Heya folks,
Sorry for the mess, but I got completely sick of some bugs in the old site system. I'm upgrading the whole thing, but it's going to be messy as a result. Please excuse said mess. :P

I finally hit the "last straw" when I added yet another article that got lost due to a glitch. Of course, I hadn't learned this from many previously-botched posts, so I didn't have it backed up. Thus, I had to re-write it... well, instead of doing that to work around the system, I'm upgrading everything.

This will be good overall, but it's setting me back a bit for updates that are loooonge overdue.

Please hang in there and come back soon for some updates. I'll need to customize the theme and add things like menus and advertising, etc. back in. For now, though, I'm going to go have a beer with some friends. :)

Thanks a TON for visiting!

--Hoza

So, I've been working with Ruby on Rails lately -- which is another discussion entirely -- and I've come to the point where I want to figure out how to embed SWF games into a page.  This research led me to a great little article called "Embedding SWF content with Ruby on Rails " at EleventyTen (which is just a cool name, btw.)

I'm posting here as usual to give myself a future-note on the topic, but also to share a bit.  SWFObject is really sweet and is a MUCH nicer way to handle the ridiculous mess that is the embed-vs-object "thing" for putting SWF movies in your files.

So, consider this an introduction to SWF embeding in Rails, as well as a heads-up on SWFObject since you'll probably want to use that sucker no matter what you're using on the site dev backend!

You're welcome. 

I'm just dropping a post to say "hello" and thank you folks for stopping by.  I know it's been really slow around here.  I'm sorry to leave you hanging, but I've been incredibly busy with other work for a while.  I just wrapped up a couple big projects, but now I'm taking a break for the holidays.

 So... Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Yippity Skippity Doo... whatever you're doing this time of year, just have a great time and I'll see you soon.  Happy New Year!!

Oh yeah... the "snow" thing eludes to the fact that there are 4-foot snow drifts outside my front door!!  Wheeee!  It snowed around 2 feet last night & yesterday here in Denver, Colorado (USA) and I freakin' love it.  I grew up in the mountains West of here and when I was a kid, there were a lot more of these big storms than we've been having recently.  

Anyway, it's a white Christmas for me.  :) 

Yeah, I'm freakin' swamped with work that pays. I'm happy you stopped by and I want to keep you coming back. Soon, I'll be done with these few good-paying jobs and I look forward to taking some time to do my own stuff. It's these jobs (doing "serious games", in case you're curious) that are helping me have the resources to do my own ("foolish games") projects later.

Unfortunately, as is the nature of many serious game projects, I can't talk about what I'm doing right now. Later, the veil ought to lift and I should be able to discuss the stuff. For now, I get to pretend I'm all important and stuff by saying "sorry, I can't talk about my work." Sounds stuffy, I know. It's not that amazing, it's just all legal-y and stuff.

Thanks for dropping in. I look forward to journalling my next projects to start filling out this site. Also, there are the same features I've been talking about in the past.

Since I bothered you fine folks earlier about WOXY going offline, I am happily bugging you again to say they're coming back!!  Wheee!

WOXY.com is resuming their fantastic radio stream tomorrow morning... 10:10am(EDT) on 10/10/2006.

I'm really freakin' stoked.  Yeah, I said "freakin'" and "stoked" in the same sentence.  I'm just that happy. 

I have no reason to post this here other than to publicly state my appreciation for years of fantastic music and wonderful on-air companionship from the DJ's at WOXY.com . I'm very bummed about this stream going offline tomorrow, so I'm crying about it here for a bit.

All my work days are filled with the aural sweetness that is 97X The Future of Rock & Roll. Great, great stuff.

Well.. I'm just depressing myself here, so I'll shut up now.

I'm tired of server crap.  I hope the friggin' way-too-frequent server outages aren't annoying too many of you as much as they're annoying me.  I've had so much trouble with the server, all my updating has gotten postponed way too much.  I have a lot of sites to manage and clients that rely on me to make their sites go... my projects can tend to fall on the back burner what things go bad.

So... just a note to tell you "whoops" and say I'm working things out.  Do I really need to keep writing posts like this??  Well.. likely not.  It is slightly therapeutic, though.  :-P

I'm really slacking right now.  Sorry about the lack of updates for those of you trying to visit regularly.  I had been preparing a large-ish list of schools with video game development curriculae and it turned out to be larger than I thought.  I wanted to roll out with most of them at once to avoid any apparent favoritism on my part... I'm not being paid by them or anything, but I didn't want to give a few schools a long head-start while I got around to adding more.

Aaanyway.. I'll work on rolling that list out as soon as I can, since there are many people visiting here who really want that info.  I'll get my other work in line this week and do my best to post more often.

Thanks for visiting! 

I've got a bit of research left before I get fully underway, but I've been reading through info about the AMFPHP open source Flash Remoting gateway . Cool beans. I don't want to pay for Flash Remoting stuff from Macrodobe since I'm generally not cash-filled and FR is huge-o expensivo to implement from what I've seen.

I have much research about other options that are less expensive than the real thing, but I'm not getting into that. This is my journal, after all, and I'm only up to AMFPHP right now. I'll get the others posted when I get to them, eh?

Here's a clip from their home page, in case you need more info before leaving here:

It’s fast, reliable, 100% free and open-source. Flash Remoting is a technology built into the Flash player core that enables sending data between the server and the client seemlessly. If you've built XML-based RIAs you know how much of a pain it can be to serialize the data, debug, and integrate into your application.With Flash Remoting, you can call remote methods from the Flash client and the arguments will end up in the native remote language, and will come back to Flash correctly typed, so there's no messing with serialization at all.

You also get to use the wonderful NetConnection debugger, which shows you exactly what's being sent between the client and server. Remoting uses AMF, a very lightweight binary format that cuts the bulk out of packets, meaning data exchange is a lot faster than with XML. All in all, Remoting is the way to go if you're looking to build robust, fast and secure Rich Internet Applications.

AMFPHP is a complete implementation of Remoting for PHP with tons of features built-in to make creating Remoting apps a whole lot simpler.

Here's a tutorial that I'm going through along with a few other docs and some books I already own with Remoting info in them:

• Connecting Macromedia Flash and PHP

I needed to post something, but I've struggled with the exact topic... so I'm dropping this useless note to let you know I'm working on something. I'm not neglecting you, I swear!

I'm working on getting a bunch of irritating back-end website work done so I can get that junk out of the way. There are several game projects I finally had to set on the shelf as I finished up some less-fun stuff that really needed doing. With any luck, I'll be back into making games and working on this site's content real soon... next week, I hope.

I wanted to say "thanks" to all of you for coming by. Please come back soon and don't be afraid to register for an account. Soon, there will be places to post your questions and comments, as well as maybe a few games where high scores will be stored if you have an account... that's a secret, though. Don't get too excited on that one, since there's a lot of work to be done on that front. :)

Thanks again and come back soon!