becarella: Archive

Found: Gnometastic MetaPlace Demo

I was cleaning up my hard drive and found this gem from December, 2007. It’s a video of a little demo game we made at The Electric Sheep Company to try out MetaPlace’s platform while they were in alpha. Garden gnomes and bunny rabbits work together to pull weeds in a garden. It took one week to build and features basic avatar customization (be a gnome or a bunny),...

Apr 9th

Apr 1st

Mar 10th

2 notes

1 tag

Creating a facebook bookmark button without a...

Last night we put up a “Coming Soon” page for Super + Fun’s new Facebook app, BlitzPick Baseball which will be launching later this month. We wanted to start letting people bookmark the app and sign up as fans. The idea was to point the app to the placeholder we put up on blitzpick.com. However, <fb:bookmark> tag doesn’t work without an active session. An active...

Mar 5th

639 notes

1 tag

Mock time for tests →

Mar 3rd

Lean startup tools for Rails apps →

Feb 20th

1 note

4 tags

Test controllers with Facebooker Mock Sessions

To avoid login redirects when testing controllers that use Facebooker’s ensure_authenticated_to_facebook before_filter, use a mock session: get(:index, {}, { :facebook_session => Facebooker::MockSession.create}) assert_response :success

Feb 13th

1 note

Using rake with cron →

Jan 24th

CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer →

Dec 29th

How to configure SSL for Jetty →

Dec 21st

Facebook ActionScript API Gotchas →

Good description of not hardcoding the secret key and of using FacebookSessionUtil over WebSession.

Dec 11th

Ruby on Rails 3-column join table →

Dec 4th

3 tags

Overriding link_to in a Ruby on Rails/Facebooker...

I’m working on a Facebook app using Ruby on Rails and Facebooker. The app works as a Connect site or in an iframe app. Navigation in iframe apps is trickier than in fbml apps because links with the default target change only the iframe address, not the page address (shown in the address bar). Furthermore, Facebook only adds the fb_sig_ params when the Facebook app page is loaded. When a...

Dec 1st

1 note

Nov 18th

6 tags

UStream Cube: An experiment with UStream video in...

I’m working on the Electric Sheep Company’s StreamJam application, a flash-based virtual world that plays streaming video for live events. The StreamJam environments are currently using Papervision3D, which does not yet take advantage of the new 3D features in Flash 10. Papervision materials require access to BitmapData.draw in order to render a texture in 3D. For live or on demand...

Nov 17th

2 notes

Archived Flash Players available for testing... →

Nov 16th

2 tags

Things I fixed after upgrading to Snow Leopard

I finally installed Snow Leopard on my 3+ year old MacBook Pro and iMac this weekend. We’re updating to Java 1.6 at work and Snow Leopard was the best way to get that version on my old 32-bit machines. I’ve only found couple things that needed to be changed after the update. Adium My old Adium font settings were broken. It looked right in the settings, but chat I sent did not...

Nov 10th

32-bit OpenJDK6 Beta 1 for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 →

Oct 28th

2 tags

Getting started with github

I’m hosting my facebook actionscript demo source code at github. I’ve never used git before, so it’s been a fun learning experience. I managed to get the demo running on a github project page instead of being hosted on an ESC server. I’m not certain I’m taking the best approach, but I have the project setup now with these branches: becarella/fb_as_connect |->...

Oct 28th

5 tags

Facebook Authentication with the ActionScript API

I created a little demo app to help me understand Facebook authentication from flash. Goals Use only javascript and actionscript, no php or other Facebook client libraries The secret key is not hardcoded The same codebase can be deployed on non-Facebook site or in on Facebook app canvas The app can be used by both authenticated and unauthenticated users Users can authenticate with Facebook...

Oct 26th

3 tags

Using System.totalMemory to analyze flash memory...

When looking for memory leaks on an application that loads many bitmaps, Internet Explorer showed much lower memory usage from System.totalMemory than FireFox. The difference is because not everything allocated in the player is allocated by the internal allocator, nor reported through totalMemory…namely anything allocated by OS system calls, memory associated with platform bitmap data, and the...

Oct 22nd