Inspired Robot

I’m flying to Boston in a few hours so I finally caved in and picked up a pair of decent travel headphones. Trusting in Sennheiser, since I own a pair of over the ear headphones that are great for home use. However they are a bit bulky if you want to travel light, so I bought the PXC 250 at the airport for $119 (I quickly checked Amazon’s price with my Droid and found their price was $120).

The PX 250 comes with noise cancelling technology dubbed NoiseGard, which is described in the user manual as “active noise compensation based on the principle of cancelling out sound in the low frequency range using counter-sound (inverse phase sound).” It comes with a nice little travelling case with room for the headphones, a side pocket that could hold spare batteries (noise cancellation requires 2 AAA alkaline batteries), and possibly enough room for a smallish mp3 player (it didn’t fit my 80 GB iPod classic too well, although it might fit without its leather case). The style is on-the-ear, which I find much more comfortable than the in ear variety (plus you don’t have to worry about ear wax). Frequency response reported in the manual is 10 to 21000 Hz.

The noise cancellation itself, in my limited experience using it here at the gate, works very well. The noise cancellation is turned on with a little switch in the NoiseGard device, which is a separate cylindrical component that also holds the batteries. The difference is immediately obvious, the ambient background noise as well as most chatter is mostly cancelled out. You can still hear a lot, but that low ambient noise is definitely reduced to almost nothing. With just the noise cancellation, no music, it is easy to test this essential feature of the headphones. Switching the power of the NoiseGard on and off, you realize just how much noise there actually is all around us in such places as airports (I look forward to testing it on the plane, but because of the weather my flight is delayed several hours). Playing something like Pärt’s Cantus in Memorium Benjamin Britten is much more enjoyable as a result. It is easier to hear the music when you don’t have all that background ambient noise interfering with your music.

So, for the price, I feel it offers effective noise cancellation, sound quality, comfort, and portability. I would have preferred not to have the NoiseGard as a separate device that I have to carry around, but I suppose the alternative is a bulkier headset as I noticed on a few others I tested in the store. But it’s not too big or heavy, and it works fine for sedentary purposes or walking around, which is all I ever do anyway.

I’m looking forward to getting more out of my iPod both on planes and, more importantly, at work.

admin headphones, travel friendly headphones headphone sennheiser noisegard ambient travel

Tuesday it arrived, and I must say I am thoroughly impressed with my new motorolla Droid. It is my first smartphone, so I cannot compare this phone to any other. Since I am writing this blog from my Droid, I can say the on screen keyboard has taken some getting used to, but it works great since it automatically corrects my inevitable spelling mistakes (fat finger syndrome). Granted my not so smart former phone had a similar feature (isn’t it called t9?), but it didn’t have a keyboard so it was still rather cumbersome.

Totally awesome features:
* speech recognition for searches, calling, and navigation. For example, I just say “navigate to” some address, and it gives me a list of possible addresses. Sure, it doesn’t always know what I said, but if I pronounce road names as the computer might, it usually works.
* browsing without a laptop. Just waiting for the promised flash support… I just installed the dolphin browser because a colleague recommended it, but I don’t really know if gestures really add much to my browsing experience.
* turn by turn directions. So far it has already helped me find my way out of Tyson’s corner when I missed my exit (I admit I missed the exit because I was distracted by my new Droid and Bluetooth device).

Features I hope to see:
* speech to text for just about everything, but especially for writing emails (or blogs).
* can it please plow snow and do my dishes for me? Just the sorts of things an android should be able to handle.

admin Motorola Droid, smartphone

Just some random thoughts this morning, following a discussion with a colleague at work.

Perhaps it gets overused, and sometimes abused, but I find the MVC pattern a rather useful way of dividing up code.  By using the pattern, I formalize what I would otherwise try to do anyway: separate my data from the graphical display, and make it easy to switch different views for the same data.  And although with MVC you should be able to set up your data model so the actual data can take several forms, XML is so easy to parse with e4x that it’s really not worth the effort to create a separate class to act as a parser.   So now I think I will call the data “model” the XML format itself.  This does mean, however, that if data is actually stored in some other way, say in the database, a serializer will need to be created to generate this data model.  This way the View in MVC can just parse the data format directly.  The Controller’s role is usually limited to locating the xml file and instantiating the View, passing it the xml.

Or I could just wing it…

admin Actionscript 3.0, Flash CS4 MVC, XML

I ran into a bug yesterday for flash 10 swf files that really had me scratching my head.  I narrowed the bug down to the following: filters applied at runtime to a SimpleButton that has been moved in 3D will crash the browser if embedded into html with wmode tranparent.  I guess it sounds really specific, but I think it’s pretty likely someone else will run into this soon if they haven’t already.   Download the example.

In the example, If you run cs4crashtest.html in firefox3 or IE7, and you move the mouse over the flash icon, cs4crashtest.html will crash (I haven’t tested other browsers).

The workaround I used for this example was to apply the filter to the over state of the SimpleButton class (btn.overState.filters). See cs4crashfix.html in the example.

Of course, if set wmode to something other than transparent, you won’t experience these issues.  You can also apply filters using the Flash CS4 IDE instead of using code, this seems to cause no problems.  Hope this helps someone avoid some debugging time.

admin Actionscript 3.0, Flash CS4 3D, Actionscript, as3, filter, SimpleButton, wmode

The above is an Inverse Kinematics example authored with Flash CS4 that doesn’t use any (of my) code.  The robot just seemed fitting with the domain.

Having looked at David Stiller’s tutorial and Lee Brimelow’s blog on the subject, I decided to see how easy it would be to do something similar to David Stiller’s puppet of Tom but allow the user to drag the pieces around like in Lee Brimelow’s example.  After hunting around for the way to make the pieces draggable without using any code, it turns out it’s really easy: look at the Property panel on the Armature layer and change “Type” from “Authortime” to “Runtime.”  Probably this is in the help somewhere, but I just stumbled across it on my own.

For more info visit Adobe’s Flash CS4 Help on Inverse Kinematics.

Download the source (version 0.2).

Note: I have recently updated the swf so it uses vectors rather than bitmaps so you can more easily do the selection.  If anyone can figure out how to combine the runtime method with the authortime method so you can have your puppet fly in and then allow the user to move it around, please let me know — I was having difficulties with this.  I assume it can be done by using several swf files rather than a single one.   Also I found out that skewed movieclips in your armature can have unwanted side effects.

admin Flash CS4 flash cs4 inverse kinematics robot drag runtime