ricardocabellov5.5

At least not here. I had a similar problem before they released the AirPort Extreme Update 2007-001. For some reason it doesn't let me connect to my WPA wireless network.

I would say it's a problem of AirPort Extreme Update 2007-002 cos it also did the Mac OS X Update (Intel) (10.4.9)...

Whoever dos the updates in Apple isn't doing a good job :_(

Pheeew! It took a while... but looks like I've finally done the base of it. If you don't know what I'm talking about.. phodoob is how I named my photo gallery system. I did the first version 2 years ago more or less, and since then I always wanted to recode it and improve it, so it could run faster, smoother...

While I was on it I also fixed the zoom algorithm (which wasn't working really well on the previous version) and also I added some fancy animations to the rollOver / rollOuts...

I've a lot of plans for this but I can't say too much yet  :P By now, you can enjoy the pics from Reykjavik! :)

EDIT: If you feel like you want the pictures in a table, here its a link for you... and no, the keyboardnavigation doesn't work yet :P

Months ago everyone was speaking about Wii. Wii was everywere, everyone was hacking it, a lot of videos of people using it. I even thought it was the best idea of the year. But now, it looks like it was released 5 years ago. Everything has a BOOM, but I didn't expected to be like that. Does anyone still speaks about it? What was the problem? Too childish games?

Now is time to see what Spiderm... sorry, Playstation 3 have to say about all this, and maybe its because they sell it very well, but seems that they're also doing something really cool. Although I don't think I'll buy it, in the same way I didn't want to buy the Wii, and I didn't.

Sorry, I had to do it!

Yey, seems like some of the last websites I was working in Spring are finally live. After that much time I'm not that keen on the designs anymore tho :S

The one that took us more time to do was 40 Savile Row. Something like 1 year for doing it, and this is because it had a section were you are able to customise your own shirt and you even had some fancy pieces of flash to explain from where to where is each measure. I believe the one that did the best work here was david with the dev part.

Another one is Coolthermal, tho for this one I mainly se the style/design doing the homepage. Mike finished it.

Mike was also the designer of Darley Kids, and I think he did one of his best works here. For this one I did the flash games. All about horses, Jockey colours, Quiz and Word search (this one took me a while to figure out the maths for it). I also did the score system and the security of it (which is a bit hopeless when dealing with flash).

And the last one is Cardpoint. Again, one of those longterm projects that never ends :) It ended up a bit too empty maybe...

So, with these one I will probably have done 1000 websites already. Nah, just kidding, but, checking the portfolio I've actually done a lot being at Spring. Here are some:

Rolf Harris, Stargazer, I.T. lab, RS Scan, Wesmon Press, Odyssey Consulting (flash piece), Beaumont Legal, Border Energy, GSL, 4NX (flash piece), Partnerships in Care, Halo Financial, Epico, TechMondial, Best Deal, DBD Media, Isis, Faith Fantastic, Ethical Network, Financial Objects, Corpora Software (flash piece), ICH (build), Olive solutions (logo, flash pieces),  CIC (design+dev), Nasda (fancy flash map :D), and many more....

Phewww!

I was checking Hamad Darwish Flickr profile, the guy that did the pictures that now Microsoft is using as Desktop images with Vista, and I noticed a lot of contrasting and retouching on the pictures. And it was funny that in some comments the people was commenting that it was ovbious how professional he was. Don't get me wrong, there are nice bits on these photos but I don't think that getting nice colours makes you a great photographer.

If you don't think the same, then here its a quite basic tutorial so you can be a great photographer too :)

Here is a picture I took one week ago in Iceland. I used a small and handy (and now old) camera and, as you can see, the place was well nice, the picture looks cool, but it doesn't give you a 'professional' impression.



Now, compare it with this, probably as a picture, is not well positioned, but the colours are great now, aren't they?



So, if you're wonder how did I do that... Here is a quick step by step process for doing it. I used Photoshop, but you can use any soft,

Lets duplicate the background layer and get rid of the colours with Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. This is not the best way to get proper greyscale of a picture, but that will do by now. Then change the blending mode of that layer to Overlay. What you have now is what a lot of people use for CDs, mainly for Hiphop covers and stuff, it would probably need a bit of sharpen tho. Anyway, the colours are still not cool enough. Lets duplicate the layer again, and then contrast it a bit with Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation... and put the Saturation to +50. Done.

The Layers panel should look something like this:


You can delete the Background layer if you want tho. Some people will may think that using the Brightness/Contrast will get you the same result. Well, it will certainly give you a similar look ,but will kill some colours and info of the pic. This method lets you have more control of the level of contrast that you want, and also the level of blacks and whites.

So, now we are professional photographers!! \o/

I was checking some days ago a project from a friend of mine, and apart from the app itself, I was quite impressed with the nice fades and slides of texts. So I obviously had to do research about how did he do that.

The answer was jQuery, and oh man, what an answer! :) As everything, it still have some bugs with the heights of some elements for doing the effects, but the way of selecting elements its too good to don't use it for every project that needs some .js

I've used it a bit of the work log, so the page now looks a bit clean and light, and if you want to read an article you click on the title (which by the way, uses sIFR 3 :D) and then it will expand the body.

I'll probably use innerDiv for the portfolio items soon. What a .js site! wasn't I supposed to be a flash guy? :)

Finally reaching the 6th month mark. Seems that is going well.

I still have to get better on delivery times, but I think i'm good enough dealing with clients, answering emails and stuff.

There is some stuff you would need if you want to go freelance. The first one, I called it Econodoob ;) and its money/invoice/time tracker. I just implemented the time tracker today. So you submit the amount+time spent, and having all the info then you only need to do some nice Graphs. I'm afraid I don't think is a good idea to share those graphs, but I've done something like..

Cashflow (real)
Cashflow (theoric)
Time spent
Invoice value (input)
Bills value (output)

Yeah, it's cashflow because I include the bills I've to pay to see what goes in and out. If you want to make sure that the 'business' is going well, you need that kind of visibility. And to be honest, doing a tool with PHP to record/track/report all that info is a matter of 1day of work. Isn't it cool to have the knowledge to develop your own little apps so you don't depend of other BIG apps that you will use only a 1% of them?

The other thing you will probably need to do is to move to an office. Working a home gets very annoying at some point. You need some place, some environment that makes you think: "Right, I'm at work, I should be working now". Right now, I watch a movie if I feel like, it's too easy to get distracted.

So the idea is renting a desk in an office, so I would end up sharing the office with other people, freelancers, companies... By now, the best place I've found to look at is at the gumtree. I should be going tomorrow Friday to watch a nice one, see how it goes

We didn't have time to learn enough about this country yet, but we have seen that they have in some maps ghost symbols to consider the zone doomed or something like that. This place is weird and small. Very small.

And to show the ghosty thing, all the pictures we've done today got lost when I connected the camera to my laptop :O It formatted itself somehow! Well annoying because apart from some pretty cool pictures I did a video of the plane landing, the terrain with snow was simply great, and the video was superb. But somehow, all lost.

Weird

I'll declare myself Mr.Tutorial!

For the ones that doesn't have too much time and need to understand what's going on, this tutorial explains how to do this:



(This tutorial isn't just for Papervision3D, you can use it with any other 3D engine).

The point is that when you approach a realtime 3Dengine the best way to achieve good results is to think about how to use the resources you have. Papervision3D still doesn't have illumination, but it can render polygons with textures. So, why don't we render the illumination to the texture with our 3D package? This is exactly what I thought when I did this, this and this.

I'm afraid I've no idea of how to do this thing with any other package, but at least you will get the idea.

Ok, let's start...

Open 3D Studio MAX and all that, I believe the Render to Texture feature is there since the version 5 or 6... (I'm using 8).

Then we create a Torus and a Plane.



And we do an scene similar to this one:



The under the Lights tab we select the Skylight... er.. light, and with check the Cast shadows checkbox. The rays per sample parameter is the quality, if your machine is slow, put it to 5 or 10 just for testing, I usually do the tests with 5, and then when I go to do the render to texture I put it up to 30.



I'm don't thing the position of the light really matters, this is not one of those lights that you need to focus on something, just put it anywhere.



Half of the work done! If we do a Render right now, It should look like this:



Now, sometimes the 3D object we want to render the texture from is quite complex, so we need to Unwrap the mesh to a plane so we make things easier to the render to texture thing. (You'll understand what I mean in a sec). So, under the Modifiers tab, we select the Unwrap UVW from the Modifier List. And then we click on Edit.



A new window will appear with the mesh on a plane in wireframe. First we click on the 3rd option of the Selection Modes, and then We go to Mapping/Flatten Mapping.



On the new window that will appear we put the Spacing to 0.0 and we click OK, this will explode your mesh to the best (not always) way so the Render to Texture can put as much information as possible into the texture.



The end result should look something similar to this:



We close the window, and then with the Torus object stil selected we go to Rendering/Render To Texture.



On the new window, we scroll down to the Output part and we click on Add... to add a new texture you want to bake. This will prompt another window where we have to select CompleteMap.



If we scroll down that panel a bit, we will see the options for the final texture. If you want to save the texture in a different path, well... feel free. I usually do the renders to 1024, and in case isn't it can be reduced then I reduce them to 512 with Photoshop.

As the last thing, If you don't want MAX to change the texture of the Torus with the backed one, I recommend you to check the Render To Files only checkbox.



We click on Render and after we'll end up with a texture similar to this:



And that's all, I'm afraid I won't go into the part of doing the code with Papervision3D for loading all this, but I'm sure you know how to use this texture now ;)

Hope this is useful for someone