After a collaboration for over 9 years it’s time to say bye bye to our former Hosting Partner Schlund+Partner (now integrated into the 1&1 Internet AG).During the last months their service and availability got worse and worse. The negative highlight was during the last days when parts of their mailsystem went offline once again (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/83828 and http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/83916).

Lovely Systems is serving several Terrabyte of data per month. The combination of Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the local datacenter of Telekom Austria in Bregenz is a ideal combination for our hosting services (Telekom Austria Advertisment Video, wmv :)).

1&1: sad, that you perform that bad. Oli, fRiSi, quodt: great, that you work night and day!

Whoever has tried to display smileys in Flash-textfields has recognized the strange and unpredictable way Flash displays inline images. It’s not possible to do this in the expected way by using <img> tags in a html textfield.

As I am currently developing a realtime chat application based on the open-source instant messaging server Jabber I had to find a work-around for this problem. Jolan’s SmileyTextField, an early solution published as Flash MX component, uses a seperate Textfield and a MovieClip displaying the smileys. The big problem of this solution is that its not possible to get the coords of a specific letter in a textfield in an easy way. SmileyTextField calculates image (or, in this case, library assets) positions using autosizing textfields and line counts, which seemed to be rather imprecise on long texts and caused severe performance issues.

Our solution, we call it the EmotionalTextField, also uses a seperate TextField and MovieClip for smiley positioning. But smiley-positions are calculated using the Flash 8 bitmap-manipulation capabilities. Basically, predefined string sets (like  :-) or :-( ) are replaced by colored dots, the textfield is loaded into a flash.display.BitmapData, and the colored dots are searched using BitmapData.getColorBoundsRect().

After some refactoring and documentation our EmotionalTextField will be released here. Also included will be a configuration-xml, where you can register the text-snippets and corresponding images you want to use in your project.

—- 05/24/07 —-

finally. it’ done! the component can be downloaded here:

Download EmotionalTextfield 0.1b

This is a map with background mage data from vogis and a track i recorded on a hike we did this weekend i created with gpsman.

I already used gpsman for downloading data from my garmin and for transforming and exporting tracks and waypoints and described it in Data transfer from GPSmap 60CSx to a linux PC.

Gpsman also supports loading background images as maps and display items on the map. This will briefly describe how to do that.

The first search on google took me to the gpsman documentation on Map background images.

First i tried to create geo-referenced background images using the command line as it’s suggested in the first paragraph. Therefore i tried something like this:

gpsman georef ebnit-vogis.png "affine conformal" N47.37917 E9.74427 N47.34709 E9.74470 "WGS 84" \0 0 943 682

This did not work out this way (probably because of the missing projection argument) so i read on in the documentation.

Soon i found out that you can very easily do this using gpsman gui.

More or less everything you need to do is

• find map material on some online service (eg google maps, vogis or tiris) and note down the coordinates of some siginificant points (eg the top-left and bottom-right corner) of the differnt images.

• create waypoints for significant points you noted down for every image

• load the first image

  • map / background / load
  • choose the correct transform (i chose “aff conformal” for the vogis maps)
  • choose 2 or 3 (depending which transfrom you chose) waypoints and point them out on the map

• you can load additional images using map / background / change

  (use the right list to add images not excatly located like the ones in the left column)

• to store your geo-refernce data for the images use map / background / save geo-ref info

You can also download the resources (gpx file and map backgrounds) if you’re interested in trying this out on your own.