I’m thrilled to be participating in the Web Flash Festival at the infamous Pompidou Centre in Paris this Saturday. I will be involved in a number of ways. I will be giving a talk entitled “Playing With Yourself (for fun and profit)” about the professional benefits of doing experimental work, and exploring the foundation of how my webcam experiments work. I judged the experimental category, and will present the award (my first time presenting an award… I feel so glamourous). I’ll also be setting up Installation Incomplet in the Centre with some new pieces that attendees will be able to play with.

I’m really looking forwards to meeting some of the French community at this event, even with my embarrassingly poor French (parlez vous en Anglais, s’il vous plait?). I’m also looking forward to seeing André Michelle again, his work is always very inspiring.

This is more a reminder for myself than anything, and to save others the half hour of grief I went through…

While setting up the Installation Incomplet at FitC, I ran into some trouble. The installation allows users to save an image of themselves playing with the experiments back to our server, and view it online, but this feature refused to work on location. I spent a stressful half hour testing everything I could think of (internet, connection to our server, etc), shuffling modified files between my powerbook and the installation PC on a USB key, before it dawned on me: It was a security sandbox error, but it wasn’t displaying any errors because I didn’t have the Flash IDE installed, just the Stand Alone player.

I remember reading about this from way back when, but it totally slipped my mind. The IDE installs a file that the player looks for to determine if it should throw (developer) errors – without this file, it just fails silently. To make things worse, all my testing had been in my experiments directory which is I’ve set up as a trusted location. Definitely something to remember if you’re deploying any Flash 8 content to other users’ local systems or doing any installation work.

Going to the advanced settings online and setting the installation SWF as a trusted file fixed things right up (although the spotty internet access largely defeated this feature in the end anyway *sigh*).

While I don’t recommend it as standard practice, there have been a few cases where I have found it useful to use a set of static (class level) methods to proxy a singleton implementation. This simplifies access so that you can do this:
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