ricardocabellov5.5

I think Facebook should be able to do (much) better than this...

If you're reading this, you're already on the v5.5 of my site, which, for you, won't be much of a change as the design is more or less the same, but I've re-coded the whole site and blog sytem. Although it has taken more time than I thought it would have been even longer if it wasn't thanks to sole's (great) php framework symple. A "simple system" we (she) have (has) been working on for escena.org v3 and xplsv.tv v2 during the past few months.

Once thing you may like to know is that the comment feature is back. I haven't really done anything different, but we'll see how Akismet is doing these days. I also have a better admin panel for handling the comments this time tho.

And, as the last thing, once you're inside a post (not on the post list) you'll see a navigation on the right. This is something I've been looking to implement in the site for years, which I think is a quite handy way for browsing between posts and, at the same time, something I miss in all the blogs out there.

Oh, yeah, and I've also changed the profile picture ;)

Damn! Why didn't he created this one last week when I bought some of his t-shirts? Hahaha!

So, as soon as I heard about the idea behind the whole platform some years ago I was quite excited about it. But unfortunately, they haven't find the way to keep the variety of music up to my needs.

Is it just me or when using their radio service the tunes are always the same? Also, they need to find a way to sort out the artist duplication. Every time I listen to 'similar artists to Little Bitchard' radio, there is this hiphop/rap artist Vic (which shares the name of another demoscener) that keeps poping up and trashing my flow. I can't listen to any demoscener radio anymore.

So, after this break, I'm back to style focused internet radio stations once again.

On top of that, for a project I'm working on at work, we had a meeting with them to see if we could collaborate. Basically we needed them to provide us with a stream of music based on the user's taste for our website, we would credit them for that and promote them as best as we could, but they started to rise a lot of legal problems and shit, but it was easy to spot that it was all being bullshit talking. The only way they were offering us for collaborating was to have a section on their site, or having a popup in our clients site, you know, like in 1998.

I guess that's what happens when you have money ;)

Sorry, but you lost an opportunity there, and a user.

These Japanese are crazy... The last thing they've managed to do is to embed a Actionscript compiler right inside the browser. On top of that the site has basic community features where you can code your own snippets and remix other people's.

http://wonderfl.kayac.com/

Coding on that window is a bit tricky, but it was fun, somehow. I wonder how the project will end up.

I added some of my snippets on my profile:

http://wonderfl.kayac.com/user/mrdoob

http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

Is it me, or this one looks like a serious flash killer? (And I actually hate when people use that [product]killer word combination).

Seriously... Specially now that Actionscript 3 has become quite dev-only thing. If google can make this one work, I can only see trouble for Adobe.

EDIT: I'm pasting here a email I've sent to the internal Hi-ReS! list which extends a bit this post:

Basically, this is a double kick.

First to Microsoft for trying to compete with Flash player by copying the worst side of it (scripting language).

Second to flash, because the whole community is always complaining how bad optimised the player is and how slow it is still compared to OS based applications. You know, compare flash earth with... redbull earth.

This is just opening a door to all the C/C++ Graphic programmers out there to the web. Letting them use what they know (C/C++) to create application/experiences/experiments viewable from any browser. (As long as they have the plugin and/or use Google Chrome).

Processing uses Java, and people that weren't happy (with flash performance) moved to Processing/Java in order to have richer visuals on the web. Java hasn't really been doing well online, the applet is annoying most of the time and takes a lot of time to load (and shows a ugly loader). This even beats that.

It is, of course, not going to be a night/day change, but I think this has way too much potential if they handle it well. I still don't know if it's sofware-rendering only.

And hey! They have Quake already, and flash (publicly) doesn't!

Is not at all the effect I was trying to do, but it ended up quite decent too. I'll keep trying... Until then, enjoy the trip :D

Source file.

UPDATE: I've changed a bit the .as (and the .swf) so it checks if there is a webcam available. I guess I should update someday all the other examples...

Haha! Nicely done CBS!

Hopefully this post will be displayed properly some day... in some browser...

EDIT (Post firefox 3.5 release): Aparently if the file has the .ogv extension, it wont play on Firefox 3.5. Wasn't it that .ogg videos were going to be renamed to .ogv to avoid confusion? I just renamed the file to .ogg and... surprise! it works.

I've been trying to use Senocular's duplicateDisplayObject() for a while and I've experienced a lot of crashes of specific versions of Flash player and also unsuccessful results when used within an AIR application. After playing around quite a bit with all this, the best way I've found is to avoid duplicating the instance but duplicate the element on the domain/library instead.

I'm pasting here a snippet of how it works:

/*
 * node.@src example: file:///home/[username]/Desktop/[project]/files/assets/home/ball.swf
 * Cache.get() its basically a Dictionary where I store all the externally loaded files using the url as keys
 */

var mc : DisplayObject = Cache.get( node.@src );

var pathArray : Array = String( node.@src ).split( "/" );
var filename : String = String( pathArray[ pathArray.length - 1 ] ).split( "." )[0];  

if ( mc.loaderInfo.applicationDomain.hasDefinition( filename ))
	mc = new ( mc.loaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition( filename ))();

mc is now a clean duplication (as far as I know) of the original class. In my setup I expect the element that I want to be duplicated be named with the exact name as its container's filename (.swf), which is perfect for FlexSDK compiled stuff, but need some teaching for Flash IDE.

This is, of course, compatible with any kind of Object (not only MovieClips/Sprites/DisplayObjects)...