Synesthesia

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Terri Timely, director and creator of Synesthesia, brings us this Terry-Gilliamesque conflation of man and machinery in a chaotic world where music melds melodically with food, literature and even ourselves. Watch this short film for the beauty and color of each shot, and pull your own hypothesises from it. Or follow him on is photolog (plog?) here.

Flash Indexing with External Resource Loading

flashFrom Google’s Webmaster Central:
We just added external resource loading to our Flash indexing capabilities. This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.

This new capability improves search quality by allowing relevant content contained in external resources to appear in response to users’ queries. For example, this result currently comes up in response to the query [2002 VW Transporter 888]:

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Read the entire story, here»

Old School “Medicine” Ads

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Special thanks to Katherine for locating this little gem. We’ve all seen the cigarette ads of the 1950s with doctors proclaiming their medicinal effects. Take a look at this collection on pharmacytechs.net, which unifies the promotion of cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, heroin, opium and dozens of other illegal substances as being safe for family (and children) consumption. See them here »

Flash File Uploader – Allow All Filetypes

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A [d]online reader recently requested that the Flash File Uploader allow provision to upload all filetypes. And while I’d previously decided against such an option—due to security/malicious action issues, this was not the first time I received such a request. In fact, since the uploader was created a few years back, I’ve gotten dozens of requests for this feature. As such, I’ve decided that my disclaimer for downloading the uploader should adequately cover me from any litigation and wrote the feature into the latest version of the uploader.

For people wishing to just use the uploader without understanding the changes, simply add “all” as an item under the extensions flash variable in the swfobject embed code:

fo.addVariable("types", "video|text|pdf|audio|archive|office|image|all");

For those that wish to know the changes, the Flash loop that adds the array extensions to the “allowed” list also looks for the “all” option and changes a variable to true, if all filetypes are allowed. This is then passed to “upload.php” and skips the extensions test. Lastly, it’s passed to index.php to properly display the success message.

For your convenience, the link is the same as the last one.

Comments and feedback always welcome. Thanks again, Mike, for the assistance and to all the [d]online readers and commenters for your interest in the FFU and readership.

The Vendor-Client Relationship – in Real-world Situations

I found this video as torturous as it was funny, for various reasons, but figure that most of my colleagues would get a good kick out of it. Especially on the heels of the Win Without Pitching manifesto—which friends and [d]online readers replied in unison ‘In a perfect world…”—these two posts have really made me stand back and think about how our industry differs from many others.

That’s all I feel comfortable saying on the subject, in such a public forum, though.