the booze out of the green room if it's going to be a problem. 

I've been keeping up on the mess that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' seems to be in.  I've been laughing through my tears as he offers explanations for alleged improprieties with, "I don't recall."  Lawyers gain respect and become successful for having studied and being able to recall, from memory, the most specific and obscure details of previous cases that have ever gone to trial.  It's hard to fathom that you can become the top lawyer in the US without being able to recall even the basics details like, who, what, when, where and why of some pretty important meetings that happend only a few weeks or months ago.   Saying you cannot recall the truth, when it's pretty certain that you should be able to, is the same as lying in my book.

But since it appears I'm casting judgement, I'm going to fess up to a lie that I told today.  While out for a walk with my wife earlier today, my 3 year old saw a dead bird laying in the road.  Later in the day she told me that she wanted to take me for a walk and show me the dead bird.  I told her that I didn't want to go.  Of course she asked me why to which I replied, "If I see the dead bird, I'll feel very bad that it didn't look both ways before crossing the street and I'll start to cry."  Telling that lie seemed like a much better solution than standing by the side of the road while people driving by watched my kid poke a dead bird with a stick.  

Sometimes lies can come in handy but they should be reserved for dealing with your children under the age of 5 and not an entire nation. 

One problem I came across during the widget development was parsing out the EndDate value that eBay webservices uses to denote when the auction you are looking at is going to end.  eBay uses an UTC formated date value that looks like this:  "2008-07-16T05:30:45.000Z"

I was relieved to find that Flash 8 supports the UTC Date type, but then realized that I could not find a way to take the string value of the EndDate that I got from eBay and turn it into a Flash formatted UTC date.  Hmmrph.  C#, as well as a good number of other server technologies make this quite simple so  I searched the innernets and came up empty for an example of what I was looking for.  Looking at Flash I discovered that I could construct a valid UTC Date with the following format: 

var myDate = new Date(year,month,day,hour,min,secs,ms);

Looking at the EndDate value of the eBay record I saw that I had all the values that I needed to construct a valid UTC Date, but I was going to have to roll up my sleeves and chop the string value up a little bit to get what I wanted.

Note:  Flash Months are zero based, unlike most languages, so January is equal to 0 instead of 1. 

So here is the function I created that will take a string that contains a date and convert it to proper Date.UTC format in flash.  It simply hacks apart the string and grabs the valid numbers that we need to pass to the constructor.  To expand on this, you could cast the variables as Numbers and do some extra validating before passing it to the constructor.  This could also probably be a good example for conversion to a prototype function.

function ConvertStringToUTC(dt:String):Date {
 var year = dt.substring(0,4);
 var month = dt.substring(5,7);
 var day = dt.substring(8,10);
 var hour = dt.substring(11,13);
 var min = dt.substring(14,16);
 var secs = dt.substring(17,19);
 var ms = dt.substring(20,23);
 
 var myDate = new Date(year,(month-1),day,hour,min,secs,ms);
 return myDate;
}

usage would be:

Date dtEndDate = ConvertStringToUTC("2008-07-16T05:30:45.000Z");

If your using the new Profile Providers inside of .NET 2.0, here is how you can access a member's profile from outside the web project.  You don't get the strongly typed parameters but it still can come in handy if your desperate.

ProfileBase pb = ProfileBase.Create("UserName");
object obj = pb.GetPropertyValue("NameOfValueYouWantToGet");

The Cure recently went through another line up change and ditched their keyboard player.  I'm assuming this will mean that their set will focus on their earlier music.  More rock, less pop.  I'll be counting the days.   

 ColoradoStartups.com :  http://coloradostartups.com/2007/06/19/asking-for-giveness/. 

It's a blog written by David Cohen covering the start up environment here in Colorado.. as if the domain name didn't pretty much cover that.

He gives a good overview of how the service works and links to a specific example, which is great.  So far, our concept continues to be well received among the community and this is very encouraging at these early stages.  Judging from his other articles, I'm sure if David spotted an issue with our service or business, there would be no hesitation in sharing this with his readers.  He calls it like he sees it and I like that.

You can view it online for free here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6703482849079349175

Apparently Mr. Moore doesn't mind people viewing his movies for free, but I doubt the studios do, so I wouldn't expect that link to be valid for too long.  Regardless, I would recommend that you take the time to either view it at the theatre, rent it, or even better, buy it through Giveness.com when it comes out on DVD. 

Many people feel Mr. Moore's views are slanted and full of prejudice against the government and whatever else but I personally admire his efforts for at least creating a dialogue about issues that effect us most.  I was personally moved and in many instances appalled at some of the information that was exposed in the movie.

"Knowing your money is going to a good cause can activate some of the same pleasure centers in your brain as food and sex, U.S. researchers said Thursday."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/06/14/brain.altruism.reut/index.html

brilliant.

It's a great article and I really enjoyed his commentary about soceity as a whole.  It's a very informative blog.

Tonight is going to be a night out for a change.  Sarah-boo is coming over to babysit the kids and we'll be heading out for a nice relaxing dinner and whatever else we decide to do.  I can't wait.

One feature you have to consider when setting up an email distribution system is how you can handle sending basic "text" emails versus sending well formatted ("pretty") emails that can contain html formatting.  Old systems use to require that you set your preferences to "html" as an option when signing up for emails that you receive. 

The best approach is to create an email that contains different MIME Content-Types of "text/plain" and "text/html" and let the email reader decide which version to display to the user.  Previously, this required getting down to actually communicating with the TCPClient socket on port 25.  While possible, it certainly adds a layer of complexity that most web developers fear to tread, myself included.  If anyone is interested, I created a decent SMTP Socket class that will let you talk with the socket layer and send html and text emails old school style.  Remember that even though a mail reader can parse the html version you send, the individual user may prefer a basic text view.

First, you'll need to come up with a good method for storing and accessing two different emails templates that you want to send which is beyond the scope of this entry and something I might discuss in a future blog.  To get the general concept, we store versions of our emails in the database, pull them in to a StringBuilder, do some regex on them for customization and send away.  Email templates could easily be stored in XML, Text files or even hardcoded into your code.  The important thing is that you have two seperate versions of your email template, the text version and the html version.  I've experimented with creating one html version and regexing out the html tags to create the text version but prefer to manage them seperately for better control over the formatting.

So, assuming you are familiar with a MailMessage and the SMTP classes, this is the basic code you need to distribute dual versions of the same email.

MailMessage mm = new MailMessage();
mm.To.Add(new MailAddress("ToEmailAddress", "ToDiplayName"));
mm.Subject = "Your Subject";

//load up the templates into the StringBuilders
StringBuilder sbBody = new StringBuilder("text template content");
StringBuilder sbBodyHtml = new StringBuilder("html template content");

I use to be quite comfortable working with Flash a few years ago but a lot has slipped my mind since then.  The fundamentals have been coming back quickly but I've been saying, "How did I do that before?"  One issue that had me stumped for a bit was being able to scale and center a dynamically loaded movie clip.

I started out manipulating the _xscale and _yscale of the movie, but didn't get the exact results that I wanted.  I'm sure it's possible to make it work, but I decided to take a different route of adjusting the _width and _height properties to fit. 

So here's what I did and it gives me the results i was looking for.

//set the maximum dimensions that you want the clip to live in
var imgMaxWidth:Number = 300;
var imgMaxHeight:Number = 240;

//the object referenced as "which" is the dynamically loaded clip
//this could be accessed in the .onLoadInit function of a MovieClipLoader listener

 //make sure the image is not too wide
 if(which._width > imgMaxWidth) {
  //calculate the height to proportion of scaled width
  var iHeight:Number = (imgMaxWidth * which._height/which._width)
  //set movie to new width and height
  which._width = imgMaxWidth;
  which._height = iHeight;
 }

 //make sure the image is not too high to fit
 if(which._height > imgMaxHeight)
 {
  //calculate the width to proportion of scaled width
  var iWidth:Number = (imgMaxHeight * which._width/which._height);
  //set movie to new width and height
  which._height = imgMaxHeight;
  which._width = iWidth;
 }

//center the clip within the bounds of the container

which._x = (imgMaxWidth/2) - (which._width/2);
which._y = (imgMaxHeight/2) - (which._height/2);

I think using the _xscale and _yscale would probably get the amount of code down a bit so I'll probably circle back and give it another go and turn it into a prototype for easier use.  

We celebrated Cash's first birthday yesterday.  It's always such a happy ocassion to see your child celebrate a birthday but their first one is always a blast.  We did the token.. "what happens when a 1 year old eats cake" but I'm sparing him the embarrasment of the event by not posting a picture.  A good time was had by all and congratulations to my little bundle of joy.  You rock Cash.

I believe that tickets are still available and if anyone would like to car pool with us up there, the more the merrier.

If I want to call the blog page for a Charity, I can send a request of:  
http://www.giveness.com/africaaid/blog 

When the server sees this request, the application can read the url and know that it needs to create a blog page for the Africa Aid charity. 

This next url will make a request for the second page of my blog list:
http://www.giveness.com/member/rwaldvogel/blog/page2

This one will get any blog that I have that is tagged eBay:
http://www.giveness.com/member/rwaldvogel/blog/tag/ebay

From the previous url, this is the actual request that is being made at the server level.
http://www.giveness.com/member/blog.aspx?un=rwaldvogel&tag=ebay

I use to think that people only used this type of design to hide the type of software their application was written in by hiding their file extensions.  I now realize that this is a very beneficial way to handle requests.

This week I re-joined my fore-father ranks when Giveness switched our hosting environment to a Web Farm environment.  The word "farm" is the only similiarity between the 2 professions but I'll take what I can get. 

This switch is going to allow a much more stable experience for our Nonprofits and their supporters.  It will also allow us to scale our company much faster as we continue to grow and help more people.  Getting a web application to run on one machine is a pretty easy thing to do.  Getting a web application to run on two machines is pretty hard thing to do but once you figure that out, adding another server is relatively simple, or 15 servers for that matter.

It's been an exhausting week and quite tricky at times but it was worth the effort.  Giveness is now in a position where we can grow with the demmands of our users, and that's something that I would expect from any site that I used.

We met so many wonderful people and got introduced to some amazing organizations that are doing great things.  The Nonprofit community is such a great segment to work in.  Everyone you meet has a kind heart and believes that any effort they make, can impact soceity as a whole. 

Lance Armstrong gave one of the keynote presentations and it's a truly remarkable story that he has to tell.  I sat enthralled and hanging on his every word as he discussed his illness and recovery and most importantly, his message that people can come together to great things to change the world.

It's unfortunate that most people have to wake up to the idea of helping through experiencing a bad situation themselves.  I'm guilty of this as well.  It took a good friend getting sick that landed this concept into my lap.  It's easy to live in ignorance and hopefully some of the work we can do here at Giveness will help bring the concept of helping others through a scenario that is less shocking to the soul.

Thanks to everyone that was kind enough to spend a moments to stop by our booth and allow us explain a little bit about what Giveness is.  We enjoyed the time we had together.

In an unrelated story, we visited the spot where JFK was assisinated.  It was quite interesting to see but I also could get a sense of the sorrow that the area seems to give off.