Video day today. Appeared in a soon-to-be-released show talking about Photoshop 7. Lots of fun flubbing lines and making a fool of myself. All for 2.5 minutes of air time. Felt like an info-mercial geek. Then later in the day on a video conference link to Noida (near New Delhi) in India. Didn’t have to wear shoes in either instance!
Got 5 minutes? Look at this: Generate your own South Park character
I think I’ll buy the new Moby album 18.
90% completed a Visual Basic frontend to the mungenetengine. This should make it easier to update and edit some of the content on the site, with resorting to copy and paste. The original interface is a forms/web based thing.
Strange days. Had an email from a Dreamweaver/Coldfusion MX user saying that the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server was the first successful SOAPweb service he could connect to. Nothing like helping the competition!
For those interested in getting high quality printed output from InDesign, GASAA, Adobe and Heidelberg are presenting a series of sessions in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in early July. Please visit the GASAA events page to register. Free.
GoLive 6: Adobe’s Open Source Embrace. A good read if you are into databases, PHP, GoLive et al.
As as 1.30pm, the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server has served 1000 lyrics!
OK, so I felt guilty. Spent some time creating table versions of the templates for those few people who are stuck in the late 1990s with Netscape 4.x and similar. The css is also customised slightly, too. mungenetengine will dynamically determine the browser you are using, and serve up the same content, just slightly modified depending on your browser.
Wild and crazy times. Last week I implemented the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server as a SOAP service. Now it gets hit hundreds of times per day! This crazy guy is translating Neil Finn into French and Spanish. Mon deu!
Been working on a minor skunkworks project for this site. Based on Visual Basic, SOAP and lots of munging stuff.
Russell Brown’s Tips from the Photoshop 7 User Conference (as Quicktime) are online.
Taking data from FileMaker Pro 5.5 to Photoshop 7.0 is simple with AppleScript. So simple, I challenged myself to write the code on the flight from Sydney to Auckland on the Photoshop 7.0 User Conference/Roadshow/Tour in May. After a little modification “in the shop”, and comments from the great Shane Stanley, here it is in all its glory!
Firstly, lets look at the database supplied. This is quite simple: there are 3 fields and three records. The very important field is the filename pointer field. This contains the file name of the template for this record:
![[1187] 01_fmpro_source](http://media.nickhodge.com/legacy/1187.jpg)
The definitions of the fields is important. The script uses the names of the fields to point out layer names in the Photoshop template files:
![[1188] 02_fmpro_defs](http://media.nickhodge.com/legacy/1188.jpg)
This is the template Photoshop file. Notice the layer name of the text layer. Again, these layer names are used by the script as the linkage between FileMaker Pro and Photoshop 7.0:
![[1189] 03_template](http://media.nickhodge.com/legacy/1189.jpg)
The end result in the file system. It is very important that you check the properties at the top of the AppleScript to point to directories you would like the script to look for the source templates and where to place the end results:
![[1190] 04_end result](http://media.nickhodge.com/legacy/1190.jpg)
The final JPEG as displayed in the browser, this time with the data inserted by this script:
![[1191] 05_jpg end result](http://media.nickhodge.com/legacy/1191.jpg)
The FileMaker Pro database and Script is available for download: filemaker to photoshop 1.0.sit
I have only tested this on MacOS X 10.1.4 with Photoshop 7.0. You will also need the Photoshop 7.0 Scripting Plugin 1.0.2a (Mac) available from the Adobe web site.
Comments are welcome!
How to incorporate Random Neil Finn Lyric Server into your web site.
New article: InDesign 2.0: Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs
At 8.30am today, mungenetengine had served 10000 unique page views to 1829 unique viewers.
Earlier today I had an idea of a web service that I could implement here. To the right is from this web service on mungenet – the Random Neil Finn Lyric Server. This is implemented as a SOAP service installed on my host, backended by a MySQL database. Including the interface to the database and the SOAP service, it took about 4 hours to complete.
Lynn Grillo on Creating HTML emails with GoLive
I’ve just tried to load mungenet in Netscape 4.7 and realised its very broken. I’ll have to look into how to fix this on the server side. The good news is that things are still cool with the newly released preview of Netscape 7. It looks like we’re back into web browser version number wars.
note to self: WSDL is easy, as long as you name things intelligently and match the code and parameter’s naming conventions