Another reason not to visit the US?
The Department of Homeland Security have now given themselves the right to nick your laptop when you go to the states.
Someone tell them about the Bill of Rights? I pity the state of the states these days.
You know the situation - a designer has given you an FLA file to build from and either the text is too small to be legible for us mere mortals, or is going to be too large when translated into Russian. Since designers rarely think of these things, I find myself either coding in text size dynamically, or using these couple of of JSFL scripts I wrote a lot. One of them increases the point size of all text in an FLA, the other reduces it.
I started playing around a little more with my webcam and extended my previous webcam motion detection example - this time to control the camera of a virtual 3-D space from motion detected in the user’s webcam. It detects motion area and general direction, albeit with dubious accuracy, but you get the idea.
Due to popular demand, I’ve posted the source code for you lot to play with. It contains the FlashDevelop project file (it’s compiled with the flex 3 sdk) and my cut-down 3-D engine, Pant3D 
I recently went up to the Lake District with some friends and did a fair amount of trekking. Geez was it windy! Very pretty though, if a little overpriced.
But I guess that’s bank holiday weekend everywhere 
I played around some more with my webcam today and knocked this out. I also found my webcam already has the IR filter missing (cheap webcam), so it can already see infrared… which will come in handy:
After getting my Wii remote hooked up with the WiiFlash Server, I knocked up this quick Flash demo which draws the blobs of infrared light the Wii remote detects (it can track up to 4 blobs at once), just like the Wii console's sensitivity setting dialog does. I just gave each blob a different colour and clear the graphics on pressing the 'A' button.
Here's the code to get it working - requires WiiFlash Server:
import org.wiiflash.Wiimote;
import org.wiiflash.IR;
import org.wiiflash.events.ButtonEvent;
import org.wiiflash.events.WiimoteEvent;
import flash.events.*;
import org.wiiflash.IR;
import org.wiiflash.events.ButtonEvent;
import org.wiiflash.events.WiimoteEvent;
import flash.events.*;
var myWiimote:Wiimote = new Wiimote();
myWiimote.connect();myWiimote.addEventListener(WiimoteEvent.UPDATE, onUpdated);
myWiimote.addEventListener(ButtonEvent.A_PRESS, onAPressed);
function onUpdated (pEvt:WiimoteEvent):void {
var ir:IR = pEvt.target.ir;
var irWidth:Number = 400;
var irHeight:Number = 400;
var irSize:Number = 4;
if (ir.p1) drawCircle(ir.x1*irWidth, ir.y1*irHeight, ir.size1*irSize, 0xff0000);
if (ir.p2) drawCircle(ir.x2*irWidth, ir.y2*irHeight, ir.size2*irSize, 0x00ff00);
if (ir.p3) drawCircle(ir.x3*irWidth, ir.y3*irHeight, ir.size3*irSize, 0x0000ff);
if (ir.p4) drawCircle(ir.x4*irWidth, ir.y4*irHeight, ir.size4*irSize, 0xffff00);
}
function onAPressed (pEvt:ButtonEvent):void {
graphics.clear();
pEvt.target.rumbleTimeout = 50;
}
function drawCircle (x:Number, y:Number, size:Number, colour:Number=0xffffff):void {
graphics.beginFill(colour, .2);
graphics.drawCircle(x,y,size);
}
I started playing around with using the Wii remote as an infrared tracker to work with those cheap keychain lights you get - just like Johnny Lee suggested. I'm looking to start building interactive installations using novel forms of interaction, such as sound, webcam motion and perhaps 3-D techniques I'm thinking up.
Gotta love this guy - he's proper Kung Fu mental he is...
I missed this when it was published, but Tinic Uro, an Adobe Flash Player engineer, published an interesting article on exactly why framerates in Flash Player are so damn unreliable - seems it's not just about our shoddy code
This dodgy git is Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, head of security, son of the Crown Prince and puppet master to hungry arms manufacturers, such as the UK's very own BAE Systems. He's the guy responsible for threatening poor old Tony Blair with 'another 7/7' if he didn't halt the Serious Fraud Office's investigation into his alleged corrupt dealings with BAE - involving a $1bn bribe. Small fry like Blair and Bush listen to Prince Bandar, he is a man not to be messed with. I also heard he said things about Bush's mum and nicked Tony's dinner money - c'mon Brown, get him in a headlock and nick is hat!