Ziray Studio Labs

Petunia

Mike — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:44:01 +0000

We’ve had Petunia since the beginning of September and we couldn’t have asked for a better dog as our first foster pet. She’s sweet, quiet, calm, doesn’t jump up on people, playful and loves to snuggle up to you if you lie down with her (she’s also more than willing to jump into your bed though!). For the first month we had her I had only heard her bark maybe four times and that’s only because she was excited about something that was going on. She’s great with my cat Meko, who’s not such a fan of her but he really isn’t a fan of anything that he can’t eat, scratch or sleep on.

We got Petunia through the Animal Wellness Foster Program (AFWP) who provides the food and any medical care she needs. So really, it’s like renting a dog almost for free, keyword being rent, since someday we’ll eventually need to give her up to another loving home. We also buy her extra treats because, well, she’s just too cute not to. However, the reason we chose Petunia from the Montgomery Animal Shelter was that it was unlikely she would be adopted and as this animal shelter is a kill shelter, the foster program is essential to save these dogs’ lives. The problem is, Petunia is a pit bull, a bully breed as it’s known. People have a misconception about these dogs and ignore other aggressive breeds like dalmatians because there’s a Disney movie about them. I’ve never met a sweeter dog in my life. These dogs are also infamous because of the Michael Vick dog fighting incident. Just like with bad children, it’s usually the parent’s fault and that goes with bad dogs as well.

Since I’ve gotten her, we’ve trained her to sit, lie down, come and not snap when giving her treats. Instead, she’ll put her teeth on the treat and try to knock it out of your hand with her tongue. We’ve also taught her to walk without a leash and will come when called if she wanders too far ahead. She’ll also run with me on grass but she’s a little slow and I can usually out run her if I sprint (but just barely). She also allows us to brush her teeth and even though you can tell she’s not a huge fan of it, she puts up with it.

Dogs and Cats Do Get Along

It was a little tricky getting Petunia and Meko to tolerate each other. When I first brought Petunia home, the first thing she wanted to do was sniff everything she could, including poor Meko. Luckily Meko is an extremely curious cat and kept approaching Petunia to check her out, then hissing, moaning and running away. I never let Petunia off the leash at any point while she was home. Every time I caught her looking at him funny I’d poke her to divert her attention. Sometimes I would even turn her head, she’d try to look at Meko and I softly move her head away again. This went on for about two weeks with Petunia sleeping in her own room with the door closed. I wasn’t worried for Meko’s safety, but really Petunia’s. Meko isn’t declawed and while I clip his nails every other week or so, he can still take a large chunk out of your skin if you’re not careful.

I tried to introduced them properly several times with Meko always feeling too uneasy. Petunia now won’t even look at Meko and instead diverts her eyes when she walks past him. It’s the funniest thing to watch but that’s not what I intended. So maybe they don’t get along, but I feel 100% confident I can leave them alone together without either one of them hurting each other. As I said, she’s the sweetest dog ever.

She’s an Eligible Bachelorette

Next week she gets spayed. After that, it’s full time advertising to get her adopted. It’s not that I don’t want to keep her, it’s just that at this point in my life I can’t. Had she come into my life at a later time I wouldn’t think of letting her go. And everyone that has met her has said the same thing: she’s the sweetest, nicest dog ever. Check out Petunia’s own webpage on Petfinder.com. Make sure you check out the video of her playing in the back yard, it’s hilarious at the end:

I’ve been a little rough when I’m playing with her but she’s never shown aggression at any point that I’ve had her. Not even toward Meko. Now, when it comes to other dogs, it’s hit or miss. Some dogs are a little too intense for her at this point and I hope to work with her to get her to not feel threatened. She’s already made one good dog-friend already, so I know she can learn to be around other dogs as she’s learned to be around Meko.

The dog, not the girl!

Not All Dogs are Perfect but They Do Go to Heaven

Petunia does have her problems, and in the interest of full disclosure here they are:

She snores, loudly, and sometimes snorts in her sleep. She also dreams about chasing things so her flailing legs on her bed could get a bit noisy during the night.
She poops, a lot. OK, maybe not anymore than the average dog, but this is my first dog. Maybe when they breed a dog that doesn’t pee or poop, it’ll be the perfect pet.
She doesn’t like other dogs. We’re working on this one and I just think when she was abandoned and/or neglected in her previous home, she met other not so nice dogs during her life to make her not trust them. I’m 100% confident she’ll learn to trust other dogs again as she meets ones that will play with her instead of trying to bite her.

So, if you or someone else you knows wants a sweet, huggable, playful dog, Petunia is an awesome dog. And don’t feel bad about taking her away from me. Sure I’ll miss her, but we plan on saving and training another dog as soon as we can after Petunia. Dogs are a ton of work, but they’re also a ton of fun.

Oversized Lapdog

Florida Scuba: Captain Tom’s Ledge (06/28/09)

Mike — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:40:12 +0000

In the afternoon, we did our third dive of the day on a place called Captain Tom’s Ledge. This was a bit of a deeper dive at 59 feet max, so the top of the surface was a beautiful 86 degrees, while the bottom was a relatively frigid 70 degrees. There is actually a layer of water that you pass through where you can immediately feel the difference in temperature. This is called a thermocline. After coming up from below the thermocline, the water feels like hot tub water. It’s really refreshing since you can start to get chilled wearing such thin layers. The total bottom time was 52 minutes.

Scott worked to get Juanca finished up on his scuba certification while Ana, Laszlo and I explored the ledge. The reef stands along a ledge that drops of to several hundred feet into the abyss. On the other side is a flat sandy surface nearly devoid of life. We stopped to get a photo shoot of ourselves as you can see from the photos below.

Laszlo had to surface due to constant condensation in his mask. But when we got back down, we were treated to a lot of Caribean lobster, moray eels and fish all over the place. We didn’t quite make it to the ledge because the reef was so wide. No bother though, not much to see but black ocean below you.

Captain Tom’s Ledge

Ana and me in front of the reef near the sandy bottom of the ocean.

Ana sees something interesting

Maybe it was this Caribbean lobster

An eel poking his head out to see what was going on

Lobsters were everywhere on this reef. Wish they were in season!

Looks like this was taken in a fish tank.

Can you see it?

Florida Scuba: Captain Tom’s Ledge (06/28/09) is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Florida Scuba: Pleasure Reef (06/28/09)

Mike — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:15:40 +0000

On our fourth dive of the day, Laszlo and I performed our underwater navigation tests for our Advanced Open Water Certification (AOW). This was Juanca’s first dive as a certified diver, so he, Elena and Ana went off with my camera and took some pictures of themselves. We met back up after the test so some of the latter photos are mine as well.

If you are curious, it takes me 18 kick cycles to travel 50 feet underwater. We stayed under water for 45 minutes and even though we were only 24 feet deep at the max, we used a lot of our air performing the AOW tests, down from 3000 PSI to 850 PSI in the end.

Check out the photos below:

Pleasure Reef

Elena and Juanca

Elena

Juanca's first dive as a certified scuba diver

Juanca

Ana and Elena

Some kind of small ray

Florida Scuba: Pleasure Reef (06/28/09) is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Florida Scuba: Molasses Reef (06/28/09)

Mike — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:04:34 +0000

After our deep dive on the USCGC Bibb, we used our second tank of nitrox (31% oxygen) for this very shallow dive to a max depth of 34 feet on Molasses Reef. The nitrox helped with fatigue and with a strong current. The current during our stay, we were told, was very unusual for Florida. Even so, it was a beautiful dive amongst beautiful animals and other ocean life.

Even though this was a pleasure dive, Laszlo and I practiced kick cycles and compass navigation in anticipation of our navigation dive for our Advanced Open Water certification.

Total bottom time was 52 minutes and I went from 3400 PSI in my tank to only 1800 PSI. Breathing nitrox definitely helped us consume less air, though the shallow depth also helps.

Molasses Reef

The sea floor is full of plant life

The dive boat from below

Laszlo slowly swimming over the reef

Pretty flat, but beautiful

Pretty typical view of hundreds of fish swimming overhead.

Something geary and big.

I love these guys. Can you see him?

Florida Scuba: Molasses Reef (06/28/09) is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Dynamic Textfields in Flash AS3 and Their Bugs

Mike — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:47:42 +0000

I do a ton of localizations for web-based media (over 30 countries) and have run across several bugs in Flash where the characters don’t show up for certain fonts, especially for translations with non-latin characters (such as Russian, Chinese, Japanese and even Hungarian and German). I always complain about them, and instead of just complaining, I figured I’d share some of the solutions since they’re bugs in Flash and may not have obvious solutions.

Obvious Solutions

The obvious solution when you have a dynamic text field, that is either driven from XML, RSS, or other external document or data source, is to embed the font’s character sets. Obviously if you are going to be using Korean in your Flash application, you want to embed the Korean character sets so the Korean characters show up in the font you have chosen. However, with so much emphasis on branding these days, not all specialized fonts have characters in Korean.

For example, the Star Wars Jedi font that I once worked with has absolutely no other characters beyond A-Z, a-z and numerals. Forget Spanish and it’s tildes, forget German and its umlauts, but Russian?! Ha! Everyone knows there were no Russian Jedis! So, what to do?

Dynamic Font Swap!

There are several nuances to Flash character embedding (ok, there’s probably a few hundred as I find at least one new one a week). Unfortunately Star Wars applications with the Jedi font won’t work in any language but High Schooler English since they don’t use punctuation either. So we have to change the font to something more appropriate if we want to use another language. Here’s the ActionScript 3 (AS3) code, which I’ll explain a bit after:

// Get previous text format from text field to save other settings
var newTextFormat:TextFormat = theTextField_txt.getTextFormat();
// Change font size if applicable

if( fontSize_num != 0 )

{

  newTextFormat.size = fontSize_num;

}

// If we need to replace the font, do that here

if( isSpecialCharacterSet_bool )

{

  newTextFormat.font = defaultFont_str; // set font

  newTextFormat.bold = false;

  newTextFormat.kerning = false;
  theTextField_txt.embedFonts = false;  // kill the embedded font

  theTextField_txt.rotation = 0;

}
theTextField_txt.setTextFormat( newTextFormat ); // Apply altered text format

Ok, so what does that all mean? We take the textfield’s font properties (say, Jedi Font, size 14pt, embedded characters, etc) and alter some of the properties we need to so that our application can speak to our Russian Jedi friends. This particular code will accept a fontsize_num variable in case you want to alter the font size of the text so that it will fit within the given textbox because we all know Russian Jedi Masters are sometimes really wordy!

Next, we have a variable isSpecialCharacterSet_bool, that if true, will execute the font swap that we need. You can set this variable via XML to control, on a per language basis (having a separate XML file per language), if you want to swap fonts. After that is the defaultFont_str variable, which we can also set via XML to determine which font we want to use as a replacement of our Star Wars Jedi font. Recommended fonts are _sans, _serif, Arial and Helvetica as those are fonts that include almost every character known to modern languages.

Then, we turn off bold because, believe it or not, a bolded font is an entirely different character set and causes all sorts of other problems. We also turn off kerning because it’s a ridiculous feature that doesn’t work and I guarantee will mess up your dynamic text fields, foreign or otherwise.

The next two lines are super important:

theTextField_txt.embedFonts = false; // kill the embedded font theTextField_txt.rotation = 0;

Unless you embed ALL the font characters that Flash will let you, you won’t have your foreign language characters, which I don’t recommend anyway due to a huge increase in file size and also for the fact that it still won’t work (I’ve tried, trust me on this one). So, even though everyone has _sans, _serif, Arial and Helvetica on their computer (which allows us to display the characters without embedding them), if you DO embed some character sets, it won’t show up. Go ahead, create a dynamic text field in Arial, embed A-Z, a-z, numerals and punctuation and watch it NOT show up when you assign a string in Russian to it. Go back, click “Don’t Embed” on the textfield and watch as your Russian characters show up again. So, we programmatically disallow fonts from being embedded.

Another thing you’d think Adobe could have gotten right but doesn’t seem to care about the non-English speaking community, a.k.a. the 6 billion other people on this planet, is the bug that if a foreign character exists in a textfield that is even slightly rotated, the entire textfield disappears. So, thank you Adobe for wasting my time with your poorly programmed textfields. The trick though, is to simply make the textfield’s rotation 0. Strangest thing ever, but give it a try if you don’t believe me. And if the textfield’s parent movieclip is rotated, not your child textfield within said MC, try:

theTextField_txt.parent.rotation = 0;

You can also programatically set the multiline property if translated text seems to be a bit wordy. But you should probably have set up your textfields to handle the expanded text anyway.

Put that code into a function and throw the textfield at it and additionally the font size (which I usually get from the XML node’s property). Unfortunately, you have to do this for every textfield and every time you set the text, but if you plan and build your Flash applications correctly, this should be a simple addition to your application framework. If it’s not obvious, let me know and I’ll write another article on best practices for localizing your Flash applications.

Flash Textfields Are Still Broken!

What isn’t broken in Flash? If you’ve delved deeper into Flash than simple animations, you’ve more than likely run into several on your own. Most of the time, restarting Flash will work, but other times, some detective work must be done in order to sort out the workarounds.

Masked fonts

If your dynamic textfield is masked, in anyway, fonts won’t show up if you disallow font embedding. Why? Well isn’t it obvious? Flash is broken. So, don’t mask your fonts if you want them to work internationally.

So many thanks to Adobe, we enjoy overpaying for your products so that they’re full of bugs. I’ve worked in Flash since the late 90s and I can’t remember them EVER releasing a patch for it. Just a new version that you have to pay several hundred dollars for. So my advice is to use an open standard for your applications and websites since those always support international languages.

Dynamic Textfields in Flash AS3 and Their Bugs is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Life Goal Complete – US Coast Guard Bibb: Wreck Dive

Mike — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:24:31 +0000

After learning to scuba dive, I put diving the Bibb on my list of things to do in my life. The U.S.C.G.C. Bibb was the ship my grandfather served on in the Pacific theater during World War 2. I was very young when I learned that the Bibb was sunk off the coast of Florida as an artificial reef. It never occurred to me that I would ever get to see it in person. I had heard a number of stories about the Bibb and was told that during its service in WWII, it was the ship that carried the Admiral of the fleet since the Bibb, being a Coast Guard ship, was one of the smallest of the U.S. Navy fleet.

I brought one of my camera so I got some photos and video of the experience.

A Little Visual History

The United States Coast Guard has a page on the history of the Bibb with a bunch of photos of its early history, so be sure to check that out. Below are some photos my aunt sent me.

The picture above actually has my grandfather in it. He’s standing on the deck of the ship looking at the camera, to the left of another sailor in white, just to the left of the deck gun that’s in the center of the photograph. It’s hard to see in the photo of this size, but it’s him.

Artificial Reef

The Bibb was sunk in November 1987 off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. The sinking did not go exactly as planned and the Bibb now lays on her side at 130 ft. Unlike her sister ship, the USCGC Duane was sunk properly and rests upright less than half a mile from the Bibb. As a result, the Duane is a more popular dive since it is upright and its depths can be reached more easily by less skilled divers.

The Bibb was refitted several times throughout her service in the Korean and Vietnam wars and in later peacetime operations. Here’s a photo of the Bibb prior to her sinking. There’s a rear crow’s nest that was installed after World War 2 that we witnessed on our dive as we approached the boat from the stern or back of the boat. If you’re interested in reading more about the history of the Bibb, you can head over to the U.S. Navy’s military history website for more info.

The ship is a popular dive site in the Florida Keys and is easily accessed from dive shops in and around Key Largo. The one we dove with was the Florida Keys Dive Center, which I highly recommend for any dives on the Bibb, Duane or any of the sites in that area. If you’re a GPS nut like me, you might like the GeoHack Bibb location, which has the location in every format, from downloadable GPS coordinates to online maps like Google Maps.

The Dive

After our dive on Davis Ledge (Dive Spots link) and Pleasure Reef on the first day, the next day we headed out in the early morning to dive the Bibb. We hit the water at 9:17 AM. My tank had about 2900 PSI of enriched air nitrox 31 (31% oxygen, as opposed to the normal 21%). The water was a beautifully warm 84 degrees fahrenheit. After entering the water we had to swim on the tag line, which ran from the current line (runs off the back of the boat so divers don’t drift and can stay close to the boat until the rest of the group is in the water) to the front of the boat. The current was so strong that there was no way to stay in position without the tag line. If you turned your head perpendicular to the current, your mask would be pulled off your face if it wasn’t tight enough.

We descended on the trip line, which runs from the surface to the back of the Bibb. We looked like flags on a flag pole as the current pushed us in a horizontal position. The bubbles from the divers already on the wreck looked like a school of jelly fish and the normal sized bubbles grew to about four times their size as the pressure decreased on their way to the surface.

Down on the actual wreck, we only made it to about the middle of the ship before we had to turn back. At that depth, you consume about four times the amount of air that you normally consume near the surface. With nitrox and the increased air content, it allowed us to breath less heavily and increased our bottom time (enriched air nitrox also increases no decompression time limit for nitrogen off gassing in the system). That’s the beauty of nitrox and it’s a great certification to get if you’re interested in longer bottom times while scuba diving.

USCGC Bibb

The Bibb lies on her right side.

One of the buoy lines, with a fishing line caught on it. While descending, you have to watch out for hooks in the line. But with all the fish on the artificial reef, you can't blame them for wanting to fish there.

One of the hatches near the middle of the ship

Another hatch nearer to the rear of the ship, on the second level

The look out, which is on the back of the ship

Deck below the look out tower.

Ladder up to the second level, near the middle of the ship

The main propeller

Taken from the back of the ship, looking forward. Two divers return from their dive just as we get down to do our own diving. They were part of the same dive boat.

Laszlo hanging onto the line as we make our slow ascent to the surface.

A long, boring, but necessary safety stop, 15 feet below the surface.

Notice how Laszlo's bubbles travel, not up, but almost parallel to the surface. That's how swift the current was.

Ana hanging on in the swift current

The Video

The 7 Sisters

The Bibb had 6 other sister ships that were part of the Treasury Class Cutters (or sometimes Secretary Class) during that time. They were named after Secretaries of the Treasury. The USCGC Ingham, is on display at Patriots Pointe Maritime Museum in South Carolina, and the USCGC Taney, on display in the Baltimore, Maryland Maritime Museum, are the only ships still afloat. We visited the Taney once in 2001 for my grandfather’s 80th birthday and again in 2006 with a friend. Seeing the Bibb at the bottom of the ocean, I instantly recognized each part of the structure and it was an incredible experience to know that my grandfather had spent much of his youth on board, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with Kamikazes and Japanese submarines.

Me, my grandfather and my father aboard the Taney

Radio Room on the USCGC Taney

The Next Life Goal

Following the completion of this goal, I have come up with two more to add to the list (it wouldn’t be a real to-do list if it didn’t get bigger as I went!!):

Penetrate and explore the inside the USCGC Bibb – This one will take a lot of additional dive training and experience as wreck penetration dives are similar to cave diving and is one of the most dangerous forms of diving. To penetrate a wreck this deep, several tanks will be needed and additional technical dive training will need to be made since staying down that deep and that long requires decompression intervals, which can not be performed with a regular recreational certification.

Scuba dive in the Pacific Ocean – This one will be much easier to accomplish but still something I want to make sure I do. I have plenty of opportunity to dive out in California, but I think I’m going to shoot for a place that’s a little more exotic to me and dive with manta rays, hammerhead sharks, and whale sharks in the Pacific side of Colombia. Ana and I already have a trip planned in December when we go to Colombia for Christmas, so this will be a quickly met goal.

Life Goal Complete – US Coast Guard Bibb: Wreck Dive is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Pleasure Reef, Key Largo Florida

Mike — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:54:58 +0000

This was our second dive of the day and was on a reef called Pleasure Reef. It was a shallow dive to abou 26 feet and as a result we stayed down for 41 minutes. I messed around with my new DiveRite compass from K2Scuba. The only complaint I had about the compass was that the wrist strap was way too large. Next time I’ll swap it out for the bungees that it also came with. Towards the end of the dive we started to hear a roaring sound and looked up to see it raining. It only rained for about 5 minutes and stopped. I never even saw a dark cloud the whole day.

Second Dive

Scott, Juanca and Elena

Laszlo, Scott and Juanca

Can you find the fish?

Can you find him now?

There he is!

Ana and Elena

One of my favorite fish: French Angel Fish

Ever see it rain under water?

Pleasure Reef, Key Largo Florida is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

First Dive in Key Largo, Florida

Mike — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:32:29 +0000

Ana, her sister Elena, Laszlo and I took a long weekend and went down to Florida to visit my friend Scott and do some scuba diving in the Keys. Below are the photos from our first dive.

Diving in Key Largo, Florida, Day 1

Elena and Juanca

Laszlo

A sea slug

Elena and Ana

Ana blowing me bubbles

Scuba diver walking on the bottom of the sea floor, back up regulator hanging down and tank not secured.

Juanca, Elena and Ana

This was Juanca's first Open Water scuba dive

Lots of scuba divers on this trip. It was a Saturday after all.

Eel!

Ana doing her thing.

First Dive in Key Largo, Florida is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

What’s Wrong with this Scuba Diver?

Mike — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:06:11 +0000

The diver in the photo below just cracked me up when I saw him. At first I only noticed his backup regulator hanging down and for the fact that he was almost literally walking on the sea floor. So, I took this snap shot and only later noticed that his tank strap is not secured either.

The first thing you will notice about really bad scuba divers is loose gear flopping about. Not only does it look ridiculous, it’s also dangerous when they need to reach for their backup regulator and realize it’s floating behind them somewhere. Also, the back up regulator is suppose to be attached somewhere on the divers chest, so that if the dive buddy requires help, they can find and grab the other diver’s backup, unless of course it’s floating behind your dive buddy somewhere. In other words, don’t be this guy’s dive buddy.

Finally, don’t walk on the ocean floor. Not only is it bad style, it’s destructive and just plain stupid.

What’s Wrong with this Scuba Diver? is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

New Floor

Mike — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:55:20 +0000

Last month I finally put down the floor I’ve been talking about for so long. My dad came into Blacksburg just to help me put in the floor (and by help, I mean he did most of the work).

New Floor

Meko surveys the job before we begin

The hallway

Livingroom

Livingroom with the carpet ripped up

Bringing in the tools

We had to rip up the subfloor to get the massive squeaks out. Notice how they hung the drywall for the apartment downstairs (hint: the white strip).

The builders thought no one would ever see. This floor was obviously never inspected due to some obvious code violations.

Because the beams were uneven, the subfloor was uneven so we had to level it with some floor leveler.

And then we put down another subfloor on top of the old one.

Beginning to put down the hardwood laminate flooring.

Meko hid in the bathroom during the sawing, hammering and other loud noises.

Meko voicing his complaints

Hallway laid down.

Put down the quarter round on top of the floor to finish it off.

New hardwood floor meets almost new tile floor.

The cost of it all? Less than $800. Of course labor was free and you’d be looking at 3-4 times that cost for the same work we did.

New Floor is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Custom Mouse Cursor for ActionScript 3

Mike — Sat, 30 May 2009 20:54:38 +0000

I threw together an FLA for someone to show them the different ways to handle custom mouse cursors in ActionScript 3 (AS3). I figured I should start posting more of my code for people since I use other people’s blogs all the time to figure out my own problems.

I’m mostly coding up stuff for Flash, Flex, Augmented Reality, iPhone, PHP, and CSS/HTML right now so hopefully I’ll have the time to post more snippets of things I’ve figured out trying to get all this technology to work.

Direct Access to the X and Y Mouse Coordinates

The first method allows us a finer control over the movement of the cursor by directly changing the X and Y coordinates of the cursor movieclip with the X and Y coordinates of the mouse. If we wanted to restrict the movement to say, a specific Y coordinate (as we’ll see in the next example), we can do that just as easily by keeping the target_mc.y a constant when we update it’s X coordinate.

// Set up our listeners for each of our mouse actions

boundary_mc.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER,

onMouseOver );

boundary_mc.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT,

onMouseOut  );
// Ignores all sub movie clips and treats them as the parent

//      — otherwise events will be triggered on the child

//      movieclips and not our main clip

target_mc.mouseChildren   = false;

boundary_mc.mouseChildren = false;
// Ignore all the mouse events for the cursor

//      — otherwise MOUSE_OUT will trigger since mouse is

//      now on target_mc instead of boundary_mc

target_mc.mouseEnabled = false;
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// ON MOUSE OVER /////////////////////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// When the mouse rolls over onto our red boundary, hide

//   mouse/show cursor

//

function onMouseOver( theEvent:MouseEvent ):void

{

  // Swap the mouse for the cursor

  Mouse.hide(); // hide mouse cursor

  target_mc.visible = true;
  // Add a listener to handle the moving of the mouse

  // We add the listener here because otherwise the onMouseMove

  //    would execute whenever the mouse moved, whether it was

  //    on our boundary or not. Not a big deal, but better for

  //    efficiency

  boundary_mc.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE,

  onMouseMotion );
  // Handle the movement now so we don’t have to wait for a

  //   mouse movement to reposition the cursor

  onMouseMotion(null);

}
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// ON MOUSE MOTION ///////////////////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// When the mouse moves, we also want to move our target to follow

//   the mouse

//

function onMouseMotion( theEvent:MouseEvent ):void

{

  // Reposition our custom cursor

  target_mc.y = stage.mouseY;

  target_mc.x = stage.mouseX;

}
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// ON MOUSE OUT //////////////////////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// When mouse goes outside our red boundary, show default mouse,

//      and hide our custom one

//

function onMouseOut( theEvent:MouseEvent ):void

{

  // Swap the cursor for the mouse

  Mouse.show();

  target_mc.visible = false;
  // Stop listening for mouse movement

  boundary_mc.removeEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE,

  onMouseMotion );

}

The Drag and Drop Method

Our next method uses the drag function built into Flash. With this function you can drag a movieclip around the stage with the mouse automatically. This restricts some of our freedom, but gives us some very easy coding to control the mouse cursor to specific regions. In this case we simply restrict the motion of the cursor along a rectangle of 0 height (so it won’t move along the Y axis) and with a width as wide as our boundary box. This feature has its advantages, and I merely include it to demonstrate how to use it in the context of a custom mouse cursor.

// Set up our listeners for each of our mouse actions

boundary2_mc.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER,

onMouseOver2 );

boundary2_mc.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT,

onMouseOut2  );
// Ingores all sub movie clips and treats them as the parent

//      — otherwise events will be triggered on the child

//      movieclips and not our main clip

target_mc.mouseChildren    = false;

boundary2_mc.mouseChildren = false;
// Ignore all the mouse events for the cursor

//      — otherwise MOUSE_OUT will trigger since mouse is

//      now on target_mc instead of boundary_mc

target_mc.mouseEnabled = false;
// Calculate the the vertical center of our boundary

//   so that the cursor can move along that line

var verticalCenter_num = boundary2_mc.y + (boundary2_mc.height / 2);
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// ON MOUSE OVER 2 ///////////////////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// Same as our previous one, but set for another boundary

//

function onMouseOver2( theEvent:MouseEvent ):void

{

  // Swap the mouse for the cursor

  Mouse.hide();

  target_mc.visible = true;
  // Add a listener to handle the moving of the mouse

  // We add the listener here because otherwise the

  //    onMouseMove would execute whenever the

  //    mouse moved, whether it was on our boundary

  //    or not. Not a big deal, but better for efficiency

  boundary2_mc.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE,

  onMouseMotion2 );
  // Handle the movement now so we don’t have to wait

  // for a mouse movement to reposition the cursor

  target_mc.y = verticalCenter_num;

  target_mc.x = stage.mouseX;

}
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// ON MOUSE MOTION 2 /////////////////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// Restricts the movement of our custom cursor along the X axis

//

function onMouseMotion2( theEvent:MouseEvent ):void

{

  // Calculate the the vertical center of our boundary

  //   so that the cursor can move along that line

  var verticalCenter_num = boundary2_mc.y +

  (boundary2_mc.height / 2);
  // We use startDrag() here since it’s easier to restrict

  //   the cursor’s boundaryusing a Rectangle object.

  // boundary2_mc.x: Start from the x position of our

  //   boundary verticalCenter_num: Start from the

  //   vertical center as our y coordinate

  // boundary2_mc.width: Allow the cursor to move

  //   the length of the boundary’s width (starting from x)

  // 0: Don’t allow the cursor to move up or down

  target_mc.startDrag( true, new Rectangle(

  boundary2_mc.x,

  verticalCenter_num,

  boundary2_mc.width,

  0)

  );

}
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// ON MOUSE OUT 2 ////////////////////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// When mouse goes outside our gray boundary, show default mouse,

//   hide custom mouse and stop drag

//

function onMouseOut2( theEvent:MouseEvent ):void

{

  // Swap the cursor for the mouse

  Mouse.show();

  target_mc.visible = false;
  // Stop our drag

  target_mc.stopDrag();
  // Stop listening for mouse movement

  boundary2_mc.removeEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE,

  onMouseMotion2 );

}

I hope the code is commented well enough for you to understand what’s going on. It should be fairly self explanatory, but if not, feel free to ask.

Custom Mouse Cursor for ActionScript 3 is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

River Clean Up and the Roanoke Times

Mike — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:00:21 +0000

On Virginia Tech’s Reading Day (the day between classes and the beginning of finals), the Scuba Club at Virginia Tech (SCVT) performed a clean up on the New River near Radford, VA. We picked up several trash bags of garbage, mostly that were left behind from the fishermen that frequent there. There were plenty of fishing line, beer cans and other trash to keep us busy for a few hours and we do this every year.

As it had been raining for the past several days prior, the river level was two feet higher than normal, and big trees were being swept down river. The visibility was non-existent and we didn’t want to get caught or crushed by the trees coming down, so we didn’t get to go diving. However, there is still a ton more beer cans and other trash left by the fishermen at the bottom of the river that we have yet to get to.

While we were there, a photographer from the Roanoke Times took several photos of us as we worked. I had passed up picking up some trash that was in the water because I was wearing shoes but since I had all my scuba equipment with me, I put on my diving boots and jumped into the water to pick up the pieces I had missed.

The photographer caught me just as I was walking out of the river and they put me as their main image. Pretty cool. Check out the image below and download the PDF for the full size.

SCVT May 7, 2009 River Cleanup

River Clean Up and the Roanoke Times is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Claytor Lake

Mike — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:20:13 +0000

After we dived at the river that morning I then headed to a day on the lake. The water was cold but I still had my wetsuit so I made good use of it there as well.

April Trip to Claytor Lake

It may look innocent, but it was freezing cold water

Gabor up on the wake board

Gabor is in a bit of pain after one of his falls

Claytor Lake is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

New River Dive

Mike — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:35:57 +0000

We went diving in the early morning in the New River. It was early, it was dark under the water, the water was cold, but we had a lot of fun.

New River Dive is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs

Photos of the Week (5/17)

Mike — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:58:09 +0000

I finally got around to posting some photos. I’ve been extremely busy these past four weeks and haven’t had time to process any new photos. Here are just some photos from the past couple of weeks.

Anton and Eva

Gabe and Fifi

Mana and a MacBook Pro

Photos of the Week (5/17) is a post from: Ziray Studio Labs