My talk was titled, Searching for Adam Savage, and was based around a research project that I conducted called Seeker. The basic premise is this:

Modern cell phones frequently include a camera and a GPS. Even if a GPS is not included, cell phone towers can be used to establish the location of the phone. Image formats include special headers that can be used to store this information, so called EXIF tags. In this talk, I described the process that was used to find the information that many consumers (including celebrities) unknowingly broadcast out on the internet.

The article that resulted from my research can be found over at ZaaLabs.

During the presentation one of my slides was missing, somehow creating the slides in Apple Keynote and then converting them to PowerPoint caused some issues.

So here is the slide that was missing.

Also, Ben Huh of Cheezburger Network wants everyone to know that they are hiring.

The Flex Show – Episode 115

RIARadio – Episode 17

GangstaCast Episode 1: Celebrity Stalker Edition

Also, I was thrilled to find out that I was mentioned on TWiT.tv’s Tech News Today for an article I wrote regarding tracking celebrities by scraping exif data from photos uploaded to TwitPic, yfrog, TweetPhoto and TwitGoo.  The part when they talk about the article is about 15 minutes into the episode.

Tech News Today 34: Take Off Your Pants, America

Article on ZaaLabs

So all in all, it’s been a very interesting week.

Built in image support of Adobe Flash Player limits you to 3 image formats: gif, jpg and png. While this has worked well for many, many years… I recently have needed to expand the types of formats that I could use in Flash Player. I should also note that you can absolutely add support for these formats directly in ActionScript using ByteArray. For example Mike Chambers blogged about an AS3 BMP parser.

I was originally looking for support for TGA, BMP and PSD, when my friend Ben pointed me to DevIL and challenged me to port it using Alchemy.

Porting C code using Alchemy is not a very straight forward process, but between Aaron and I… and with help from Ben Garney and Branden Hall… worked our way through it. We plan on a series of blog posts discussing the process of using Alchemy in detail. Hopefully we can garner enough interest in the community around Alchemy to get Adobe to continue work on it.

ZaaIL is being released as open source software (MIT if you’re interested). We will post it all on GitHub when we get the chance.

[sidenote]
I have been asked by a few people if I think Adobe should expand from their three image formats and use something like DevIL in Flash Player… I don’t think they should. Adobe has given us the tools to create really cool things such as ZaaIL. I’d rather the Flash Player team focus on things I find way more important… such as 3D support, mobile performance, hardware accelerated graphics, etc…
[/sidenote]

ZaaIL allows developers to now to load more that 40 different image types… go ahead give it a try, I particularly like using a PSD file or cover art embedded into an MP3 (View source is enabled):

More information can be found over at ZaaLabs.