erik otto @ shooting gallery

this guy @ this gallery is creating vibrant work that doesn’t need to be animated. it’s got faucets leaking, scary-looking people, and cute little birds — just like my life.

prep work for patti smith @ fillmore

looks like patti’s covers-heavy show includes jewels & gems. i’m loading for download: overlooked tracks, rarities, and songs she’s bent to cover (until the show imagine the same chords with a poet’s diction directing the rhythms). for further research check patti’s setlists site out while the following files download:

Patti

1. overlooked
2. rarities

notPatti

1. ballads
2. chords

supernaut on hong kong phooey

And why would you hire a dog to be your janitor anyway? Dogs aren’t known for being particularly clean animals. Then again, if you knew your janitor was going to be drinking out of the toilet, I guess you’d have to trust that he was going to do a good job cleaning it first.

One last thing I’d like to mention here is Rosemary, the telephone operator. She scorned Phooey in his civilian identity of Penrod Pooch, but was in love with Hong Kong Phooey. Okay… first of all, how many talking dogs do you know? Can’t this woman see through his disguise? I might be able to chalk it up to the Clark Kent/Superman glasses routine, but he’s got the voice of Scatman Crothers. Are you going to tell me she wouldn’t recognize that voice? I’m not even going to try to make a joke, I’m just calling straight up bullshit on that one.

source

dan b. underhill on irony

katy st. clair on how to recognize a good song

You pretty much know a song is great if you can add a quick “Cha-cha-cha!” to the end of it. For example, take Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely.” Wait for the extended “dumbydoowahhhh,” and then place a “cha-cha-cha!” after a beat. The trick even works on Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You,” which closes with a long, soaring “youuuuuu … cha-cha-cha!” and “God Save the Queen”: “Nooo future, nooo future, nooo future … cha-cha-cha!”

jeff tweedy on taking rock seriously

I loved that analogy of a halfwit gardener onto whom people project profound meanings. I think rock music has a similar function.

annalee newitz on transformers

If you want to enjoy this flick without guilt, you will have to ignore the whole Middle East issue. Of course, one could say the same thing about living in the United States. Maybe Bay has succeeded in pulling off some social commentary after all: welcome to the United States — ignore the Middle East stuff, but stay for the masturbation jokes and cool special effects.

Grabbing the swf’s URL when the swf is loaded

I finally got fed up with recompiling our Flex application for the different servers I had to deploy to and decided to have it automatically figure out where it is and configure itself. This should have been relatively simple as the swf’s URL is known by the Flash player and was always available in Flash as _root._url (or _root["_url"]). I knew that Flex had to have this information available so I looked it up.

Sure enough, there is a place in the DisplayObject where you can get this info. DisplayObject.loaderInfo.url. Further looking showed that the Application object should have the loaderInfo. I added some code to test this in a function which was run on the “creationComplete” event and….the loaderInfo object is null.

I then looked further to see if there was another object that maybe had the loaderInfo I needed. The root proprty is supposed to give you the root object of the SWF and this should have the right loaderInfo, right? Nope, still null on “creationComplete”.

I now got suspicious and added some code to look at the URL on the click of a button. Sure enough this code was able to access the loaderInfo and hence get the URL.

So why is the loaderInfo not loaded when the application is created? If I can’t get the URL I can’t do my configuration as there is no other event I know of which I can listen for to set the configuration.

I now dove into the Application code in the Flex framework. I soon found the _url property which is declared as mx_internal. I remembered reading Daniel R’s blog post about mx_internal and quickly set up my code to use mx_internal::_url. Success, this is set on creationComplete.

Now to ask Adobe why we don’t have access to loaderInfo until after the creationComplete event….