Big Trapeze

This took a while for me to figure out, hope it helps someone. (I’m using Leopard on an iMac, with Flash CS 3). If you follow the Adobe instructions for connecting your Flash app to your built-in iSight camera, things will start great at first, and you should be prompted to connect to your camera when you run the code:

Click allow, and you’ll likely only see a blank screen. And that’s where I became stuck. After some searching, I found you have to actually change the type of camera inside Flash from the default setting, which is “DVCPRO HD”, to a USB based one. To do this, run your SWF, right-click on the movie, then click on “Settings…”

From the Settings menu, click on the small camera icon, and switch to a “USB Video Class Video” camera. 

That should work for you. You should see your iSight light activate and see video in your Flash app. Let me know if you have troubles.

I pull for the little guy, I really do. But in this case, Firefox gives me more trouble than it does a sense of the downtrodden and oppressed sticking it to the man. So, I’m with Safari.

In its defense, Firefox may not be entirely to blame. I’m running Leopard on an iMac, and I have two plugins installed, Firebug and Adblock Plus. Your mileage may vary. But, I can count on at least 2 hangs/force-quits a day. I especially notice problems when exiting Gmail, but I don’t think it’s related to Firebug.

I haven’t used Firefox in two-weeks, and having used it since the first beta it feels very weird not to use it now. I’ll still use it to test my web designs across the board, but no more than I’ll use IE6/7 for the same purpose. And I do miss a few features too, like the way it restores my tabs and browsing session if there is a crash, or let’s me undo a tab close (Safari doesn’t do this for me), and I do find Firebug to be a very handy tool when debugging some of my Javascript.

I should be fair and let you know that while I was writing this post, Safari crashed. It happened while I frantically did a cut-copy-paste into a popup window, but I’m guessing it was a clever twist of Firefox irony, letting me know I can’t just depend on one browser–and for the little guy, that’s a good thing.

I’ve been pretty happy with PHP for a long time now. Every once in a while I’ll find a good reason to explore another  language, and just as I was getting the hang of Ruby on Rails, Google had to go and do this.

The Google App Engine (GAE) has very exciting potential, especially for developers like me who don’t have a big supply of extra cash they can throw at scaling hardware or bandwidth costs. Free 500MB of storage and 5 million pageviews a month? I’d be happy to pay for exceeding those pageviews.

Conspiracists will find some Big Brother-ly problems with GAE, but really, it’s a neat idea, and I’ll definitely be taking advantage of Google’s services. Unfortunately, it only supports the Python programming language, of which I have no experience. So, for the next few days, I’ll be dipping my foot in the Python pool, and waiting for my invite to the GAE.