This has been talked about by many people before me, but music videos caused the sully of the music industry. Sure the idea is fresh enough, using another medium such as video to enhance and drive home the point of a song. But since most people aren't artists, most people don't think of music as art. They see music as a consumable item that fulfils a need, and as such are not bothered and even drawn toward what's become the typical music video. Tits, ass, drugs, jewellery, cars, big houses, private jets are all consumable items as well and so suits decided that that's what should be in music videos, and that's what their contracted(grossly untalented) talent should be singing/rapping about. Your typical music videos, the ones that flood the airways and by some commercial force the ones that drive their accompanying audio diarrhoea to the top of the charts are designed to sell products, in fact the bodies that run those charts that they manage to climb are themselves managed by the same fuckers selling ad space in the songs. Lyrics to these puddles of poo are comprised of the dirtiest things they can think of, which in terms of the music industry are poorly strung together half-sentences and repeating the same misplaced vulgar words and catch phrases again and again. I'm all for talking dirty but this is a half-dressed attempt at best. Most of it anyway lends to a 7th grade outlook on dirty which makes it all to clear it was placed for the cheap thrill that resonates the mainstream when hearing such words through a set of speakers to a shitty beat. Art is when something tangible, like a paint brush or a guitar string, can be used to portray something abstract, like an emotion or a cultural folly. When people are poisoned by infomercials injected into what should be an aggregate of art, and to the point where they are convinced what they are watching is in fact art, it's sad. It's sad to think that not only do these people live on the verge of a human experience–in a significant way, but also that they remain chained in the dark because someone else wants to make a buck. Manipulating someone else's reality and truth  for your own gain is a dirty trick to play. I leave you with some art. Support these artists and others like them or soon there won't be any left. Metallica - Turn the Page Directed by: Jonas Akerlund Killer Mike featureing Ice Cube - Pressure Directed by: Giovanni Hidalgo Radiohead - Just Directed by: Jamie Thravest

That's it, I'm getting a ticket back to South Africa and not coming back until someone's figured out how to solve snow. The weather network I blogged about earlier must be using some kind of archaic and inaccurate scale of measurement because the supposed 10-12cm of snowfall predicted yesterday is more like 3 feet and it's still falling. There was a practical blizzard yesterday and so distribution isn't exactly equal, our side of the street was like the bottom half of an hour glass at the 45 minute mark, while across the road everything was fine and peachy. I feel like I've written about this before but because of the sheer height of the snow and the apparently insufficient size of my snow shovel I'm effectively shovelling the entire driveway 3 times. In other words there is a top, a middle, and a bottom to the snow cover. Further more someone, and this could only happen to me, took all the left handed gloves in the house. AND HID THEM, or ate them, or something. This is a bad thing for two reasons. The first, is that it's -10˚C without the wind chill factored in. The second is that my extremities are extremely sensitive to cold, and after 5 minutes in this kind of cold(15-25 with super warm gloves on) my fingertips, followed by my hands lose dexterity, turn red, and lose all feeling except for something comparable to what it would feel like to have an elephant sitting on it. Then again maybe it's not me, because it seems my ipod can't cope either, if it's not tucked away against me it shuts down after 10 minutes and the little ipod on the screen starts shivering. Not looking forward to the fact that it gets as cold as -45˚ in late February. On the upside every so often I find some snow treasure. Today I found 2 newspapers, and a pristine tomato that must have been inadvertently flung into the driveway by a Tomato Carrier while it was still snowing, as he was skipping down the street singing about growing methods, artichokes, and clucking like a chicken as they do. When you're on the virge of frost bite you're supposed to warm your hands slowly so as not to encourage them to fall off. Lucky you I chose to do that by writing this, but I still have to go back out there and chip away at the last 4 feet of snow—piled up by forceful snow plows, which left over night through a quazi-blizzard is a lot like rock candy and regret. Update: Thought I'd add some pics for the sceptical among you. The first one is of the peachy side, the second is not an artificial hill in any respect aside from one lump directly above the ruler, it's just how much snow there was.

Color Browser is a great AIR app for designers to store your favourite colour pallets. It works with pallet files from sites like ColourLovers.com, you can then customize them or create your own in the app. Levitation Design also has some amazing wallpapers while you're over there.

"Color Browser was designed as a way to store my favorite color sets for reference. Kuler and ColourLovers had great ways to manage my favorites too, but keeping them open, or referencing them quickly was a pain, or not possible if I wasn’t online. So I put together a small application to handle a local set of my favorite color palettes. It’s grown a bit along the way, but the main purpose is still the same. The ability to open, or drag in ASE files was added (since both of the main color sites export those). And I expanded it from the original five color sets to support much larger sets. Color Browser has recently reached 1.0, so feel free to download it and try it out." via Levitation Design » Project » Color Browser.

Adobe AIR 1.5 Linux was publicly released yesterday :

We released an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux today so now we’ve got some form of support for Mac, Windows, and Linux with the exact same code/.air file. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and it’s really impressive to see most AIR applications just work on Linux exactly the way they do on Mac or Windows. Linux support is one of the things I’m most excited about with AIR because I love using Ubuntu and I hope that a lot of the applications I use will be built on AIR so I can spend more time in Linux and have the same experience I do on Mac/Win. We also announced we’re joining the Linux Foundation so we can help push the idea of RIAs on Linux. In addition to the AIR Linux release we also released an updated alpha version of Flex Builder for Linux so we’re hoping developers can both build AND consume RIAs on Linux. We’re working on a 1.1 version of AIR that will include some localization as well as some bug fixes from the 1.0 release. The Linux 1.1 version will lag a little but but after 1.0 our plan is to release a Linux version of AIR together with Mac and Windows so all three platforms will have the same release cycle.

Download it http://get.adobe.com/air/ If you have the AIR Linux Beta installed, you'll have to remove it, and all your AIR apps or 1.5 won't install. Here's a step by step guide by the AIR Dev Team on how to do that [ http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2008/12/tips_on_resolving_application.html ]. Update: After trying everything and racking my brain and the internet, I still couldn't get the installer to start. So I headed back over the the AIR Dev Team Blog and actually read the faq which plainly points out that AIR 1.5 doesn't work on the latest Ubuntu. If only I'd read that before I did a clean install of Linux Mint.

Will AIR run on newer versions of Linux distributions? For example, Adobe AIR's system requirements say Ubunutu 7.10, but I am running 8.10. While we have not tested fully against newer versions of these distributions, we believe AIR should run fine in most cases. If you run into an issue, please send us a bug description using our feedback form and we will look into addressing it in a future version. For a list of our supported Linux distributions, please see our System Requirements page.

I just looked outside to find tons of snow that, lucky me, I get to shovel in a few hours. After living here for a few years and working with a 7 car driveway I feel the best strategy is to check the local weather for the week and figure out when and if I have to bother moving mountains of snow about. The single most important thing to look for is whether there'll be an up in temperature and then a sudden drop and increase in wind chill. What happens then is a lot of snow creates a thermal blanket with the warm ground which if the temp goes above -5˚C will melt a layer of snow close to the ground. If the temp then drops that layer freezes into solid ice. This is compounded by snowplows which create a mountain of massive ice chunks and solidified snow and dirt at the end of your driveway. Today, there was a weather warning for the province that started out reading like a novel and near the end deteriorates into grammatical sewage. Maybe I'm reading to far into it but seems to me that whoever's responsible for posting weather warnings got a creative streak and then one of their superiors walked in and they had to shuffle some papers around and get back to work.

WITH THE FIRST 10 CM SNOWFALL NOW FADING INTO MEMORY..THE SECOND IN A FASCINATING SERIES OF SIGNIFICANT SNOWSTORMS IS BEARING DOWN ON SOUTHERN ONTARIO FROM COLORADO. THE COLORADO LOW HAS FORMED AS EXPECTED IS RACING NORTHEAST TO CENTRAL OHIO LATER TODAY THEN INTO PENNSYLVANIA TONIGHT. A RAPIDLY EXPANDING AND INTENSIFYING AREA OF SNOW OVER THE US MIDWEST INTO MICHIGAN HAS JUST MOVED INTO WINDSOR EARLY THIS MORNING AND WILL CRUISE NORTHEAST INTO THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE BETWEEN 7 AND 8 AM THEN EAST DOWN HIGHWAY 401 INTO EASTERN ONTARIO ALL THE WAY TO KINGSTON BY THIS AFTERNOON. THE SNOW WILL BECOME QUITE HEAVY AT TIMES AS THE LOW GETS CLOSER. LATEST INDICATIONS KEEP ANY RISK OF A CHANGEOVER TO ICE PELLETS OR FREEZING RAIN IN ESSEX AND KENT COUNTIES FROM WINDSOR TO CHATHAM AND SOUTH TO LAKE ERIE. OTHERWISE ONLY SNOW IS EXPECTED FOR EVERYONE ELSE. SNOWFALL RATES OF 2 TO 4 CM PER HOUR ARE EXPECTED AT TIMES AS THE HEAVIEST AREAS OF SNOW MOVE THROUGH. A GENERAL SNOWFALL OF 15 TO 20 CENTIMETRES IS LIKELY ACROSS THE DISTRICT BY THIS EVENING. AREAS AROUND THE WEST END OF LAKE ONTARIO FROM DOWNTOWN TORONTO THROUGH MISSISSAUGA TO HAMILTON AND EVENTUALLY NIAGARA WILL GET SOME HELP IN THE COLD NORTHEASTERLY WINDS OFF OF LAKE ONTARIO BOOSTING SNOWFALL AMOUNTS TO NEAR 25 CM IN QUITE A FEW LOCALES. IT IS NOT ENTIRELY OUT OF THE QUESTION FOR ONE OR TWO LOCALES TO GET UP TO 30 CM SHOULD AN EMBEDDED LAKE EFFECT SNOWSQUALL DEVELOP OVER LAKE ONTARIO TODAY AS SUGGESTED BY SOME OF THE COMPUTER MODELS. WHITEOUT CONDITIONS FROM BLOWING SNOW CAUSED BY STRONG EAST TO NORTHEAST WINDS OF 40 GUSTING TO 60 KM/H WILL BE A SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM WITH THIS WINTER STORM ADDING TO ITS NASTY WHITE BITE. THIS MORNINGS RUSH HOUR IN AND AROUND THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE MAY START OUT WITH NO SNOW BUT CONDITIONS WILL START TO DETERIORATE RAPIDLY AS THE SNOW MOVES IN AFTER 7 AM. HOWEVER..HEAVY SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW THROUGHOUT THE DAY WILL LIKELY MAKE THE AFTERNOON COMMUTE PARTICULARLY DIFFICULT AND SLOW. TRAVELLERS SHOULD ADJUST TRAVEL PLANS ACCORDINGLY. IF TRAVEL IS NECESSARY ONE SHOULD PLAN FOR MUCH EXTRA TIME TO REACH THE PLANNED DESTINATION. DRIVING CONDITIONS WILL DETERIORATE QUICKLY AND BECOME DANGEROUS DUE TO WHITEOUT CONDITIONS FROM BOTH BLOWING SNOW AND HEAVY SNOW. via Weather Watches & Warnings: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario - The Weather Network.

There are a number of situations where you'd want to grab the urls from a block of text. For example you may be loading in some external or dynamic data and want to make the links clickable, or change their colour. Regular expressions are used in a multitude of languages; they define patterns that can be matched against a string, thus certain key characters used in defining a RegExp have to be escaped so they are interpreted as special characters like \d matches any digit. In Actionscript, you can define a RegExp by either wrapping it in double quotes "", or forward slashes//. In each case you would have to escape any characters that match the wrapping in addition to the characters that need to be escaped in the actual pattern. Further more Actionscript requires you to separate out the last part of the regular expression, called flags, and insert it as the second argument when defining a new RegExp object. Here's how you find a url in text or html:

var str:String = new String('This is a url www.fightskillz.com, and this is another one: <a href="http://chalk-it-out.com">Chalk It Out</a>');
var reg:RegExp = new RegExp("\\b(((https?)://)|(www.))([a-z0-9-_.&amp;=#/]+)", 'i');
var result:Object = reg.exec(str);
trace(result[0]);

First off if you're new to Flex/Actionscript you have to copy and paste this into a function and the variables created will only be accessable within that function while it's running as they are created and destroyed as it runs. If you wanted more permanence you'd just define the variables outside the function.

Now Let's break it down. The first \ is used as a character escape for Actionscript. In actionscript when defining a string within double quotes you'd escape a double that's part of the string like this "Look at this double quote \"". \b searches for a word boundary ie: a whitespace, or the beginning or end of a string.The next part ((https?)://)|(www.)) defines the first part of a 'word' that passes for a url. It's made up of two substrings, the first looks for http, the question mark deems the preceding character optional, so it'll match to https as well. It then looks to see if the protocol is followed by ://. The | character means OR, so if there is no protocol specified, it checks for (www.). Next we have [a-z0-9-_.&=#/] which is a list of characters a to z, 0 to 9, and various others commonly found in urls. This is followed by a + which instructs the pattern to match the preceding list of characters until it can't anymore. It can't anymore when it reaches whitespace, a single or double quote, brackets, or any other non-url character. Finally the RegExp flag i informs the pattern to be case insensitive.

reg.exec(str); executes the pattern on the specified string and returns the results as an array. Since the example is only designed to match the first url it encounters and then stop, the array will only have one result. The method reg.exec(str) is interchangable with str.match(reg)

Somehow searching for an original version of Crying my heart out over you on Google video search, the first hit was this. It's funny, but he does make some good points...

One song that really has my attention at the moment is Crying my heart out for you by Ella Fitzgerald. It's been done by a bunch of people,  but for some reason the only version available on youtube is by this guy... so here it is :). It says he transcribed the guitar part from listening to the original, maybe I can get him to put it on paper and send me a copy.

While WebKit is trying to make some headway, anyone using Firefox that isn't too attached to all their plugins should get the 3.1 Beta 2.  It's lightyears faster than the current official release, which seems to hang noticibly when chewing through Javascript and when loading big web pages into memory. Get it here [http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html]. What's new:

WebKit is the lightest rendering engine meaning it can be built into more devices and applications without burning through system resources. Some of the biggest names already using WebKit are Google Chrome, Android, Apple Safari, Iphone(safari), Dreamweaver CS4, Adobe AIR, MSN Messenger. It's got potential, here's that potential in list form:

• Light on system resources
• Fast
• Small and lightweight = portable = mobile devices, specifically Iphone and Android
• Adopted by a wide range of browsers including Google's, Apple's, and Adobe's
• Widely integrated into devices, and software
• Open source

There's talk that Micorsoft is looking at WebKit for Internet Explorer 8, which is their latest attempt at building a competent browser. The internet's previous hope–Firefox, has been increasing in market share every month since Firefox 2 was released. Despite this insiders note that Gecko(Firefox's rendering engine), which used to be superior to WebKit, is written in an exceptionally convoluted way with a very 'steep learning curve'. According to this guy, WebKit is also far simpler to develop. WebKit has everything it takes to be and stay the best including something that Firefox never had enough of. Funding. Firefox's success to date can largely be attributed to Google's support. They have the Google Toolbar for Firefox, Firefox itself is tightly integrated with Google search(typing a keyword into the location bar uses Google's 'I'm feeling lucky' search feature), and Google invested a lot financially in Firefox. These days Google has announced plans to strike deals with OEMs who will pre-install Chrome on PC's much like Microsft did to take over the operating system market share decades ago. With Chrome coming out of beta shortly there is rumored to already be a line of OEMs eager to offer it as the default browser, a spot long held by Internet Explorer–which currently holds the biggest market share. Chrome will be cross platform, and finally, Google is the #1 search engine, combining OEM distribution with all their web reach ie: Search, News, Youtube, Adsense, etc. It seems like it wouldn't take more than a year for WebKit, via Chrome particularly to become the ubiquitous rendering engine. Test your browser against the Acid 3 Test[http://acid3.acidtests.org/] note:Even if you have a browser that uses WebKit, it probably doesn't have the latest version of WebKit that'll pass the test... yet. Learn more about WebKit[http://webkit.org/]