calvin crane

It was difficult to leave the place I had had in Tooting Bec, London but I finally today moved to Hampstead Heath. I went out for a last look around as it was nice and warm off towards Balham. A small bottle of captain morgans was consumed on a small friendly wall and I watched the world go by in quiet contemplation while I listened to music and sent a few texts. I won't miss the distance I had to drive to get there or the long tube ride all the way down. I'm now living with an English guy called William and an American girl called Jennifer. I will start to look around for a capoeira club and explore the area. Now at least I have a massive park that has some good hills to go and run in. My room is tinier and I feel a bit like a student again which has to be good. I stayed too long where I was and the lesson I learned was this.

Do not let comfort dictate anything to you. Analyse to see if comfort in A leads to discomfort in B or suitability to your lifestyle.

Posted by calvin crane

It was going to have to be a big story to knock Ethan off the front page, so getting my eyebrow pierced isn't bad..I'm not really sure why exactly but it is definitely nice though I have to get used to it. Wanting to was my face and hair like normal with hands all over it will have to be careful. Also need to keep it clean. I will stop there I think piercings should be like kids, you know the number you have !

Continue reading "I punched a hole through my eyebrow and put some metal through it."

Posted by calvin crane

The movie star Ethan Hawke sat opposite me today on the tube. I'm not sure what was more fascinating seeing people not quite working out if it was someone they knew. But I'd say about 2 others only realised. I think otherwise they were in their own worlds and they were a young set. It is an amazing film called Training Day that springs to mind and also the film one day in paris and its prequel where he is attempting to charm julie delphy and has from dawn until dusk, so thats what they called the film and she was also in 2 days in Paris which is soo funny co staring with adam goldberg who was excellent in a non off centre role like he had in saving private ryan. But Training Day where Ethan Hawke really shows off his talent opposite (and really opposing) the wolf Denzel Washington a really fantastic film in my top 50 all time.

I have to say Ethan was looking rather grand in a grey suit and hat to top it off. Please leave your comments here not in any sites linking to this. Thanks Ethan and co for brightening my day.

Posted by calvin crane

Been working on my google map geocoding issue currently , its a service that if you give it a country it doesn't this wonderful thing and returns lat and lon coords. I have had to place a purposeful delay in the call to the service as it was detecting a flood or spam dos attack and returned a failure code.

Other than that it looks like set now 95% sure that I will be moving to Hampstead Heath. Will feel like moving to a different town. I'm sure that I will miss my kebab shop but I get to savour the northern line still at the other end. Will miss the be at one bar in Clapham Junction but that's about all.

Posted by calvin crane

Last Tuesday I had a fantastic afternoon swim at the countries largest freshwater pool the lido in Tooting Bec. I did 10 lengths of 91 meters then caught some of the sun through the cloudless sky.
There was a stunning women too I might add. I dugress, yes it was really quite weird going so far before reaching the end, almost twice the length of an olympic pool. It was jumping straight in as I think the water must have been 18 degrees c. I was quite fit and its interesting the fitness you can carry across sports as I havent really been swimming at all for a long time.

I just got back to mums after driving back this evening, smoked the last dried up monte cristo on a stomach of tuna and mushrooms and glided through the London streets in my trusty Focus. (I do love a good cigar will have to try the combination of tuna mushrooms and cigar again one day as it was a good buzz). I need to show her [my car] some love soon or she may kick me. I'm on the sofa about to collapse the lid of this interface to the world next to my black cat wisp. She is getting old and cranky for sure but tonight seems solid and non biting.

Posted by calvin crane

Was wondering why my flash movie appeared to be scaling within its fixed size even though the html surrounding element may have been different depending on browser- platform.

After probing the myriad of possibilities it was not the flash scaling it was the browser zoom. Another thing to check next time. Restarting the browser would have reset this value possibly, though who knows what settings get saved etc... hundreds and thousands of things to remember. I have been doing the browser wars a bit too much with css for the past couple of days.
The product is looking good so far

http://landed.at/europe/greece.html

Posted by calvin crane

I have finished to a point the flickr thumbnail application which was stage 1. A MVC frame was used and today refactored to add the google maps api into the same swf. So the results can be seen with landed.at if you have navigated to a specific country then the url passes in the country to the swf. Flickr does a search on thumbs and the google api geo-codes the country (not so much of an address) address and returns the position of the map. What was fun NOT was that having a latitude and logitude and trying to get the offset in full screen mode with the image to the left was a bit of applied trial and error, coming up with a coefficient for the particular zoom. It kind of works well with i.e. being a bit unstable in the full screen but it bloody well usually is with something. What have they done.

I'm glad bing is getting a big push hope it wakes google out of its dollar PR rubbish. Well please check out the following link and let me know and others too if you like it, thanks

http://landed.at/africa/kenya.html

Posted by calvin crane

There are times in life when it feels like you walk alone though this is probably not the truth the perception is there and feels very real. But it is on the way to somewhere where you no longer walk alone and indeed do not feel it. Today I had an experience that fully placed me in the feeling alone category, though I was not.

Continue reading "We all walk alone at times on the way to what draws us."

Posted by calvin crane

sunset, wilshire, beverly, nelson , speedway, venice, la cahuenga, sepulveda bvd, pallisades, PCH. oar house , firehouse, jims at the beach my LA. 1992.

Posted by calvin crane

I have in fact been surprised at the claims for expenses that MPs have been making. In fact more than shocked. And the backlash will be felt on the back of the backlash of the economic downturn.

If there is something that I also felt however is that a felling of optimism. Part of the old regime died in the economic collapse and it seems politicians are talking reform tonight with Jeremy Paxman at a level that would have been laughable a month ago perhaps. So in both cases perhaps the bang is nasty and has had a very negative effect but maybe it was necessary. I think it may have hurt the wrong people but they are merely casualties of a war on greed. Greed is a common denominator here and the working classes are not exempt from their greed in the housing market fuelling the demand and inflated price rises.

Ok I jumpt off my soap box for a moment, caught up with some ciudade de homens following the street kids in brazil by way of a series from the creators of ciudade de dios city of god. Cool I was disappointed as I was expecting similar to the popular film. But the series has merit and every episode a kind of message Confucius would have been proud of.

Posted by calvin crane

Another short term job today, but very nice atmos at DDB Health in Hammersmith, nice also to do some visual work for a change. Getting on also with my flickr widget for as3 and flex. Its mostly flash but as I built it with the sdk and started with an Application tag I'm looking at trying out some flex components for challenge. It might keep things tidy. Will see how easily they skin up as I want a custom look. Still not doing Capoeira but my handstands an general balance upside down are getting there. And also my makak's are coming off to the extent a hard floor doesn't worry me. Would be nice if i could control going backwards and balance in the vertical, at leats for a moment. Still no sign of full on Summer. But its nice to have the late evening light, allows me to get out for a run since I was biggin it ip playing battlefield 2 last night, and how good this game still is years later !

Posted by calvin crane

I had a moment of clarity and thought I ought to blog it.

Where I'm at - I will develop action script as and when it seems suitable interesting and a good idea or the bills start to get on top..

I want to focus on developing widgets for portals and websites, and anyone's sites generally.

I want to get into a style industry in some capacity.
I want to get into a travel industry better. Indeed combine the two sometimes. Style will mean sticking around Europe and indeed I don't think I will ever be able to not access it say at least 3 times per year if I do get to do my thing on some Caribbean Island.

So nothing drastic , an evolution but need to define a few clear goals to make it happen.

Posted by calvin crane

The older one (website) had some very old stuff, so I'm getting round to doing things.
Had a strange one this week end, misjudged my friday night consumption and that's all I'm going to say on that one very big baseball bat in the face note to self. But will I learn I know I caused a friend some grief. Sorry buddy I'm looking for an excuse but don't really have one. Watched some of the football, Arsenal look quite poor, I think they have been a bit unlucky this year with injury and the side is very young, wonder who will stick around, would be nice to have a few more English players in the squad.

Continue reading "Messing around with the look of this, its not mine but its cleaner and appealing."

Posted by calvin crane

My old colleague Jake Brindle let me in on a cool package called bulk loader for as3.

http://code.google.com/p/bulk-loader/

I'm just checking out its usefulness here. Its a bit bulky for banners but for microsites and my portfolio should be ideal to centralise my loading of external assets.

EXAMPLE USEAGE

package at.landed.view.components
{
import flash.display.Sprite;
import br.com.stimuli.loading.BulkLoader;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.display.Bitmap;
import flash.display.BitmapData;

public class Image00 extends Sprite
{

var loader : BulkLoader = new BulkLoader("main-site"); // creates a BulkLoader instance with a name of "main-site", that can be used to retrieve items without having a reference to this instance

public function Image00()
{
loader.add("images/me.png", { id:"me" } );
loader.get("me").addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onBackgroundLoaded)
loader.start();
}
private function onBackgroundLoaded(e:Event):void
{
addChild(loader.getBitmap("me"))
}
}

}

Posted by calvin crane

I have possibly recently at last got to grips very well with (as I have used MVC for some time) the concept of MVC. So I start to look at your framework in the context of actionscript.

You use the term 'pure' yet it seems that this variation of the pattern is less clean and more complex. I will give my reasons why as a positive Criticism of at least the Documentation.

You introduce a 4th top level class - Singleton called Facade (I understand that it is supposed to simplify things however so await to try it out but it seems I can do everything here (going against the idea of modularity facade=frame1 stick all my code here type of thing) and undermines the strict chain of command and decoupling that MVC originally set out to do)

You introduce Proxies to the model (I suppose to encapsulate the model further- I always when using proxies think its an unnecessary step on many occasions too far - too many wrappers).

You Introduce mediators as a part of the view which itself is a Singleton, I assume the main view is a singleton but obviously there is a need for multiple view classes, so then are there each time a view its a Singleton ? Perhaps I need a view not to be a Singleton. For me I could understand the top level view being a Singleton but I don't like views being Singletons for no good reason. And back to Mediators they seem like views to me ? Confusion here. Events dispatching would be done from the views to the controller traditionally and I can understand this. Are views Abstract mediators ? So the concrete is the mediator and the abstract the view and in fact then a mediator is just another view or nested view ?

Can you see how a beginner to patterns is getting lost here. I hope so this is mostly what I want the point of this post to be. As I'm sure this is a great framework and there are benefits, just that the documentation is a bit well confusing.

e.g. You state that with Commands and the Controller "They are the home of your application’s Business Logic." well I thought and was comfortable knowing that (in MVC) the business logic is with the Model and ONLY here ! I would like an answer to this.

It is just stuff stopping me from trying out the framework.

Posted by calvin crane