We took the kids to the Brussels Toy Museum last weekend. Good times, good times. On the second floor, I bumped into a toy which made me scramble for the curator(?). He didn’t tell me the date or country of origin, just mysteriously wrote down “akzente” on a PostIt note and said : “type this into the internet and you will find it immediately”.
(apologies for the miserable skills, and equally miserable attempt at whistling )
There I was, surrounded by all sorts of toys from the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, so I assumed the Tetromax is also a relic from times before…
After a frustrating google session, I found plenty ofinfo abouttetris , yet NOTHING about the history of Tetromax.
Did Alexey Pajitnov play Tetromax as a kid?! Or is Tetromax a copy of the video game?! One of the tetris concept links claims Alexey was really into Pentominoes, which is not surprising, what I’m curious about is who came up with the “falling geometric shapes”. The lack of info, it punishes my mojo .
I’m really happy with how this project turned out. Enough time and budget to keep the code clean, Even enough to spend on the design details I actually had dinner with the wife and kids a few times during the week . The only regret I have is not going for fullscreen, performance is fine (on my machine anyways ). Maybe we’ll do an update when papervision3d rolls out with a flashplayer 10 release.
For the full story, read my entry from the nascom blog :
I’m posting this because I’ve wasted several hours pulling my hair out, frantically searching, and finding nothing. Maybe my search terms suck, but anyone with the same problem (with the as3 cs3 FLVplayback component, and lack of search skills), here is the solution:
Do not use multiple instances of FLVPlayback. It’s that simple. I had a class with a protected var _video:FLVPlayback; I would instantiate this class over and over again, play a video, and add a good 1-6 megs into ram everytime! Not so good… So, I changed that code to:
protected static var _video:FLVPlayback;
…and I was almost there. The FLVPlayback only keeps one video in ram (who’da thought?! ). One important thing to keep in mind is that when attempting to play the same video twice in a row, the VideoEvent.READY doesn’t fire. So, just skip any “preparatory code” and go straight to playing the video. Just keep the current video path in a variable, and check against that every time you try to load a new one.
Thursday morning, just as I was about to press “publish”, my swisscom *cough*RIPOFF*cough* connection CUT OFF. So, one day late, my highlights:
Sunday
Step off the plane, get immediately ripped off by some dodgy taxi, good start! (When I say ripped off, I mean an expensive, yet scenic drive through Milan instead of the 5 minutes it took me on my way back )
Arrive at hotel just after dinner was finished, but in time to meet the organizers and some of the guys. I think the ‘open mood’ for discussion (which prevailed the entire conference) kicked off here.
Played a game of pool at the hotel bar… The Finnish/French alliance (Cyril and I) pretty much pwned and humiliated the Flemish/Italian one (Koen and Marco ) Good Times
Monday
After the keynote I saw Michael Labriolas “Dense and Hot: An Introduction to your applications start up”. I had read some rave reviews about his presentation in Atlanta, and the session (to be honest) did get me quite Dense and HOTT . I’d say it was the most entertaining presentation of the entire conference, but also amongst the most informative. Michael put some fairly complex ideas into easily digestible slides… thumbsup!
I also saw Marco and his Colleague Mattia give a talk about the combination of Flex and Ajax. Ajax isn’t really my cup of tea, but connecting to the html/js side of things is necessary from time to time. I found this a useful and well prepared session.
Following the sessions, I spent the rest of the day in my hotel room, polishing up my own presentation. And when I say polishing up my own presentation I mean working on one ridiculous example…
Tuesday
My own presentation. I was quite happy with what I had prepared, I had already test driven it once at nascom. What I wasn’t ready for was the 600×400 resolution on the beamer With awaiting eyes on me, live, I actually edited y positions of display objects to make my examples somewhat intelligible. This kind of screwed my flow, but I got some positive feedback later on so I guess I managed… like I said, anyone can deliver slides, it takes a REAL MAN to jump back and forth from Powerpoint to Flexbuilder, and actually do some coding in between :D. Thanks cyril for the photo (above)
If I felt bad about my troubles, such feelings quickly vanished while enjoying Neil Webbs Cairngorm presentation. Neil had no technical difficulties. As a matter of fact his presentation was quite brilliant, and very very funny, only, it seemed I was the only one laughing at his jokes Truly, I’ve never seen such good humor fall on deaf ears… cultural differences I suppose
Tuesday night was well spent at the hotel lobby. They stopped serving drinks, but the conversation flowed… I don’t think I’ll ever forget Tomislav Pokrajcic and his “Croatian Saying”
Wednesday
I was disappointed by the cancellation of Ivan “the Mars Spider” Zambanellos presentation. With a name like “Mars Spider”, who wouldn’t be disappointed? This was easily made up for by Rostislav Hristovs presentation about SWFAddress. I will certainly be looking at SWFAddress and his examples again, particularly the wordpress example. And, thanks for the T-Shirt!!!
In the afternoon I checked out Christo Jolif talking about the ILOG Elixir components. It was very nice to see him do some live coding. The products are rock solid. A little expensive. But rock solid.
Dan Thomas was The final speaker of the conference… This turned out to be a fantastic presentation. It started off with Dan just listing “best practices”. I’m not sure if it was 100% intentional, but the presentation turned into a kind of an open forum, lead and moderated by Dan. Lots of great input from Neil, Robin, Michael and Sam
As promised, my slides and examples can be downloaded from here (warning, 16 megs, apologies for not optimizing my ppt images).
HUUUUUUUUGE thanks to both John and Tom, you guys ROCK!!!
All in all, I learned a lot, made a lot of new contacts and I hope to see all of you again at random occasions at random locations
If you’ve visited sakri.net/blog in the past month or so, you may have noticed some weirdness… Disappearing posts mainly, posts with commenting off, inquisitive guests may even have witnessed a long list of spam links in the source
At first I thought the ‘incredible disappearing post’ was just a human error (me editing spelling mistakes and accidentally deleting an entire post). The second time around, with no edits, I figured something was wrong. That, accompanied by a sudden barrage of spam comment candidates appearing in my inbox. :mad:
Turns out Akismet had been deactivated.
wtf? How?
Then, somehow magically about 100 links were inserted at the end of my 360flex post. Again, wtf? how? I checked phpmyadmin to find a few extra posts, with some very random content.
So, I updated wordpress, and changed my password. Let’s see if this post will also join the ranks of ‘incredible disappearing posts’. (I now save backups )
As a most disturbing afternote, my domineering position at the top of google search for the term “sakri” has been overtaken by the wikipedia entry on sakri (apparently the New York City of India) and some social networking site called batchmates?! Do not underestimate the fierce battles that rage for this top ranking position and the endless bounty that is to be had by the victor. I’m 100% certain my demise was caused by the list of spam links… not to worry… like Aaaahnold, I’ll be baaack… I have a sneaking suspicion about the identity of this hacker… look out wikipedia and batchmates, I’m onto you!!!!
UPDATE: AAARRRGGGHHHH…. so, no links to man medicine, but posts they still are a disappearin’…. WTF?!!! Is there a cron job inserted into my WP that removes my latest post once a week? What have I done to deserve this? Does FSM delete my posts with his noodly appendages?! (which would be an honor). Wordpress 2.5, here I come…
So, within an hour or so I had an experiment with BitmapData grabbed from a textfield rotating around in extruded 3d
Nope, still not even as good as the oldschool windows 3dtext screensaver (the barometer for all that is cool in this world). Certainly not for production (unless you happen to have a deep rooted fetish for EXTREMELY pixelated extruded rotating 3d text), yet, more 1337 than my previous attempt .
Behold:
what’s that? 360Flex Milan ?? You know you wanna register and see me there!!! (along with some AMAZING speakers).
I get back from snowboarding to find out this post just disappeared?! Did I save an edit and delete the contents? wtf? No wonder there were no comments
Here is what I remember of it… oh, and while I’m at it, how is it that comments are blocked in the 360 flex post?!!!!
</edit>
THE FLEX ANTHEM… Have patience till about 30 seconds or so into the song for the MAGICAL chorus to KICK IN
(safe for work unless you work at the vatican)
I have heard (and prolly will for a while), this every time I spark up flex lately
I’ve been listed on the homepage for a while now, I finally penned the “blurb” to my presentation which is :
Invalidation Routines, Pounded into your cranium once and for all!
The Flex Framework Invalidation Routines are a core tool in a visual component authors kit. This is a relatively small topic, yet, one often skimmed through, frequently misunderstood, or worse, entirely ignored. This presentation will go through the basics in a comprehensive manner, then dig deeper into the details and follow up with several real world examples, with an underlying emphasis on the common battles between designers and developers. The goals are to appreciate the mechanism, how and when to use it, and furthermore to understand where things can go wrong. “Invalidation Routines, Pounded into your cranium once and for all!” is targeted at developers dealing with visual components, from entry to mid level, but will hopefully also contain some gems for the seasoned veteran.
I have to say I’m really looking forwards to this! The topic might sound a little dry (what flex topics don’t? ), but I’ve already got a bunch of ideas to liven it up and hopefully produce a memorable presentation. The reason I picked the topic is simple: Flex has people coming from the developer world and from the flash world, the invalidation routines are alien to both It’s not rocket science, but a ‘must know’.
Sadly, I did pretty much none of the 3d work (which is the sole reason it’s featured), that credit goes to Patrick Pietens. He created the cube, I implemented it into the Flex app. Still, it was quite a piece of effort, orchestrating the loadings, transitions from papervision to rendered 3d flv movies, to the actual sections of the site. This was a thesedays project designed by Valentijn Destoop, I was outsourced from nascom to do the actionscripting.
apparently the site even received 3rd place at the “uber flash awards”! This is some german initiative… Big time, HUGE…must be… only, I can’t even google a link to it (news from Patricks blog, which is only readable through rss). (btw, Patrick, if you happen to read this, thanks for the kind comments on your blog Was a pleasure to work with you!)
UPDATE: Apparently the .swf was missing… it’s there now. I realize many of you spent sleepless nights shredding your nails with ye sharp fangs. Crisis is now over.
This is actually the first experiment I wanted to do, but I got too excited about the anti-aliased one. Not much to talk about here, just runs through the pixels and represents them as Cube instances. This time I used Tweener for the possibility of “auto animating” Reminds me of that crappy windows 3d text screensaver, except, I don’t have shading… Hopefully I’ll build the courage to install great white soon… Maybe I could be like the cool kids and add fire to it too
There is some ‘flickering’ going on between the individual Cubes. If time permits, I’d like to optimize this to combine as many Cubes into “stretched” cubes as possible. I’ve got a bunch of ideas stemming from these two experiments, hopefully I’ll be blogging a plenty
Oh yeah, the code is shite, experiment stylee… the useful bits should be easy enough to extract. Just right click view source, then select “TextPixelsToCubes.mxml”.
)
.
Woot! 
I actually had dinner with the wife and kids a few times during the week 
. The only regret I have is not going for fullscreen, performance is fine (on my machine anyways 
. 
). One important thing to keep in mind is that when attempting to play the same video twice in a row, the VideoEvent.READY doesn’t fire. So, just skip any “preparatory code” and go straight to playing the video. Just keep the current video path in a variable, and check against that every time you try to load a new one.
Good Times 
