andrew-kirkpatrick

Well, since I managed to leave my side-lights on this morning and my car battery is flat, whilst I wait for the AA man to come and save me I figured I'd have a few seconds spare... which seems to be rather rare these days, for some unknown reason. I think relocating and changing jobs yet again is proving to be the killer here, although there are a fair variety of other things. I can't wait until I'm down in London again, doing the things I enjoy, and not having to worry about anything or anyone.

I seem to be spending most of my time at the moment reading course material or books, revising for exams, taking exams or generally focusing on professional development. Whilst when I started this it all seemed like a good idea, I do wonder if I'm starting to get a bit lost in it... I mean for example I've still not gotten round to building a template for my own website yet (although I did at least manage to composition it in Illustrator)

So, after a long-winded upheaval back to the Midlands from London after all the problems surrounding my accomodation (and somewhat unhappiness at Imperial College London for the way my project was handled and subsequently cancelled) I ended up working for The Open University. I'd been interested in the institution for a while, and nearly landed a job doing ColdFusion development there instead of going to London in the first place!

I've got a lot of things to think about at the moment, mostly not for the better. Apart from my career, 2009 has been pretty tough with certain things happening and not happening, but it'll sort itself out, I hope. For now I've got to take the 1st of my Adobe Certified Expert exam passes (Dreamweaver) as a step forward, and keep at it with everything else right now. I just hope that it is worth some of the sacrifice, because right now it sure doesn't feel like it...

If you want to manipulate a Number Object (variable) to a specific precision or to fixed decimal places, instead of manipulating the Number itself you can use the Number Class conversion Methods such as toFixed and toPrecision and cast the String Objects they return back to Number Objects:

pi = Number(Math.PI.toFixed(2));
trace(pi); // 3.14

Not a replacement for a dedicated rounding function for mathematical formulae, but a handy shortcut to output rounded Numbers in a DataProvider for example.

Something that has bugged me a few times, but I needed to figure out this time, as a Flash beginner, is that because everything is an object (and thus an instance of a class, including primatives) you more often than not (unless using primitives/statics) bind everything because you're always passing variables by reference.

I've been thinking over the last couple days, no idea why really (although somewhat spurred on by a look at the Meridian Audio website) but I started to think about the quality of the music that I listen to. Being quite interested in home cinema (and more recently in audiophile equipment) I realised when I got my latest Sony F3000 amplifier and Monitor Audio Monitor 3 speakers that I was starting to reach the point whereby spending more on kit was useless.

An ActionScript Compiler bug that I discovered today (that has been open for 5 years according to Adobe! http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/ASC-2555;jsessionid=0DF58E72CC5A07E2AF...) whereby a compliation error caused in one timeline script will cascade to another without an appropriate warning as to where it was generated.

I decided that I should start posting some of the little niggles that I come across everyday, and the solutions that I've found, so that other people can find them somewhat easier than I may have (although that means years of PHP problems have been lost in the mists of time!)

addFrameScript is an undocumented method (does not appear in the ActionScript Language Reference) that allows you to *something *something as explained well at troyworks, AS3: MovieClip.addFrameScript

It's coming up to a couple months now that I have been working for the Open University, and in comparison to my last place of work it's actually been pretty plain sailing! I'm working in a media division of an e-learning department, whereby most of the teams are akin to design agency teams in a sense with their own editors, designers, artists, project managers and developers.