Archive for February, 2009
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The Space Between Us: A Novel by Thrity Umrigar
My review
rating: 2 of 5 stars
My original intention was to write a scathing review, but then I decided that wouldnt’ve been entirely fair. Basically, I should not have allowed the beautifully crafted “A Soldier of the Great War” to precede this book. “The Space Between Us” was comparatively a letdown, both in craft and in content. Though the plot was riveting in its own way, it does not avoid the usual clichés and pitfalls of the book’s subgenre (i.e. a story about the trials and tribulations of women in non-Western cultures).
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins
My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was a great book. I have to confess, it is one thing to call myself a dork because I write Actionscript and know what a “Rick Roll” is… but it is another thing to let this MIT professor, who is probably a bigger dork than I will ever be, take me through the hidden backstreets and boulevards of new media culture. Through this book, I learned so many things that I wouldn’t have fully realized just from being a bemused observer and participant, from the ambiguously empowering effect of Harry Potter on children to the great lengths Survivor spoilers would go to prove themselves masters of their craft.
A quick blogpost from work to document something useful to remember…
Flash Player 7+ has a security restriction that requires XML files loaded into a Flash movie to reside on the same domain as the Flash movie. This I already knew, but what I didn’t know was that Flash Player counts “www.domain.com” and “domain.com” as two separate domains.
This wreaked havoc on my brain for about 15 minutes as I couldn’t figure out why my Flash movie would load images on some computers and not others at the office. Turns out some people were in the habit of typing “www” and some (me included) weren’t.
Then I noticed that Safari was looking for some file called “crossdomain.xml” in its Activity window. I googled it and found this article on Adobe that explains it all. Turns out this file was needed when the Flash player wasn’t sure whether an external file was on the same domain or not. Inside you can put instructions to allow Flash Player access to the domains you need, like so:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd"> <cross-domain-policy> <allow-access-from domain="www.company.com" /> <allow-access-from domain="company.com" /> </cross-domain-policy>
Uploading these few lines of XML into the root folder quickly solved everything. Another crisis averted. =)
This is a belated post. Saturday afternoon (pre-mochi), we actually went to see the Shepard Fairey show at the ICA. Here are my random thoughts:
By and large, it was a very predictable show. We saw an abundance of visual tropes inspired by war propaganda depicting activist/culture-jamming themes in a super-flat, high-contrast style. We also saw a preoccupation with sumptuous Asian and Middle-Eastern decorative motifs, as well as those spirograph-like things on money. But none of this is meant in a disparaging way. There were several things that I found amazing about the show.
Something surprisingly easy that I learned just now: to get a special character, like an en dash or an em dash (it is very important), into a string in Actionscript, look it up in the Unicode index on this amazing site, slap a backslash and a lowercase “u” onto the beginning of the Unicode hex value, and stick it into your string.
I know, this doesn’t make for much of an entry but… this was a complete OH DUH, angels descending, rays of enlightenment kind of moment, so I figured it was worth documenting. Also, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m gonna forget in 12 minutes and then bug Yang about. =)
