My esteemed colleague Nik Rowell has graced these pages with some really cool Flash experiments in the past, which has inspired me to also explore the wonderful capabilities of ActionScript 3.

Audio visualization is a fun area to experiment in, as you can do some very interesting things with very little code. Nik showed us a unique way of looking at sound in this post. His code utilizes one mode of Flash’s sound compute spectrum method, which returns the raw sound wave data.

In my program I decided to use the Fourier transformation mode, which returns a set of calculations derived from the sound wave data. These calculations output a set of frequency numbers, starting with lows and ending with highs.

If your browser has Flash 9 installed click here to see a really cool song by Kate Havnevik brought to life with Flash. If you don’t see anything except the background right away, please be patient. On slower connections the sound may take a minute to load.

Every once in a while I come upon a site so unique, so interesting, that I simply must share it. Indexed is one of those sites. Jessica Hagy has taken blogging to a another dimension with her faux-math graphing posts.

While others (me included) struggle to convey complex thoughts and opinions with hundreds of words, she cuts strait to the point using only a few lines. Jessica’s hand drawn creations may not stand up to scientific scrutiny, or be testable on your TI-80, but they are genius in their own special way.

She also has a book coming out that will no doubt become an instant coffee table classic among nerds everywhere. It’s sites like Indexed that renew my faith in the Internet’s ability to offer up quality content for an unbeatable value.

Don’t miss this site, it will change your perception of blogging, graphs, and math forever.

OK - this is a little off topic, but I’ve been having a lot of very vivid dreams lately.

Last night I dreamt that I was praying with Mark Johnson (Mark works with me as part of the executive management team at ArcStone and is the managing partner in charge of our association CRMs AMO and CMO).

In the dream we were saying the prayer together in the morning before we started work.

When I got up, I wrote down the prayer. It has a ring of authenticity (being made of dream stuff and all), and I like it - so I thought I’d share it here….

This week Sun Microsystems announced an agreement to acquire MySQL, makers of the most popular open source database platform. This comes much to the dismay of open source zealots and sweaty nerds everywhere, who are afraid their beloved dolphin may end up in Sun’s enterprise tuna salad.

Sun has had a rocky past with the open source community, and tends to garner mixed reviews when they attempt to make inroads into open source.

Continue reading for more insight into Sun’s past open source shenanigans and what this deal might mean for the future of web developer’s favorite database platform.

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The updater calls
Embrace my new version now
My tears flow freely

I was rummaging around my files and found this old (but still useful) Flash program from days gone by. It has been noted in the past that ArcStone is a hotbed of tea consumption.

Since we are so busy it’s often hard to time the perfect steep, resulting in a bitter and undrinkable liquid. My solution was to create the Steep Master 1000, an interactive steep timing system.

Keep reading for detailed operating instruction for the Steep Master 1000 and tips on creating the perfect steep.

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Local software / tech pioneer and serial entrepreneur Dan Grigsby makes a compelling case about the depth and value of Minnesota’s contribution to the software industry. According to Dan, Minnesota has a quietly innovative and expert software development work force - with major players opening development offices here like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. Dan states that Minnesotans can get the work done for about half of what it costs on the coasts (I don’t know if it’s half, but I’d agree that there is probably a steep discount).

With the weaker dollar (and even without) does it make sense for coastal businesses to outsource software development to the Midwest? Is Minnesota ready to capitalize on this movement? Are we ready to support and assist software entrepreneurs and truly foster the software industry in MN?

No, we’re not. I have not been impressed with local associations or any state agency sponsored effort to promote our software industry.

If you look closely at where future innovation and good jobs will be had in the 21st century - you’ve got to bet on the Internet and software. Yet Minnesota does not have an organization dedicated soley to moving software ahead. This has got to change.

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If you’re anything like me your daily digestion of web content can’t be contained in one browser tab. Between RSS feeds, work Intranets, gMail and other web applications, several tabs are needed, and flipping between them constantly becomes a carpal tunnel inducing nightmare.

The solution many choose is to setup a start page. Start pages are one page sites that aggregate data from many other web pages into a dashboard style display.

Google’s iGoogle is the most popular start page system, but I have started using a little known competitor that puts iGoogle to shame; Netvibes.

Keep reading for tips on setting up the ultimate start page and the secret to unlocking the start page’s hidden power.

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By now even casual web users are familiar with the term “Web 2.0″. Probably because the most popular brands (YouTube, Flickr, FaceBook) of the Web 2.0 revolution attract large amounts of novice and first-time web surfers.

Now there is a new revolution on the horizon, one that lacks the glitz and glamor of Web 2.0. This revolution is less about the human user, and more about the machine user.

Welcome To The Semantic Web, Where Machines Do All The Work
Imagine if you didn’t have to dig through Craig’s List, eBay, and Google separately for the best deals on antique soup spoons. Now imagine there is a way for web developers to aggregate all those sites together without much effort, therefore being able to offer users a single point of reference for antique soup spoons.

Welcome to The Semantic Web, where machines do all the work. Continue reading for a preview of the revolution.

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As many of you know, I’ve been spending a bit of my time exploring the cool features in ActionScript 3.0 - some new, some not. Lately, I’ve been intrigued by the SoundMixer class which has a special method, computeSpectrum(), that essentially takes a snapshot of the wave of a streaming sound (or an embeded sound, but I’m talkin’ 100% code here)…

The finer details quickly boil down to binary data, but the power of this is the potential to create audio-powered animations in Flash.

After a refresher in Trigonometry, some tortellini, and a late night (or early morning), I’m pleased to present latest ActionScript 3 experiment!

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