Matt Shooks

I started reading The Essential Guide to 3D in Flash this week and have liked it so far.  From all that I can tell, it looks like Papervision 3D is a dead project with the loss of one of the main developers. It looks like Away3d is next in line and this book covers development using Away3d version 3. So far I have only run into a couple of problems as the examples appear to use an earlier version of Away3d than the current release version of 3.6. Flash now has it's own vector data type so you no longer use the Away3d vector data type. I have also noticed several of the Away3d classes that had 3D in the name have had that portion removed. With support for Molehill in Away3d 4, it will be an interesting option to include in our future game and simulation training at work.

My daughter is now 2.5 months old. Things are settling down quite a bit and the last couple of weeks I have been working on an update to my guild's website. I hadn't touched the page in 2 years and it was starting to show. I'll be writing a couple of articles on it as I took the oportunity to do a couple of news things. Most notable was the change to using Blueprint CSS Grid for layout. I was pretty happy that I was able to get the layout identical on Firefox 3, IE 7/8, Chrome 1/2 and Safari on a Mac. I will also be writing a couple articles on the various WoW news services and how to integrate and cache the information in ColdFusion and how to use the RealmStatus XML.

We had our third child last weekend and I am off for a couple of weeks to help my wife out. Took the oportunity to dust off some of the stuff I have on my website and decided I wanted to play around with Mango blog. I had previously been using BlogCFC which had been an easy to setup and use blog software. Installation of Mango went pretty well up to the point of trying to make it work with my subdomain blog.shooksweb.com. Found out I had to manually edit the base directory path for the blog to "/" in the database and clear the application scope to get it to work. Mango imported in all my BlogCFC posts and is working great so far.

One of my developers just sent this to me today about the plight of the software developer. Tragic. http://www.codesqueeze.com/hug-a-developer/

The Columbus area Adobe User Group is picking up steam again. They have been meeting regularly on Tuesday evening for the past couple of months. Michael Krotscheck has been heading things up and the group is now official again. There is a new site designed by the members, Columbus Digital. Make sure to check it out.