A* search algorithm

December 4, 2007 · Posted in General · Comment 

“In computer science, A* (pronounced “A star”) is a best-first, tree search algorithm that finds the least-cost path from a given initial node to one goal node (out of one or more possible goals).”  more…

A nice Flash implementation of this can be found over at http://www.actionscriptarchitect.com/2007/07/02/a-3d/

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Another Flash meta-data and cue point injector tool

December 4, 2007 · Posted in Flash, Video · Comment 

I’m a few years late at finding this tool, but never needed to add cue points post-encoding before. Anyhow, the tool is FLVTool. There’s also some usage examples over at OSFlash.

Few usage examples of my own, I’ll keep adding more as I work through it.

To extract part of an FLV to another file:

ft2 -C -i 1000 -o 3000 sample.flv cut2.flv

Where:

  • ft2 : I renamed flvtoo2. Less keystrokes!
  • -C : is the cut command
  • -i : start time code in milisecs
  • -o : end time code in milisecs
  • sample.flv : input filename, located in the same folder as the tool. I would also add the tool to my path so that I can run it from any folder.
  • cut2.flv : output filename. If you omit this, your source file will be overwritten.

As you can see, it’s quite straightforward.

Injecting cue points is also quite simple. There’s an XML file sample included with the tool download zip.

To inject cue points from an XML file:

ft2 -A -t tags.xml sample.flv

The XML should take the following form:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<tags>
  <!-- an event cue point -->
  <metatag event="onCuePoint">
    <name>TestEvent1</name>
    <timestamp>333</timestamp>
    <parameters>
      <speaker>Peter</speaker>
      <says>Hello my Name is Peter.</says>
    </parameters>
    <type>event</type>
  </metatag>
  <!-- a navigation cue point -->
  <metatag event="onCuePoint">
    <name>TestEvent2</name>
    <timestamp>1000</timestamp>
    <parameters>
      <index>1</index>
      <title>Chapter 1</title>
    </parameters>
    <type>navigation</type>
  </metatag>
</tags>

To view file meta-data (can also use FLVMDV for this):

ft2 -P sample.flv

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Aqua Data Studio

December 4, 2007 · Posted in Database · Comment 

This (http://www.aquafold.com/) a great DB query analyzer tool which pretty much works will most all DB engines! The latest version, 6.5, is not free but there 4.7 for free.

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