NewMedia Blog

…or RE: remotely listen to iTunes with ShoutCast. This may be a better and easier solution. The only downside is you have to use Winamp to play the music. It’s not that bad, though, just tell winamp to listen to the same folder as iTunes, and it shouldn’t change anything just add it to the library. Then you’ll set up all the shoutcast stuff and just play the music in winamp.

So, you want to listen to your music from anywhere? It’s easy! All you need is

• ShoutCast
• ShoutCast DNAS
• SHOUTCast plugin for winamp
• www_ml plugin for Winamp

Basically, just install the DNAS, then Winamp, then SHOUCAST plugin for winamp, then the www_ml plugin. All you need to do now is open the DNAS gui/console (usually in START >> PROGRAMS >> DNAS >>), then open winamp. After that, go to the prefrences >> plugins, then click on the www_ml plugin, and click the configure button. Basically, just set the port to whatever you want. I used something obscure, so it wouldn’t try to use one that’s already being used. You may need to forward the port in your router (to login to your port, if it’s a linksys, is go to 192.168.1.1 and login. from there you can change settings). You can also set up admin users, which is good because you wouldn’t want some random dude changing your songs. Then just go to your ip address (not 192.168.blah.blah, type your ip address) in a browser, followed by a colon (:) and the port you selected. There should be a page that comes up with all your songs. Just connect to this same address when you want to change songs etc. and open winamp and open the URL your.ip.address:8080 and you should start hearing your music!

Oh, you’ll also need to open the SHOUTCAST plugin. It should be in winamp’s prefrences >> plugins section. Open it and you will be able to change the bitrate (in compressions settings). I chose 64kbps in stereo (sounds really good and doesn’t keep rebuffering). Just click connect and it should start streaming!

http://www.engadget.com/2…nto-single-dvd/

This is pretty cool, apparently UCF researchers have figured out how to fit 1 tera-byte on memory on one DVD. Think about how much easier it would be to back uo your files if they could all be stored on one disk!

…A research team at the University of Central Florida has developed some advances in laser technology that could actually make disc drives cheaper and more portable — along with the obvious benefits of 1TB of storage and speedier read/write times.

Read more…

http://wikimapia.org/#y=2…=15&l=0&m=a&v=2

While i was researching how to put a google map to Partnership 2 in the SHiFT Blog i stumbled across a very interesting project. It’s called WikiMapia, and it uses the Google Maps API to allow users to mark locations on the map and write a title and description of the location. By clicking on the title of this post, you will be taken to the UCF campus on WikiMapia, where industrious people have already marked many locations of interest. Anyone can mark a location, and the locations are reviewed by other users before they become a permanent part of the map. Note: If you find a location that is incorrect, edit it, don’t vote it down.

I think this is a really interesting project, but it seems like things will get very cluttered once this catches on.

http://games.ucf.edu/shift/blog

The SHiFT Blog is up! Check it out!

I came across this interesting Engadget post about controlling iTunes remotely. It basically tells you to get and install WebWeaver http server, php and a php script written by Jordan Parker that can controll iTunes from another computer. It works great, but you can’t listen to your music remotely. It only controlls iTunes and won’t stream anything (of course this is the case, but I had assumed it would let you listen to the music as well–duh!).

I already had Apache on my home computer, so I didn’t want to install WebWeaver on it (http server that works for this purpose, according to the article), nor did I want to install the php installer (it was version 4). BUT, I didn’t have an http server or php installed on my laptop, so I went ahead and did that. I set it up the way they tell you in the article and it worked great! I could change tracks, see what’s on, change volume, and all that. The only thing that bothered me was I wanted to listen to my songs! So I downloaded Nullsoft’s ShoutCast as well as Winamp. I pretty much just followed this post on the Winamp forums to install ShoutCast. After getting that to install, I started up ShoutCast and Winamp, loaded the ShoutCast DSP/Effect, and then just tweaked the name and the port, opened it on my router and got ready for some music! I started up iTunes and started playing. I connected to my ShoutCast server in Winamp on my desktop and heard nothing.

That’s because ShoutCast is set up to either stream music from Winamp or from a line-in. Since I wasn’t using Winamp to listen to music, I decided to get a male-to-male audio cable and connect it from the output to the input on my laptop. It sounds kind of wierd to do this, but it works great. It just takes what would be heard on the speakers and sends it back in the computer as line-in. All I had to do was tell ShoutCast to get it’s input from line-in, and then I refreshed my connection with the ShoutCast server on my other computer and I heard my music! Then I connected to the iTunes Remote Controller php script in Firefox and was able to change songs, change the volume, and all that. I wasn’t able to pause, and it looked wrong in Firefox, so I went ahead and tweaked the php files and ended up creating this simple text-based controller, as well as the normal graphical one (with a few adjustments for Firefox and to make play/pause work). You can see ShoutCast running on my laptop here, and Winamp and iTunes Controller (in Firefox) on my desktop here.

So in summary, I have ShoutCast running on my laptop streaming iTunes (that’s grabbing music from my shared playlist on my desktop over the LAN), that’s being controlled by a php script, that resides on my laptop. There’s a LOT of stuff going on, but I’ve been trying it out running on 160kbps Mp3 compression and it sounds pretty good. Not as good as the original file of course, but not that bad on the pc speakers I have at work.

If you want to try this, you’ll need WebWeaver http server, the latest php intstaller, ShoutCast, ShoutCast DNAS, and of course, iTunes. You’ll also need the iTunes Remote Controller php script by Jordan Parker (thanks!) (I put it on my server just because you can’t get it on his site anymore). If you want to use my tweaked stuff as well, you can grab it here.

EDIT: I forgot to include that you also need SHOUTCast plugin for winamp

The new SHiFT blog is coming, but it’s not ready to be released just yet. It will be part of the New Media site at first, but be moved over to games.ucf.edu eventually. Look for it!

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/x/

Given the recent news of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express, I found this very interesting. GarageGames is working on an extension to their Torque Game Creator that works with the XNA project management software. This means that games made in torque can run on Windows AND the XBox 360 without having two code bases. Given the popularity of using the GarageGames products to create casual games, it seems like a no-brainer to open up XBox Live Arcade as a distribution option for those developers.

I just wanted to link to a series of videos that cover the voodoo that is using Illustrator and Flash together over at Lynda.com:

Illustrator CS2 & Flash 8 Integration

Ok, we noticed some inconsistencies between how the new mac flash player 9 handles arguments sent to MovieClip.lineStyle(). So I published the following code using flash 8 targeting flash 8.

//1
lineStyle(0, undefined, undefined);
moveTo(0, 10)
lineTo(10, 10);

//2
lineStyle(0, null, null);
moveTo(0, 20)
lineTo(10,20)

//3
lineStyle(undefined, undefined, undefined)
moveTo(0, 30)
lineTo(10, 30);

//4
lineStyle()
moveTo(0, 40)
lineTo(10, 40)

//5
lineStyle(0);
moveTo(0, 50)
lineTo(10, 50)

//6
lineStyle(null, null, null)
moveTo(0, 60)
lineTo(10, 60)

Heres the actual SWF

And screens of how it shows up in the players:

Windows: standalone 8.0.22.0, ie 9.0.16.0, ff 9.0.16.0, ff 8.0.24.0, ff 7.0.61.0, ff 6.0.79.0

Mactel osx: ff 9.0.18.0
we dont have a plugin-switcher for our mac so I only compared it to the current verison of 9, but I believe it was happeneng before as well.

Problem:
Loading in child swf files that use the same classes can cause difficult to debug problems in your code, especially when those classes change.

Example:

Your Master SWF is a fruit picking game, it contains an object named nm.classes.Fruit.
This master swf fruit picker game loads in external swfs that represent different field types.

Your still in the development phase, so you making a grape field and realized that the base nm.classes.Fruit class needed to have an additional property, var isOnVine:Boolean.

So you simply add it, the grape field swf compiles just fine, it works fine independently, but when you view the finished product in the browser, all interaction dealing with isOnVine doesn’t function.

Typically you’d spend 30 minutes removing cache, deleting Flash’s aso files, checking to make sure current files are being loaded only to be bewildered that everything checks out.

Solutions:

The real problem is that your base movie fruit picker game contains an old version of nm.classes.Fruit that doesn’t have isOnVine and is conflicting with the loaded swf that does.

The reason for this is all class prototypes go into an area in the root swf, even loaded swfs put their classes here so when you load an swf that contains the same class, they cannot both be in memory (this probably acts differently in flash 9 and up) because they have to occupy the same space.

Now to my knowledge it looks like the first one that was loaded into it’s namespace is the class that actually prevails and all classes loaded after that one simply get lost.

There are really only two fixes for this and neither result in something that is bullet-proof.

1. don’t use the same class names, (this of course breaks the whole OO idea)
2. update every file that is involved with the most up to date class