Things have finally picked up on campus and I'm starting to get busy again. My classes all seem pretty interesting so far, but all of them either have ongoing projects or big reports throughout.

For New Media Theory, I have to write a weekly blog post about 3 articles of my choosing that relate to that week's topics. I have set up the page www.davidneedham.net/mm450 to keep track of all of those posts. If you have any interest in DRM, intellectual property (IP) law, copyrights, or anything relating to that, you might find those posts interesting. This week I blogged about Amazon's upcoming sales of DRM-free music, Japan's aid to Africa for increased IP development, and how Aborigines of northern Australia are helping researchers to develop a new way of handling DRM.

As far as the website is concerned, the framework is "done". When is any website really done though? I'll be adding more content for my pictures and portfolio pages and working a little more on layout. I don't like this font. I think it's too big overall and not interesting enough. What are some interesting fonts that (most) everyone has? If only this was flash and I could embed the font I want to use. If only there was an open framework for adding flash to websites without all of the downsides.

Fortunately, my professor and mentor Steven 'Sven' Merrill and Brian McMurray have found a way to remove the most annoying problems of flash based websites using SWFAddress and Drupal. Bascially, by using Drupal as a back end for people without flash (or web crawlers like google!) while the flash lays on top of it seamlessly. All of the content from the Drupal page is pushed up into the flash dynamically, so there's no need to constantly be changing the flash content manually. The best part, is that by using SWFAddress, they are allowed to split the flash into pages. In other words, they can click links, bookmark that link, use the forward / back buttons, and everything work how a normal website does. Nothing like this has ever been done before. This whole thing is revolutionary for the flash world, and I can't wait to use this amazing new marriage of efficiency (drupal) and beauty (flash / flex) that has been coined by Sven and Brian as "Druplash" and "Druplex".