Yet Another Update. Why not? Well I have been working on some smaller paying gigs dealing with Flash recently. It has kept me from doing anything at all to the site, but hey, paying is better than hobby. Right?

Well I think so. Mainly because I don't have a full time gig at the moment. Hopefully that will change soon. In the mean time, I would like to point you to one of my most recent gigs over at LingKit.com lingkit.com is a "teach yourself any language you want" site. It just opened. However there is a ton of stuff there. You can help expand the wiki, upload sound files and even record yourself speaking in your native tongue for others to learn from, or listen to yourself speaking another language to figure out where you went wrong.

I had the happy part of creating the audio recorder. (For security and to save bandwidth - you need to log in to see the recorder. If you do create a free account, the recorder will be found under tools - personal audio recorder from your new front page after signing in.

This recorder was a special challenge for me. It was fun, and at time frustrating. The idea was to create an audio recorder in Flash. Live streaming audio. YAY. (if you don't know, that requires the use of a Flash Media Server and is very fun to code to). But that wasn't all. I had to write the code to check microphone permissions, adjust volume of the microphone, enable playback and storage of the audio on the FMS server and before you could even begin, I had to run a check on the randomly generated key. This is to prevent bots and such from utilizing the FMS server. You can't connect unless the key matches one in the database. After that check, it had to connect to the FMS server. Only 10 allowed at once. So you may have to wait. Once you are in, you had to give permission to your microphone, then you had to record your audio. Once recorded you had to listen to it and if all was well you could then save it to your profile page.

What you don't know is that while that is going on, another oh say, 3000 lines of code I wrote, are doing their thing. I had to run a check that you stayed connected the entire time, and once you elected to save, had to ensure that the php did it's job and moved the file from the FMS server to your profile page. Yeah. that was a beast. But I did it. and all under 1MB total. Within this one audio recorder, there are 6 security checks. And did I mention it was for a web site that uses any and every language in the world? So I had to do it with hieroglyphics as well. Limited amount of words on the recorder because the site has to translate those words into any possible language. I also allowed for this language change to be done on the context (right-click) menu for the "help" link. It's pretty awesome. I am pretty proud of it. It isn't exactly final yet, but final enough. Little tweaks here and there to be done, but it is a great BETA release. I suggest you all go over there and test it out. Be BETA testers and let me know what is wrong with it so I can get it perfect!

I will be working some on the site in the coming weeks. And when the Flash area is open I will have a dumb-down model of the recorder here for you to see.

Until next time...