The other day, I passed by an interesting truck. The sign on the side read "Real World Foods". A band near the bottom of the side panel read "Customer satisfaction is our number one goal."

First off, does the name imply that no other food company is in the "real" world? If so, what world are they in? The imaginary world? And then, I wonder if they've ever actually reached their number one goal ? maybe their number one goal is the most elusive: it's better than writing "not a single satisfied customer" on the side of their truck! I think they need new copy, and maybe even a new name...

:::

Interesting art site: esao.net. It's also an example of how Flash can provide good interface and spice things up at the same time.

:::

I've been signed-off for a long while again. I didn't want to blather on repeatedly about the bad news on the TV. A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail that said "Frodo has failed. Bush has the ring." I think it's worse... the ring makes you invisible, and Chaney is the one who keeps disappearing. Add to that, how W often seems strangely like a wooden puppet. "September 11"... "Terror"... "Saddam Hussein"... "Nukulur"... "Must stop"... "Evil"... "God bless us every one"... Aw, heck, maybe he's just channeling Tiny Tim.

I think I'm going to like reading the New York Observer. I picked up a copy for the first time yesterday, and the articles read like a breath of fresh air in this atmosphere of slanted, wilting pre-war "coverage."

This from a page 1 article on 3/17:
"...Eight times he interchanged the war on Iraq with the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, and eight times he was unchallenged. ...

...A New York Times - CBS poll showed ... 66% of Democrats agreed with Senator Byrd and said the House and Senate had not done enough to challenge President Bush on the war, as did 48% of the country. Save for a few dissenting voices, like Senator Byrd and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the pusillanimous and calculating Democrats have rolled over. ...

... It did not occur to the reporter?any more than it has to Mr. Bush and his bunch of crusaders?that no President has ever declared war; because no President has ever had that power: congress declares war; it's in the Constitution. ..."

Ah, yes. Civics lessons for everybody!

:::

Meanwhile, I'm still Flash-crazy. A while ago, it occurred to me that ActionScript's dot (object) and square bracket (array) syntaxes were mostly interchangeable. Now I realize there's a key difference: square bracket syntax evaluates strings, while dot syntax only works with literals. Huh? I'll show you an example in a second, but to sweeten the pot, I'll throw in another juicy bit: if you put a pair of parentheses after any string expression, Flash will resolve the string expression, and then call a function with that name. What that means is you can indirectly reference function calls using potentially complex expressions. That's juice.

Here's an example:

// Define a simple function.
function sayHi(){
   trace("Hello.");
}

// let's create an object...
tester = new object;
tester.obj = this; //points to root.
tester.fn = "sayHi"

// Now, let's use it. [This is the cool stuff]
tester.obj[tester.fn](); // evaluates to: _level0.sayHi()

// Trace out the contents of the tester oject, so you can see what's in there.
trace("\n" + "Contents of tester:")
for(i in tester){
   trace (i + ": " + tester[i]);
}

You can copy and paste the code into Flash for your own edification.

:::

What's up with Friends of ED?

Date: Fri Mar 14, 2003 12:45:37 PM US/Eastern
Subject: RE: Flash MX Studio Ch 2: errata?

Support is no longer available for Wrox - Friendsofed - Curlingstone -
Glasshaus products. Please refer to public forums or p2p.wrox.com or
d2d.friendsofed.com for support from your peers.

Thanks

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 14 March 2003 14:50
To: support@friendsofed.com
Subject: Flash MX Studio Ch 2: errata?

Hi,

The files textEffect001.fla and textEffect002.fla seem to contain a critical
flaw in their code.

In the function setUpText, getTextExtent is used to calculate the line
height, but that returns an incorrect value (537 in textEffect002.fla) -- at
least on my machine. As a result, the movie seems to show only one line of
text when it runs. That's because all subsequent text is being drawn
off-screen.

I hardcoded a line height of 26, and it works... Interestingly, I got that
value by listing the variables and noticing that each of the spawned movie
clips showed a textheight attribute with a value of 26. I'm running Flash 6.0 r25 on Mac OS X 10.2.4. Hope this helps.

I like their books, even if some seem a little sloppy. They're good for inspiration. If they've cut support across the board like that, sounds like something's not going well. I've never even heard of Curlingstone. Is that a reference to that Olympic event?