timwalling.com

I’ve added two more charts to analyze Jack’s kill stats.

http://timwalling.com/bauerkills/

Yes, I’m obsessed with Jack Bauer. The site bauercount.com keeps track of every kill he makes on 24 so I decided to chart all of his kills against the hour of the show in which he made the kill.

Which time of day is Jack’s deadliest? When is it safe to be around Jack Bauer? See for yourself:

http://timwalling.com/bauerkills/

I took my contact form down a long time ago due to all the spam that was being sent through it. I put it back online this weekend with a security image that I found googling for “php captcha”. I’ve incorporated a PHP security image script into Ryan Duff’s WP-ContactForm and hopefully all should be well again. If there are any interested WordPress users out there, I’d be happy to package it up as a modified plugin. I’m not completely happy with the location of the security image though so before packaging I’d be interested in getting some input on the contact form layout.

Dickson Brothers Co.

This hardware/home goods store has almost every product imaginable. I thought I almost had them stumped yesterday when I went in looking for a plastic/zip garment bag. I was looking around the home goods section, where the hanger were, didn’t see anything and finally asked. “Upstairs, over to the left.” Hmmm, you win today Dickson Brothers.

This is by no means a big store either. It’s only 2 small floors but seems to fit an entire Home Depot’s worth of stuff into the limited space. They offer some 2×4’s, paint, hardware, home appliances, bakeware, make copies of keys, the list goes on.

They don’t make stores like this anymore. Just wait until I come in looking for a replacement top for a 1985 Michael Graves tea kettle. Wait, I think I saw one of those upfront…

My co-worker, Joe Berkovitz, co-authored (with Todd Rein of Adobe) and released a nifty little Flex library called UrlKit about 2 months ago. I feel like the project didn’t get as much attention as it deserved and thought some action was warranted :).

Deep linking within a Flash application of any kind has always been a challenge on projects for me personally. Mainly because the requirement was throw in after most of the application was already built. One of the great things about UrlKit is that not only does it offer an easy to use framework but I think it would also be very easy to add to an existing Flex application.

I encourage people to try out the sample application. I’m going to post some sample code in the coming weeks, going over some simple examples. There’s very little code to implement and it basically consists of setting up some rule sets where parts of the URL in the browser are dispatched to the various parts of the flex application that care. Based on the values of the URL you can decide to do whatever you want. Bind it to the state of a view component, pre-populate input fields, etc.

UrlKit - http://joeberkovitz.com/blog/urlkit