Flashtronaut

Flash On The Beach 2011 is approaching fast. I’m really looking forward to the event as I’ve always had great fun there in the past years, and it’s a good chance to catch up with friends and colleagues, see cool things, learn new ways of looking at things, and stare like an idiot as Joa Ebert amazes everyone with his magic.

And I’m supposed to do an Elevator Pitch on the Wednesday morning. Parties on the Tuesday nights usually go on quite late, so a presentation at 9:30am is a bit of a risk, but I’ll take it

My topic is going to be more technical in nature and is related to the McLaren Automotive car configurator we created at AKQA. I’m going to talk about how we used Pixel Bender to quickly render out beautiful images of the car on the client side using dynamic instruction sets to individual layered assets. My talk should be perfect to make sure those suffering from sleep deprivation from the following evening will get atleast 3 minutes of sleep during the first session of the day.

I just banged my head against the wall for a long time. I wanted to publish an .ipa file for iOS from Flash Builder 4.5.

The problem was that the publish process hung without any errors or notifications, it just told me to wait as “It might take a few minutes”. I left it on overnight. No luck. I thought maybe some of the code was too hard to convert so I tried to publish an empty project. No luck. I tried to tweak the settings in the app.xml file. No luck. At this point my head left a large crater on the wall.

Then I tried to compile the .ipa file using ant. Progress.
The ant script told me the following error “Could not retrieve certificate chain from keystore”.

So something wrong with the certificate file, but how could this be? I had created the certificate  file by-the-book using Keychain on a Mac, and then copied the resulting .p12 certificate file over to my PC. I used my Mac because it was easier to create the .p12 than doing it over the command line on the PC.

Well, apparently, .p12 files created on Macs don’t play nice on PCs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufsf_-a_H9Q

So, in order to fix the issue, a certificate used on a PC needs to be created on a PC. I used openSSL and followed documentation by Adobe:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/build/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e3d118666ade46-7ff0.html#WSfffb011ac560372f284e44b012cd1e700c0-8000

After that, no problems: Project compiles to an .ipa file in a few minutes and installs on the test iOS device.

This has been a public service announcement.

Just to let you guys know, I’m exited to be heading to FotB this year. Last year was a blast and I hope to see as many people as possible there this year again. Definitely something to wait for. Outshine the rest, check the box on the right hand side for more info.

See you in Brighton.

My old server had a fairly catastrophic crash which left the database in ruins, and in other words all my old blog posts etc.

Well, time to rebuild. Much has happened since the blog went down. I’m nowadays working for AKQA Berlin, having transferred here from the London office to build a brand-spanking-new AKQA office. How sweet is that. I don’t speak German, nor have I ever visited Germany before, so my request to transfer here is either cheer lunacy, delusions of grandeur (and German frauleins), or an openness to new things and a positive outlook. I’m leaning on the former ones, but ask me again in 6 months. The summer here was amazing, and still going on a few days of the week, so I’m off to a good start here.

Living here is much more enjoyable than it was in London. While in London you had the feeling of constantly being in a hurry somewhere because there were so many people packed into such narrow streets, here there are less people and the streets are build wide. I’m talking German wide. Like the front opening of a Biergarten waitress in a traditional Bavarian dress. It’s less hectic here and people feel chilled out.

I’m on a rooftop bar @ Soho House Berlin, which I heartily recommend, and I’ll go back to my drink and see if I can get this blog up and running like a German engine.