Microphone bug in as3?

[UPDATE]

Ok, so it really is a bug,  Thnx Matt for the comment with the link:

“you need to pass a value of “-1″ to the getMicrophone() call to get the one you’ve chosen”

—-

Seems like there’s a bug in the As3 (or flash player 9) in the Microphone class.

I’m not able to switch between Audio-input devices using the Settings panel.
And Microphone.getMicrophone() always seems to get the First Audio-device,
and not the device the user has selected in the settings panel.

Try this:
do a Microphone.getMicrophone();
bring up the settings panel (through rightclick or code: Security.showSettings(SecurityPanel.MICROPHONE); )
switch audio-device.
Now, for me it’s still using the firts audio device, and NOT the one I just selected.

Can anyone confirm?

I’m using the latest Player. 9,0,64,0

Be careful where you put your projects

I Just made a big mistake.
I created a new project with Eclipse, but placed it in my “active projects” folder instead of “active projects/projectname”
So I deleted it. Unfortunately Eclipse deleted ALL the contents under “active projects” instead of just the project files.
So I just lost a weeks work…

Lesson learned? Daily backups instead of Weekly backups….

Flash, Midi and Red5

Although I’ve had some real fun using the velleman k8055 to control flash with sensors, it only supports 2 analog inputs.
So I started looking for alternatives and was pointed towards the MidiSense page. It’s a small and affordable circuit that has 6 analog inputs and sends the data as Midi.
Midi huh, so how are we gonna get that into Flash? Well, I saw this wonderful post on John Grden’s blog.
So I hooked up my flash-file to Red5, converted John’s code (just a few lines) to AS2 (I’m still teaching my students AS2) and…
‘Hurray’ 6 analog sensors were available to flash…

In John’s Words… ROCK ON \m/

Wrapping the k8055 dll to an neko ndll

I loved the fact that I was able to communicate between flash and my Velleman k8055 board after I had created my c# wrapper app.
I’m using it to give a course on Haptic Interfaces at Communication and Multimedia Design.
But I’ve been having problems getting the .NET2 framework installed on some machines
(security settings, that I can’t change)

So…. I finally tried wrapping the dll into a Neko ndll to be used with neko and/or haxe.
Main problem:
I don’t know c or c++.
Solution:
2 liters of Coffee , 3 E-books, 4 krentenbollen (buns with raisins) , 5 websites and 6 hours of being really focused (which is very rare)

And now I have a 0.0.1 release (which is probably very buggy)
But hey, let’s share it

All the demo does right now is turn on 3 digital outputs and 1 analog output.
Proper demo coming soon.

Old Projects

Sometimes I stumble upon old projects, usually when backing up my stuff.
So: “Here’s one I made earlier” (2005)

[kml_flashembed movie="/files/kalligrafie.swf" height="250" width="400" /]

Full version (in dutch)

FMS on Fedora Core 6

I upgraded my develoopment-server to Fedora Core 6 , so I had to reinstall some apps.
Getting Flash Media Server to run on FC4 wasn’t easy so I knew trying the same on FC6 would also be a challenge.
Here’s what I got so far.

Get the latest version of FMS from adobe.
flashmediaserver2.tar.gz
unpack and change into the ‘ FMS_2_0_4_r79_linux’ dir
install with:
./installFMS -platformWarnOnly

Don’t choose to start the server, cause your (probably) missing some some symbolic links
get openssl097a
yum install openssl097a-0.9.7a-9

now you should be able to start fms.

If it doesn’t work, try running fmsmanager in de fms directory
./fmsmanager &
and see if it throws any errors

Happy streaming

upgrade failed

Updating WordPress failed..
So happy I backed up my database…..!
I’ll restore my blog tomorrow

MCE 2005 and Flash, Things done my way

I’m really enjoying my Windows Media Center, allthough I still have to do a good case mod ’cause right now I just a have a big ugly atx-tower and a 19″ crt in my livingroom. The only thing is, being an Interaction and Interface Designer I like having things behave the way I want them to. Since rewriting MCE isn’t an option, I decided to see what I could do with extending MCE through the ‘programs’ section.

Reading through the SDK I found that it was real easy to extend MCE with HTML-pages (it embeds IE). Well hey, if it does HTML, it does flash! And because I have all my media and data on a LinuxServer it was easy to create a backend that can read my musicfolders (my biggest complaint about the way music is handled on mce) but also my contactdatabase, my musiclyrics and tabs.

[ Screenshot ]

Now the tricky part was designing the interface and application-structure in flash, and getting the remote to work.
But now I’ve got everything sorted. And I’m enjoying my MCE the way I want to.

b.t.w. It should’n be too hard to replace the backend with a c# or asp.net solution, so you could even run it when you don’t have server.

Demo of K8055 Interface for Flash

I’ve completed a demo for the K8055 Interface to Flash.
I’m using this demo for a minor in Interactive Installations I’m teaching at
Communication and MultiMedia Design in Breda (the Netherlands).

You can download the demo from the download page.
You’ll need to have the .Net2 framework installed as the wrapper executable has been written in c#.
And ofcourse you’ll need a Velleman K8055 Experiment board.
Be sure to run the exe, not just the swf!

If you like it, you’ll be able to buy the sourcecode for a small amount, once I’ve set up my PayPal account.

Tip for embedding Characters in Flash

If, like me, you always have to include characters outside the basic latin set, then read these 2 tips

http://blog.fuelindustries.com/archives/000062.html

http://www.5etdemi.com/blog/archives/2004/12/quick-tip-french-chars-in-flash/

so, as a reminder, you can find the xml-file on your machine here:
ConfigurationFolder/FontEmbedding/UnicodeTable.xml