I’m pretty happy with my performance. My goal was to get into the quarter finals, which i did. I also almost made it into the semi finals. Me and Mark Kempton both had to skate an extra run because the judges couldn’t decide who to send into the semis. In the end Mark won, and I left proud of my self, carrying a new resolve to add some more technical tricks to my arsenal. Overall I placed 9= (which means i tied with 4 other skaters for 9th place) out of 22 skaters, i think.

While i was there I got a new pair of the 2008 Seba Highs, which i’m working on breaking in currently.

Naomi and I also discussed details of starting a world freestyle team, which i’ll write more about soon.

my quarter final group

On the Fan, we’ve occasionally had problems with playing lists of videos with VideoDisplay, and we’ve had to jump through a few hoops in order to continue to use it so that we’d still get all its benefits. The problem generally consists of the VideoDisplay getting into a state where it stops responding to subsequent calls to load() & play().

We had worked around most of these by moving around our code to avoid apparent race conditions in VideoDisplay, and we even had to monkey-patch the VideoDisplay & VideoPlayer classes to get around a problem were it would load the netstream twice for the same video and you’d get a double/echoing audio stream. While working with one of our partners recently, we came up against another bug in VideoDisplay that we couldn’t get around. This time it was throwing an error like this:

ArgumentError: Error #2126: NetConnection object must be connected.
  at flash.net::NetStream/construct()at flash.net::NetStream()
  at VideoPlayerNetStream()[E:\dev\flex_201_borneo\sdk\frameworks\mx\controls\videoClasses\VideoPlayer.as:2883]
  at mx.controls.videoClasses::VideoPlayer/createStream()[E:\dev\flex_201_borneo\sdk\frameworks\mx\controls\videoClasses\VideoPlayer.as:2712]
  at mx.controls.videoClasses::VideoPlayer/_load()[E:\dev\flex_201_borneo\sdk\frameworks\mx\controls\videoClasses\VideoPlayer.as:2170]
  at mx.controls.videoClasses::VideoPlayer/load()[E:\dev\flex_201_borneo\sdk\frameworks\mx\controls\videoClasses\VideoPlayer.as:1486]
  at mx.controls::VideoDisplay/load()[E:\dev\flex_201_borneo\sdk\frameworks\mx\controls\VideoDisplay.as:1361]

It actually involves not only VideoDisplay but also VideoPlayer (which VideoDisplay has an instance of) and even NCManager (which does some of the stuff mentioned above). My counterpart at the other company wasn’t seeing this error in his test environment, but eventually we realized what the crucial difference was: autoplay was set to false in the Fan, while it was left to its default (true) in his test player.

Since he had it working with no problem, i decided to see what would happen if i left autoplay at its default value of true.

Well, there were some side effects related to videos playing before i was ready for them, however the broken state of VideoDisplay went away! Now I simply pause the VideoDisplay right after i set the source to simulate having autoplay set to false. This has the added benefit of buffering the movie right away instead of later on, so i’m pretty happy with the solution (although i think VideoDisplay should do that anyway if it was written properly)

Update: here’s the code we used to patch mx.controls.videoClasses.VideoPlayer:

public function ncConnected():void {
  if (_ncMgr == null || _ncMgr.netConnection == null)
    setState(CONNECTION_ERROR);
  else{
    if (!alreadyLoaded) {
      alreadyLoaded = true;
      createStream();
      setUpStream();
    }
  }
}


Obviously we also added a variable declaration for alreadyLoaded, and we also reset it to false in the _load function (you can’t miss it, there’s a ton of variables getting reset in the function)

Update: here’s a screenshot of my project structure showing how to “underride” the adobe class. 

The Union Square sessions
On Wednesday night, Sebastien and Naomi met us at Union Square for our usual skating. We had a much bigger turn out, though, and the energy was really high. Then on Friday, Phil and Jim (from the UK) and Igor, Chloe and Olivier (From France) joined us, and as you can imagine it got even more interesting. The mix of Union Square freestyle with European freestyle slalom actually drew quite a large crowd. So big, in fact, that a break dancing performance that was originally on the other side of the square (two blocks away) actually moved their show right next to us to try to get their crowd back! After these two nights, I was already content with how the event had turned out, and it hadn’t even “officially” begun yet!

The Competitions
The International Battle was great to watch, and we even had two Americans make it to the semi finals (Evan and myself both got 3rd in our semi-final groups, just missing the finals, and tying for 5th place). Then came the US Battle, which was also pretty exciting. You could really see each skater pushing their limits to try and do their best. The top four were me, Evan, Stacy and Denni. Next we had an off-cones freestyle battle, with Team USA vs Team World. It was a bit light hearted and involved lots of trash talk between the teams, but the audience decided that Team USA was the better freestyle team, giving two of the top three spots (1st & 3rd) to Americans. Oh we did speed slalom as well :P.

Battle US 2007 Results

The Food
I’d be letting a major part of the event slip if I didn’t mention all the great restaurants that the local New York skaters took us too. We had a tour of asia, with some of the best Japanese, Schechaun and Korean food I’ve ever had. Thanks to Pete, Shawn and Young-sang for picking great places to eat.

Not only was the launch uneventful (which is good) but it was also right on time. We’ve really got a great team, and I don’t just mean tech. Our Project Manager¹ is great at managing the ebb and flow of daily issues, and our business manager¹ is a geek at heart who totally gets tech and development in a way i’ve never seen a “suit” ( ) do before. Obviously our tech team rocks too, since Arpit is one of the premier flex custom component writers. (The Fan has a freakin Circular scrolling list, need i say more?)

Which brings me to my personal milestone. When i got home today, i noticed an IM reply from Arpit that I had missed at work. We were talking about some code of his I had to change:

No i’m not talking about our horrid spelling/typos (i’ll let you guess which those are) but the passing of the torch on the Fan.

Call me a geek, but I’m quite proud

[1] Both left unnamed, as i’m not sure if they’re ok being in the blogosphere

check out the site, and play the game which is in the main navigation:

To Market To Market…

(Be sure to check out “Square” view, as thats were most of the changes are)

Naomi is gunna buy me a copy, and she send me a scan of it already.

They decided that Sebastien would be good for all the action shots, while Naomi and I would be best to portray the attitude of a true skater.

follow the link for the picture…

Working on the Fan is really fun and interesting. I’m getting to learn Flex and also work on a very high profile consumer entertainment app at the same time. I can’t wait until we release the latest version to the public. Until then, you can check out our regular preview releases at CIM|Labs