An Update (Christmas 2009)

27th December, 2009

Here is an update on some bits and pieces I have been doing since starting my new job way back in October now.

Misty winter morning steps to work.

Arrival of the massive box for my new PC.

Because there was a video on YouTube of the PC game Witcher’s strange monkey creature, or Mamune which has subsequently been removed I decided to record my own and upload it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQlT8WVhVs

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Mamune

New Car

2nd November, 2009

New car for the purpose of travelling between home and work and more.

New Site Design Up and Running

22nd September, 2009

So finally I’ve switched my website to the new design, with a hefty number of new bits and pieces being added so you’ll have to bear with me for a little while as things get sorted out. Some of the bigger changes include integrating twitter (for which I have had an unused account for years) as a sort of microblogging tool, separating my university work from my professional portfolio and integrating a ‘Related Posts’ system which I have had in mind for a long time but have only just discovered a brilliant plugin that does all the hard work for me.

Above is a shot of a couple of the images I’ve produced for new site features.

You can find that related posts plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/. Another plugin by the same authors is one that shows a list of the most recent posts. In the old design I had this functionality hardcoded into the theme footer but now it can be done with a single line of PHP.

Referrer Message Plugin for Wordpress

20th August, 2009

I was looking through some old del.icio.us tags when clicking on a link brought me to a blog that had implemented a specialised greeting message based on the referer. I know grabbing a referer isn’t that hard but having never seen it put to this use before I actually felt this was quite clever.

A link to the plugin: http://www.phoenixheart.net/wp-plugins/referrer-detector/

Baby Doves

22nd July, 2009

Had an opportunity to put my camera to use again, this time taking some photos of a newly hatched dove up in the dovecote.

Useful DXUT DirectX Pages

10th March, 2009

Rather than simply tagging this page I thought it more appropriate to draw greater attention to it for myself:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173254(VS.85).aspx

New Laptop RAM

21st December, 2008

Yes, I genuinely thought 1GB was a little bit on the insufficient side these days, so added another chip to bring my laptop up to its maximum capacity. Running my usual set of programs almost always brings memory usage over the GB mark.

This is also one of many photos I’ve forgotten about uploading over the past few weeks because I’ve been busy, so expect a couple more to appear!

Read the rest of this entry »

Custom Flash Player Menus

7th December, 2008

I’ve posted a little tutorial here on making custom Flash context (right click) menus because when I learnt to do it (a long while back now though) there was very little out there describing how.

• First of all you need a function to take the menu action. It can do absolutely nothing, but it does need to exist for the menu item to work. For the example here though it will link to a website:
  function menuClick() {
getURL("http://www.srjm.co.uk", _blank);
}

• Next, declare the menu variable, it’s good practice (and incredibly helpful) to do it this way because then whenever you add to the menu you get the Code Hints.
  var menu:ContextMenu = new ContextMenu();
• Finally, hide the existing menu (unless you wish to keep the play/rewind and other options) and add your own options instead, and apply it to the root context menu:
  menu.hideBuiltInItems();
var menuItem1:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("http://www.srjm.co.uk/", menuClick);
var menuItem2:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("SRJM Design", menuClick, true, false);
menu.customItems.push(menuItem1);
menu.customItems.push(menuItem2);
_root.menu = menu;
  The second ContextMenuItem has additional parameters to give it a horizontal line above and also make it unclickable.