Posts under “General”

OnAir Tour plus Adobe support of Open Source

Two quick topics in a single post here. First off, I attended the OnAir bus tour here in Minneapolis the other night. I must say it was a good time with some good information. The food was good (pop rocks and nerds, how do you beat that?), the atmosphere was nice and the speakers were fantastic. Didn't see anyone playing Guitar Hero on expert mode to play against, but a lot of people were giving it a good shot. I also discovered that Mike Chambers was taller than I expected him to be after...

Flaver : Redesigned for more tastiness

The site got a visual overhaul. At this moment it's strictly visual ( though the code on the back end has been completely redone ) but I have plans for some other minor additions to the site. Some may or may not be noticed, but I'm excited about them regardless. There are some issues I'm working out, so some things may not be fully functioning until then. Source and Study items will be missing while I reorganize them and update the links in the posts. Comment form may be a bit wonky ( it...

Flash Develop 3 Alpha Release

It has happened : FlashDevelop 3 (Alpha) has been released. If you are not familiar with FlashDevelop then I would highly recommend giving it a try. I find it to be lightweight, responsive and full-featured - all of which I consider crucial when doing development. Quite simply, this has become my editor of choice and did almost the moment I started using it. Check it out and give them feedback on their hard work (though remember this is still alpha right now). For those of you already...

Another reason to love Flash and Opera

Hopefully by now you're familiar with Pandora Radio - a flash-based internet "radio" based off musical properties like syncopation, vamping, overall tonality, etc instead of just genre. If for some reason you are not familiar with it I would highly recommend you give it a shot. Also my list of things I cannot do without ( aside from Flash Develop ) would be Opera browser. You may be aware that I created a widget for Opera to display Pandora radio that means you do not need to have an extra...

Blogathon 2006 : Flash Goodness for Math and Science

Well the time for Blogathon 2006 is almost upon us, and I will be participating this year via Galaxy Goo. There should be a lot of great stuff posted every 30 minutes for the duration of 24 hours, starting tomorrow. I will even have some neat experiments that I haven't shared with the community yet, so be sure to check it out! You can find a FAQ on Galaxy Goo's participation in the blogathon. Please show your support, and if you can manage it, a sponsorshop. Galaxy Goo is a non-profit...

Flash Radio and Opera 9 Widgets

Lately I have been finding myself listening to Pandora radio almost non-stop at work and at home, and have even bought several new albums based off of music it has suggested. The interface is done in flash and is pretty clean, though I would really like to see an API released for it for those of us who like to... tinker. :) I have also been using the Opera 9 Tech Preview 2 since it was released - both at home and work, and it has been great. When I first heard about the widgets, I thought it...

Flash Online RPG : Final Fantasy IV Online

For all of you old-school RPG gamers out there (myself included), this should be great news : It seems that an online version of Final Fantasy IV (originally Final Fantasy II in the US) is being developed - in Flash to boot! I am currently engaged in cartridge wars with my significant other over the recent release of Final Fantasy IV Advance for Game Boy Advance, so this should be great if progress keeps moving on it. According to the site he is looking for help in development, so any of you...

Site Updates

Well, I've finally gotten a little time to get back into the swing of things a bit, and will have code to post again. In that vein, the site has also undergone a visual overhaul - which may not be completely finished yet. Aside from the visual aspect, there is the matter of how things are arranged. I am not really a standard by-date blogger, so I've gone over to a category format for the entries. I'm not sure yet if I will keep categories or switch to tags (allowing for multiple tags per...

Galaxy Goo Blogathon

The blogathon is on, and Galaxy Goo is participating! Every 30 minutes for 24 hours, Kristin and Edwin will be posting flash experiments to a special blog setup just for the contest. Each experiment will also have the source code for you to download and check out, and the site will be kept up after the blogathon for archival purposes. Go check it out and show your support for what they're doing, download some code, and maybe even make some modifications of your own!

Mario Kart Redux

Took a look over at Andre Michelle's site earlier this morning and saw a very impressive example of a 3D racing game in flash that really reminds me of Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo (Super Famicom for those of you in Japan). It is called fastfroots and is opened up for a 24 hour period for beta-testing and I would recommend you go check it out (user: guest, pass: racer). There are a couple of other implementations of a z-mapping racing engine done in flash: PercyPea (The original I...

Studiowhiz Redesign

Just took a little visit over to Studiowhiz to check out their redesign of the site and was very impressed. They have basically redone everything from the ground up, which can be a tremendous undertaking. They have also catered more towards standards-based design than IE-based design, which is always a good thing. Be sure to go check it out! via Pnut's Thoughts

Asteroids AI Ships

There's a new competition going on over at the Studio Whiz Forums that has some AI taste in it. The idea is to make an asteroids-like game except the enemy that you must thwart is computer controlled ships instead of asteroids (though there will be asteroids in the environment to avoid). There are two main portions that people can contribute on - the first is the player-controlled ship and the logic behind that. The second is the behaviors for the computer-controlled ship and it's logic to try...

Maze Automata

The maze-AI project is coming along nicely and I would highly recommend checking out the thread and reading through the current state of things. So far, I have maze generation working using Depth-First Search and Prim's algorithms, and might implement Kruskal's algorithm as well, depending on necessity. As it stands though, the two algorithms generate fairly different types of mazes for an automata to traverse. My examples are currently using a simple automaton that doesn't allow room for...

Maze-solving AI

Here's an interesting concept that sprung up on the Studio Whiz forums: Building some artifical intelligence agents to solve any given maze (I'm assuming any "perfect" maze - those which have only one solution). That in itself should be simple enough. But their idea is to take it further and ping-pong off each other, building the agent to be more intelligent, possibly even timing the different agents etc. Should be very interesting to see where it goes. If you can contribute or just want to...

Game Collectors

Heh, this is kinda amusing. I was looking in my referer logs and noticed a large number of hits to playgame.nl. So I went out there and noticed that it was one of those sites that collects games on their site. After a little looking around, I found that they were linking to my unfinished RPG engine that I have under my games section. You can view it on their site right here. The really amusing part is that according to the page it was on, the game ranking is 111. Given that the game is...

Macromedia Aggregator

Just noticed that I have been added to the Macromedia XML News Aggregator under the Flash section - awesome! I really like the look and feel of their aggregator - it's very clean and simple yet stylish, and I've been finding myself using the aggregator a lot lately to try and keep on things in the Flash world when I'm busy.

Collaborative Environments

Was just over visiting Marcos Weskamps blog and was reading about a nice little example of using screenWeaver with flashComm to create a desktop activity monitor. It's similar in concept to the "I'm currently listening to..." things you see on blogs and journals, but much more detailed and much cooler. It tracks what applications have what time being spent on them and what he's currently doing. The grand idea of this is to create a collaborative virtual environment for people working together...

Freaksauce Mention

Noticed I got a mention over on freaksauce about the langton's ant experiment and the redesign - thanks Jonathan! I also noticed that freaksauce has recently undergone a facelift as well, and like the new design. Go check it out...

We're Here is back

Well, it's a happy day in my neighborhood: The forums at We're Here are open for public beta as of today. It looks like a lot of the previous members of the community have been keeping tabs (like I have) and are already filtering back in, which is very nice to see. So go check it out already!

Long Time Coming - Redesign

Well, the site has had a bit of a facelift. Actually a lot of a facelift. I've tested it on current Windows versions of IE, Mozilla and Opera. If something isn't displaying correctly, please let me know along with a screenshot if possible. I have a single table now to define the columns and the rest is all CSS. I decided against a pure CSS-P / table-less design since it would have meant more code being shuffled down to the browser (hacks to account for browser differences - see Blue Robot...

Finally

Well, this last month has been nothing but work for me, and finally everyone can see why. I was working on getting the FINGERHUT up and running. It was pretty much non-stop work, cutting out everything but it is nice to see it up and running. It's cool to see something you've been working on to be featured in the news and paper, and it was neat to see people on the system the minute after we hit the "go live" button. Hopefully I can get some sleep and alcohol now, since I've been very...

We're Here is Back

After an period offline, it seems that the forums at We're Here are back online. I had been hanging out silently at the Waiting for Godot forums which were graciously put up by StinkFist as a refugee camp for lost were-here-ians. Even with were-here back up, a lot of work has been put into the twelvestone community in a short amount of time and will be on my preferred list of sites. Also, special thanks to Keith Peters (AKA Bit-101) for pointing me to the new place for us lost were-here...

Flash Remoting - PHP

Finally, flash remoting with PHP ('in a way' - according to it's author, Nik Khilnaani). Either way, it looks like some good work and I plan on checking it out and having a play session with it. I have not had a chance to play with any MacroMedia remoting stuff yet, and am kinda curious for feedback / info from those who have - so feel free to leave some comments. I wasn't familiar with Nik's work, though it looks like he's got some good work with integrating other technologies with...

Where is We're-Here?

Anyone know what's going on with www.were-here.com? It seems that my favorite flash community has dropped off the face of the earth. I sincerely hope that is not the case - please leave comments if you have any info! Also, if it seems like I've dropped off the face of the earth, I haven't. I just have a new job and have been putting in a ton of hours to get things up and running. But I will get back in the swing of things before too long :)

Runtime Revolution

OK. Now this looks interesting: Runtime Revolution. I'm very interested in downloading and evalutating this product, and I must admit that I have a little excitement over the possibilities and am hoping that it's not more bark than bite (dotNET, I'm looking in your bloated, over-hyped, non-cross-platform and uncaring direction). After browsing through their site though, I'm left wondering about one of the most important aspects of traditional application development: data. I see that there are...

Translation via Google

Added the little translation buttons up top as something for fun, which routes through the translation engine at Google. I've noticed a lot of visitors from other countries so that may or may not be useful - let me know. Also, I was considering using BabelFish from AltaVista since it supports more languages - I just wasn't sure I liked being forced to use their graphic. I'm also curious as to how well it translates. I speak a little bit of several other languages, but I don't consider myself...

IP Atlas Backend

OK, back to the IP Atlas thing. I figured out that I was still using the modification of the original example from netcaida for getting the information about an IP address, instead of the version that I had written (yeah, my powers of observation are simply amazing sometimes). Talk about wanting to kick myself. I had rewritten it myself using what I learned from it, then forgot to switch it over once I got my version working. I switched that over and fixed the bad entries that had gone into the...

Paying Attention

OK, it appears that I haven't really been paying attention lately. Please make note of the fact that I'm not surprised by this. I noticed last night that Guy Watson (aka FlashGuru) posted a nice little snippet on me on his site. Go check him out if you haven't already (the link is also available on the left) - he's always got some good info present. Thanks Guy! Also, if anyone is aware of any other links to the site (or puts some up for that matter), please let me know. Lately it...

Antagonism

Got a kick from this: Antagonism. Hit home because I just had a similar experience with my Win2k Server box at work - it went something like this: Me: Computer, why are you taking 52 minutes to boot? (No joke, actual time) Computer: Because I'm trying to communicate to machines I know won't talk to me. Me: Why are you doing that if you know they won't talk back? Computer: Because you told the firewall to let me. Me: But that doesn't make sense. Computer: Affirmative. Me: OK, let's...