Oscar Trelles

“Ellipsis: A punctuation character consisting of three dots, or periods, in a row. It indicates that a word or phrase has been omitted.”
(From Adobe’s Glossary of typographic terms.)

I don’t now how close is this definition to the reason Macromedia decided to give the codename “Ellipsis” to the upcoming update for the Flash IDE, but it certainly fits, maybe a little too well.

At this point, everybody agrees that the latest major release of Flash was rushed, and most users were left with the feeling that a lot of things were left out, even after the first update. In terms of stability, bugs and documentation, Flash wasn’t the product we were waiting for. Ellipsis promises to fill in the blanks.

Although for obvious reasons there was not much information available outside the Ellipsis beta, other than the release date, Macromedia will be progressively making more information available through the Flash Team blog, before the actual release of Ellipsis.

From now on, that’s the place to go if your are looking for information on the update. Personally, I think is a good thing that the Flash started this new blog; hopefully it will help clearing the clouds over the current status of the Flash technology.

I’m finally playing with my Robosapiens. Ever since Greg got his and I learned more about that little funny robot, I tried to track him down in almost every electronics store in Manhattan, with no luck. Then I just forgot about it… However, Elizabeth got me one as a birthday present, but even though it arrived to her office about a week ago, she kept him captive until last night.

For her, the date is the date, so I couldn’t play with my new toy until past midnight. I’ve been busy all day today, so I couldn’t play around too much with the robot, but I just shoot a short video of him, demonstrating that he is full of attitude. The remote control comes with more than 60 pre-programmed actions, and you can use them to build a batch program, a sequence of up to 6 actions. I used that feature to maintain my Robosapiens active long enough to shoot the video.

And in case you were still wondering, yes, today’s my birthday

Last week I got engage in an e-learning project that’s taking practically all of my time, and leaving little space for advances on my personal projects. Despite all the advantages of working as a freelance, one of he thing I like the least is the inability to predict how much work one is gonna have to get done next week.

If about a month ago I was far more busy doing business development than getting real work done, reviewing job boards, sending out proposals, doing follow ups, etc., today I’m already reaching my limit of working hours. It’s interesting how the market works: I’m harvesting what I started seeding about 2 months ago, and almost running out of hands. However, in about a month or two, things could be as dead as they were at the beginning, considering that during Summer everybody is on vacation, and hardly anything gets done. The best you can do is go on vacation yourself, or prepare to get busy next Fall.

I’m hopefully doing both, but for the time being I’m finding it difficult to find ideas on what to write about. I think is just that I’m so tired by the end of the day…

I’m working on a Flash project for the International Institute for Learning, and it involves a lot of animation synchronized with voice-overs, which is something I stopped doing a couple of year ago, when I started trying to keep everything in one frame. To tell your the truth, I was unsure about accepting the assignment at the beginning, since it felt almost like taking a step back. However, the real challenge is that the job requires real understanding of the materials and topics being taught.

Fortunately for all of us, my background in business management has been very helpful, and the Institute is satisfied with the results, so far. So, it seems like we are going to be working on this for a while, and I’ll have more updates on this later.

Flash Forward has published the list of Finalists for the upcoming Flash Film Festival in New York. I’m still browsing through the list of 60 nominations, but there are definitely many good works that deserve a review, and why not, a vote.

Those of you that have used the primitive search engine I had in place here, and attempted to look up for more than one word, may have been disappointed by the results, myself included. That’s why I have been working on a PHP class to help deliver better results when searching within records in a MySQL table, and I just made it operational today.

Using this class, the search process happens at two levels, automatically: first, it tries to match the whole search string against the records in the database; second, it separates the search string into meaningful segments (most likely words), and loop through them trying to find a match; if at least one of the terms is found in a given record, it is considered and added to the results array, which is ordered according to relevance.

Relevance is measured following this criteria: in the first place, the search will return all results that contain the whole phrase; in second place, we will have all records containing all of the search terms, ordered according the number of occurrences; finally, all records matching at least one of the search terms, ordered in the same fashion.

Among the turn downs, it is still incapable of understanding exclusion operators (i.e. -keyword) or quoted phrases. I’m not really sure if I want to complicate it that much, unless there’s real use for those features. So far, I haven’t found any records of visitors using operators in their searches.

Keeping track of visitors’ searches helps me to understand what kind of information they expect to find here. So, if you care enough to give a hand testing the new search, please try meaningful stuff

—-
Update (06/20):

You can check the code here. For some reason, the coloring souce feature is not working properly in my server. But you can download it and check the source.

I don’t have any statistics to support my statement, but after having a number of interviews and meetings with prospective clients, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s some sort of relationship between Flash and Python.

For some reason, a couple of people that interviewed me during the past few weeks assumed that I might be interested in doing some Python programming on the side, _because_ I’m a Flash developer. This relationship between Python and Flash might not be obvious to me because of my lack of formal programming background, and that I don’t find fun on learning new programming languages, if I don’t have to. For example, I can say that I’m good with PHP and that it has been fun learning, but I wouldn’t have tried to get to know PHP if I didn’t need it at work.

So, what does Python offer, particularly to Flash developers? Is there any particular reason it is so popular within our kind?

For those interested in learning more about Python:
- What is Python?
- General Python FAQ