Last week we were building an AIR kiosk application. Everything went perfect until we installed the application at the client’s kiosk.

The basic idea of the kiosk is that you can record a video message. We used actionscript 3 connected to flash media server 2 to record the voice and audio. Around this we added some AIR to write the filename and some other details to a local sqllite database.

The problem occurred when we installed the AIR app on a windows computer (it was build on Mac). Sometimes the audio is recorded sometimes not. We weren’t able to figure out what was going wrong. After to much hours we removed the AIR wrapper and rewrote the app to use a local php, mysql server.

In the following week i will extract the problematic code and test it with the new fms3.

This years theme of the motor show was "ecologic environment". After a year of continuously preaching about global warming, a bad summer, a warm winter and SMOG alert., you would probably thing that everybody is getting "the message" by now.

The first thing you notice when you walk into the fair are the big suv’s. Cars consuming around 10 to 15l/100km. And it looks like everybody is praising those cars leaving the "normal" cars in the dark. Even worse was that a certain brand was talking about his ecologic suv. I think that’s getting time that the government really start punishing those drivers. Car tax accordingly the CO exhaust maybe.

No it’s not all bad news, i was very impressed by bmw and mini, what they trying to do with their ecologic cars is really impressive.

A lot of things happening! I made a biggest step of my life this week, later more.

Also a lot of development going on:
-Air application for a kiosk, using Flash Media Server and local sqlite database.
-At mmc we found some time to experiment with flash lite 2.0.
-I finally finished 2 long running projects.

Today i watched the students of the PIH presenting their Small Business Projects. There were a few with great ideas, it would be a pitty if they don’t bring their projects to the market.

Tommorow i’m going to the European Motor Show in Brussels, looking at dream cars. I was always saying: "the day i turn 30, i’m going to buy my first porsche". Next month i’m becoming 25, just 5 years left to find the gap in the market. Mmm beter try some hard working

Today i found some time to do some further testing with the WiiMote and flash. After the little trouble i had with MoteDaemon. We used MoteDaemon because we had trouble connected the WiiMote to Windows in the first place. So i today i went back to step 1 and start looking why the WiiMote didn’t connect the right way.

The problem seemed to be that BlueSoleil don’t support the Bluetooth driver of Bootcamp and the bluetooth dongle my collegue is using. So after some surfing i came around this article. After changing the ini files of BlueSoleil i used those ini files as driver for the bluetooth device. Now everything is working fine at last.

You have to use BlueSoleil because the bluetooth stack in windows doesn’t support the WiiMote.

Something that is one of my “strange” habits is that i can fall very easily in love with legendary objects or brands that proved their existence (ex. Apple, SMEG, kitchenaid, bellerose).

For a while i was searching for a replacement for my old but legendary Macromedia notebook. Surfing around the web yesterday evening i came across moleskinerie.com, a site celebrating the live of a notebook? There is even a moleskin group on facebook!

Today i hurried to the local “club” to get my first Moleskine. And just one thing: i love it. Black cover, elastic band and white quality pages.

When i was using my trusted fms connection code in actionscript 3 a got a strange error: “objectEncoding error”.

After a few minutes of research on google i found the following solution: “NetConnection.defaultObjectEncoding = ObjectEncoding.AMF0;”

The reason of the problem is that as3 uses amf3 by default, but fms 2 is still using amf0.

I didn’t had the chance to test it with fms3 (because the download site is down for the moment), but after looking through some blogposts it seems that fms3 will use amf3.

Yesterday evening my employer presented their first Afterhours session in ages. Our guest speaker, Peter Elst, showed us in something more than 1 hour the more advanced Air api’s like the “Windowing”, “File”, “Drag and Drop”, “SQLite” and the “Upgrade” api. Peter used 5 little examples showing us step by step howto use the different Api’s. My hands are itching to make some great apps with Air really soon.

On the 18th en 19th of Februrary i’m presenting a 2 day course on Adobe Air with Flex at multimediacollege, so for everybody who wan’t to learn how to use Air in depth you can contact me or my employer to get your seat reserved.

For a client we’re making a demo, where you can control a flash game by using the WiiMote.

My collegue Alwyn, already builded a wii controlled drum game at university which is perfect to show in a demo. The biggest problem we faced today was connecting the WiiMote to Windows. After a while i started looking for an OS X application. Quickly i came across DarwiinRemote and a little bit later a found the best solution for us.

MoteDaemon is a xml socket server, sending out the data coming from 1 or more WiiMotes. The downside at this moment is that we can’t use the nunchuck.

At the moment i’m making an actionscript 3 interface to connect to the socket server. When we finish the demo, we will put it online somewhere.

Edit: After some more research we noticed that MoteDaemon is giving wrong values back on the moment you connect more than 1 remote. It seems that the software is mixing the values of the connected remotes.

This morning I attended a Plugmedia event. The session was about making your website accessible and presented by Roel Van Gils from AnySurfer.

Accessibility is something that i’m always talking about in my classes, but it it seems that students most of the time don’t get what it’s all about. Maybe a little trick to persuade them is to let them use Jaws instead of their eyes for a day.

I spent my whole childhood between those little blocks.