This is not a mundane detail, Michael.

Congratulations Peter and Emily!

Mike — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:58:27 +0000

See the rest of the wedding pictures

My favorite videos of 2008

Mike — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:48:10 +0000

You can vote however you like. These kids are awesome. Wish I could find the lyrics to the verses here.

For all my love of the Rick Astley, I really enjoyed watching Obama sing the song.

Loved the whole Nailed it! series on funny or die. Mostly lasted during the writers strike. So lame, but kinda funny.

Nailed It! Ep. 16

Guess I can’t leave out Yes We Can. I think it was very helpful in getting people excited about Obama early on in the presidential race.

And finally, from election night 2008. Marching around downtown Bellingham was a blast. I really wish there was a video of this night. Here’s my brother walking around in his American flag boxers:

Killer Ape Video

Mike — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:10:16 +0000

I made this video my junior year of high school. My english teacher gave extra credit if we made a short movie. Still not sure why. I filmed and edited this the afternoon and evening before the deadline. Editing with 2 ghetto VCRs was fun. One of the VCRs had a 2-3 second delay when you hit the record button. I vividly remember staying up late counting out over and over “one one thousand, two one thousand, three one NOW”. You can tell where the editing gets messed up at the very end.

Killer Ape on youtube

Virus.exe

Mike — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:55:58 +0000

Here’s the video the ResTek staff created for iMovieFest 2004.

Virus.exe on youtube

Happy New Year!

Mike — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 07:13:58 +0000

Shots at New Years

Dear T-Mobile, show me some Bellingham 3G coverage then we’ll talk

Mike — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:57:43 +0000

I really want the new G1/android/gphone. Seems pointless without 3G speed for the Internet.

Is this mapquest from 1997?

The T-Mobile 3G coverage looks great in Seattle and the Eastside, but doesn’t even reach as far north as Everett.

Boo.

SWFUpload with flash 10

Mike — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:45:03 +0000

Flash player version 10 has new security restrictions with it’s javascript interaction. It is no longer possible to trigger the local file picker from a javascript event. Basically breaking the most legitimate use of flash in websites that I’ve seen in a while.

I use SWFUpload in a few sites to get multiple file uploads and upload progess bars. It’s pretty slick.

The SWFUpload project has a beta release out that can work with Flash 10. Here’s the basic changes required in your code to work with the 2.2.0 betas:

Right above your html that contains a button to trigger the file picker:

You will want to give your button a fixed width and height.

Add the following CSS rules:

.swfupload {
position: absolute;
z-index: 1;
}

And finally, add the following options to your SWFUpload settings object:

button_placeholder_id : "spanButtonPlaceholder",
button_width: 100,
button_height: 40,
button_window_mode: SWFUpload.WINDOW_MODE.TRANSPARENT,
button_cursor: SWFUpload.CURSOR.HAND,

This adds a transparent flash object over your html button that is the same size. Flash traps the click over your button and triggers the file picker from flash itself. Ironically, this work around for the tighter security restrictions in Flash 10 seems like a compete security risk in inself…

Pat wrote about fixing the flash 10 issue with the YUI libraries.

Looking towards the future

Mike — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:48:58 +0000

Specifically the next 24 hours.

2008 Electoral Vote Estimate

2004 Electoral Vote Estimate

I don’t see this presidential election being as close as 2004.

Obama looks like something out of the Matrix

Mike — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:56:25 +0000

Obama at a rally today in Chester, PA. 9,000 people attended despite the pouring rain. These pictures look like Obama is a character in the Matrix movies.

Source.

I need to follow through on more of my goofy ideas

Mike — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 06:01:53 +0000

A few days ago I was explaining to my friend what Twitter is. He thought it sounded similar to a message board I made back in 2001 for my friends to keep in touch after we all left for college. At the time I wasn’t really familiar with blogging. I believe this was the first real code I wrote in PHP. It definately served it’s purpose well for a few years. As you can see from the stats, usage has died off completely. I think this concept was more along the lines of the blog aggregation “planets” (ResTek, Mozilla, gnome, etc) of today.

I will now claim that I almost invented Twitter.

Back in 2003, AIM was the hot shit with people living in the dorms. I really liked how much effort people put into their away messages. I remember a peticular away message of mine declaring how awesome last nights party must of been because I woke up and there was a beer bottle in my fish tank.* My idea was to write a script that logged the away messages of everyone I knew and stored them in a DB. I got really tangled up in implementation details. I tried using perl and some module that could connect to AIM. For some reason I thought I needed to use threading in perl. This became a giant nightmare as I knew very little of perl or threading at the time. Needless to say, the script never made it into a cron, and the rest was not history. I can’t help but wonder what kind of website I would have thrown together once I started gathering data…

These days I notice that people still put a lot into their status messages on gchat, AIM, etc. And facebook has fully embraced status updates as well. It took me a while to warm up to Twitter, but I’m really liking it now. How else am I supposed to get updates on what my friends are doing from a hut in some tiny village in Uganda that has no electricity or running water?

* I thought it would be a good addition to the tank so I drunkenly boiled it and placed the sterile bottle in the tank. It was a clear Corona bottle, and actually did work pretty well in a fish tank.