For anyone who may be looking for it:

I'm working on an Apple Motion 3 project where I have several objects on screen that are the result of using a few replicators and a couple of particle emitters with .tga files as their sources. The targa files all had alpha channels so in Motion, the backgrounds were transparent. When I took the Motion doc into Final Cut Pro or exported from Motion, or previewed in Motion, the animation "freaked out", with objects blinking in an out and what looked like a lightning storm at times, with big streaks or blocks of white.

It doesn't help that at the moment I'm confined to using Motion on my black Macbook with integrated intel graphics chip. Blech. But there's nothing I can do about that.

To fix it, I tried substituting the .tgas for .psds of the same graphics. No luck. Tried .pngs with transparent backgrounds, though, and I was gold. Problem solved. I think. All looks good now, at least.

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An idea whose time has come, the Boston Transit Authority is likely to ban its operators from even carrying cellphones on board. This, after a close call with an accident on Friday.

''When it comes to public safety and operating public transportation vehicles, a line has to be drawn,'' he said.

State Transportation Secretary James Aloisi Jr., chairman of the MBTA Board of Directors, said accidents like Friday's have become too common, citing a train accident last year in California in which 25 people were killed. A conductor involved in that crash was found to have sent and received 43 text messages and made four cell phone calls.

Aloisi said he doesn't know of any policy nationwide as tough as what the MBTA is planning.[1]

It's too bad that this looks to be the first of ban of its kind in the U.S. This quote from general manager Daniel Grabauskas sums up the need:

''I want to remove any temptation by one or two people stupid enough to think a moment of convenience is worth the lives of the people they're transporting,'' he said. ''I'm not going to wait for someone to die to institute a policy whose time I think has come.'' [1]

Last year, in a Japan Times feature talking about the gestures the JR train operators make when a train approaches and leaves a station, there was this interesting tidbit:

Before I made tracks, I asked Satoh about cell phones. Just that morning, news had come out that the driver in the Sept. 12 Los Angeles train accident that killed 26 people had been sending text messages just before the crash. Much to my relief, Satoh said that JR East has a strict rule that employees may not even carry personal cell phones, let alone use them, when working on trains. A driver or conductor found to have used a personal cell phone on the job, he assured me, would be fired. [2]

The Boston transit authority is doing the right thing, including firing the offending operator. If there's one thing the Japanese know, it's how to run an efficient train system. Cities would be wise to follow Japan Railway's and, presumably, now Boston's example.

[1]: After Boston Crash, Cellphone Ban May Loom, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/09/us/AP-US-Trolley-Crash.html?_r=1&hp

[2]: Japan Gestures, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20081021wh.html

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I had an odd problem with my Flex datagrid seemingly caching data in its rows. I say, "seemingly," because the Datagrid's dataprovider was accurate, up-to-date, filled with the correct data, but when I removed items from the dataprovider, then added new ones, the datagrid would initially show a row with some data from a previously deleted item.

The Fix

The field that always had the "cached" data was using a custom itemRenderer. My problem stemmed from the fact that I was setting a variable for the renderer in a creationComplete handler:

private function init():void
{
data = value;
notes = (data.hasOwnProperty("notes")) ? data.notes : data.initialInspection.notes;
}

After reading this post at Nabble

    http://www.nabble.com/Datagrid-duplicate-row-td21321826.html

I did what I should have done to begin with, which was override the data setter function for the renderer:

override public function set data(value:Object):void
{   
    if (value != null)
    {
        super.data = value;
        notes = (data.hasOwnProperty("notes")) ? data.notes : data.initialInspection.notes;            }
}

Problem solved. Because creationComplete only gets called once, and I'm guessing because of the Datagrid/List optimizations, the data in the renderer was being retained.

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I couldn't tell you where exactly I've watched episodes of this before; my first guess would be mornings in Baton Rouge watching "The Buckskin Bill Show," but this is instantly familiar, and within the first two minutes of this episode, where Peter Park accidentally puts his car in a tree while dodging a boulder, then webslings his way to a 3-point landing, then accidentally bumps another rock that reveals "mysterious lights," it's safe to say that "awesome" is not nearly strong enough to describe it.

(Their embedded video was messing with my code, man, so here's a link to it: 1967 Spiderman Cartoon )

According to NPR, Marvel will be streaming all episodes eventually.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2009/04/why_a_42yearold_superhero_cart.html

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In Focus | Watanabe Katsumi:
http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/in-focus-watanabe-katsumi/

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http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2009/03/unearthing_a_new_short_story_b.html?ps=bb3
 
I'm a little disappointed that it's something from so early in his career, but hot damn! Who cares? I'm excited to death anyway. I'll definitely be asking Jessica to get this from the UCF library next month.
 

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I had no idea.
 

 
"It was July, 1971 in New York City. We were having our morning coffee in
a hotel room facing the park. Two things were upsetting John . One was
he had learned that his manager suggested that the other Beatles use the
same bank that he used. A big faux pas on the part of the manager as far
as John was concerned. To John, that meant that he was not special to
the manager. He was just part of the package deal. The other was that
George was doing a Bangladesh Concert at Madison Square Garden, and
because of that, many musicians from India had been put up in the same
hotel as us. John had so many years of being bundled together with the
other Beatles in a hotel, with hangers-on of the famous and near famous,
that he was particularly sensitive to those situations. “It’s getting
mighty crowded," he said, wiggling his nose."
 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/

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