dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

custom myspace

About a month ago i took a stab at really whipping myspace into shape. Currently, my employer has me riled up to build a crazy-custom myspace page…somewhere between the full overhaul i did for my page and the clean “skinning” style that others have adopted.

So i was talking to a friend of mine about the obscene amount of money some people are charging for corporate myspace pages…you know, the banner-less ones with all kinds of product placement, etc. etc. $10k + monthly maintenance fees + hundreds of thousands (yes, you read that right) in ad spending to get a banner free page for yourself. its a disgusting, commodity-based market that is 100% fabricated. But its working for some really good sales people, so good for them.

My friend got this crazy idea in my head that it might be valuable to create a myspace “IDE” of sorts. I told him it was impossible because there wasn’t an API for myspace. I really need to drop “impossible” from my vocabulary because every time i think there’s no way i can pull something off, someone proves me wrong.

Turns out there is an API…sort of.

1-2-pimp (translated from german for your convenience) runs on the pseudo api created by imagelooop. Effectively it takes whatever code you provide it, and along with a user/pass for myspace authentication, it posts it automagically into your “about me” section (the technique used for myspace customization).

So with that available…all i need to do is document what myspace allows/disallows code wise, build up some neato drag and drop flash components (for rss, music playing, etc), and build up a cute little IDE so that you can, in theory, build the holy grail yourself: a myspace page without the suck.

im VERY against WYSIWYG. It belongs NOWHERE near professional web development. But wouldn’t it be nice to have myspace pages that aren’t so blindingly painful to look at? a nice intermediate step between those $10,000 corporate myspace pages and things like this.

right. like i needed something else to fool around with. ::rolls eyes::

deconcept swfObject bug debugged!

remember how i said my png transparency solution relied on deconcept’s swfobject? We noticed that whenever you clicked a link that left a page, it seemed that every embedded flash object was dumped from the page, collapsing holes and causing everything to look screwy for a second before the page switched.

for the record, this can be fixed by following these directions: http://lists.deconcept.com/pipermail/swfobject-deconcept.com/2006-August/001407.html

Or, just comment out these lines from the swfobject.swf if (typeof window.onbeforeunload == 'function') {
var oldBeforeUnload = window.onbeforeunload;
window.onbeforeunload = function() {
deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.cleanupSWFs();
oldBeforeUnload();
}
} else {
window.onbeforeunload = deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.cleanupSWFs;
}


edit: for crying out loud, why dont any of my wordpress plugins for code formatting work???

edit 2:

Geoff at Deconcpet wrote me about this, and it was definitely a known issue. I’m previewing the next release of swfobject, which seems to have the problem locked down, although, i dont have the ability to test the main function of the cause of the bug: the release of swf’s with streaming content. I should have that soon, for testing, and will follow up a report on that.

Thanks, Geoff. You (and swfobject) are awesome.

the value of education

Drexel University gets a lot of press around here as a “prestigious” school. Do any of you outside of the northeast corridor even know that Drexel exists? Does it mean anything over a degree from any other accreddited university (i’m not talking community college, i’m talking real deal university). Or, is “a degree is a degree is a degree”.

(I’m looking at you, west coasters).

(if you can’t read between the lines, i’m ready to tell Drexel to take their shaft and shove it somewhere else for a change. Just weighing my options, no decisions are being made yet, and no matter what I’m not “dropping out of school”).

a little bit of taste, please.

maybe it’s just me. maybe it’s just my distaste for world news, and the fact that its never uplifting and always depressing. it definately isnt my love for interesting uses for technology.

but exercise a little taste. today, 5 years after what we ALL KNOW and remember what happened, CNN is dedicating one of their web news feeds to broadcast the day of live coverage in real time through the course of today. As i type this, I see one tower on the ground and one still standing, smoking. I just heard them get the news of capitol hill experiencing an explosion. I don’t need to relive this, no one does.

here’s to another year of avoiding the news (beyond tech news. the only thing depressing in tech news is windows vista).

ernersto is a jerk

it’s been raining for a couple of days, nonstop. as if that wasnt depressing enough, the front windows of my apartment (the ones in my bedroom) are starting to leak from being beaten against by heavy rains.

and for the 2nd time, my apartment is being damaged by water and my landlord is unavailable until monday. but my landlord says to me that I ‘can’t live my life in fear and worry what’s going to happen’, and therefore its inapproprate for me to request an after-hours contact at the realty office.

does anyone have advice on how to deal with a landlord who refuses to provide any contact information for emergency situations off business hours? this is getting a bit ridiculous.