ricardocabellov5.5

... but still logging.

After writting the last post and reading all the feedback/comments on it, I decided that I had to stop doing that. Writting about my ideas and what I think is hard in the way that I have to spend a lot of time writting and rewritting in order to make my point clear. And even spending all that time It doesn't end up clear nough and I've to spend more time trying to explain it on the comments.

Right, that fact made me think that it just doesn't worth it. And also I'm starting to hate the blogging thing seriously. So, forget about more posts about myself, or about how do I think about something, forget about posts doing a report about an event, forget the joke prods, also forget about the posts with demoscene gossips, even the ones telling you about something cool... none of those!

This is not a blog anymore, this is a work log. I'll post about anything I do, anything I create, and I'll keep the 3 egos, in fact I'll create a new one with my real name, and I'll move all those -personal- posts that I don't want to keep doing to this new 'ego'.

I'm sorry if someone thinks is a bad idea, but I just don't feel doing that anymore... the human part of me says bye :) If you ever want to know something personal. just ask, you know how.

Nice post title, isn't it? ;)

Since a couple of years ago I had the opportunity of having very interesting chats with very experienced people. I guess that's how I educated myself (as I didn't go to uni). When I was 18/19 for example I used to hang around with God/Ozone which was the first person that illustrated me how things can be different and he encouraged me to think about everything, Now I think that I really owe him a lot of how I am. Unfortunately I've no idea of where he is now.

And yesterday I had another opportunity like that one as I went to 'drink a couple' with Simon Whittaker (which, along Kerry Harper, is running Spring Digital) to a new pub/japanese bar around Marylebone (which btw is absolutely brilliant!!).

So, yeah, we were mainly trying to think -out of the box- about the business, which actually is a bit hard to do sometimes as you need to concentrate too much if you want to be up-to-date, and one of the most interesting things he said was that nowadays there is that hype about 'accessibility', following standards and blahblah... It was no more than a couple of sentences, which I'll extend a little bit now.

There is a lot of people defending it and always thinking about it. One of the problems of 'accessibility' is that it usually goes back 10years, in a way that if you wanted to do a COOL website, you would say, ok, let's see what we can do with flash... oh wait! flash is not accessible, right, let's do it in HTML then... oh, but now we can't have those nice panels moving anymore. Oh well, but it's accessible! thousands of people would be able to access it! even from a washing machine!

Thousands of people? Do you think that thousands of people would like to see a boring website like this one? Ok, let's create an hypothetic case and put some numbers to make it more clear.

We have 100 possible users, 75 of them have flash. The comparison would be something like that:

Accessible website
100 possible users, however only 25 users went to the site and they didn't told to their friends because it was just plain, and well... just another site...

Flash website
75 possible users, 65  users went to the site because a friend of them told them it was so cool.

Now, you have to think that if you do an e-shop for a client. The client ONLY WANTS TO SELL MORE. And using the numbers from the example, it's probably more likely that the client will sell more with the flash website than with the accessible website. So, as you can see, the accessible site ends up being the less accessible site :D (for the client)

Do you want an example now? I'll tell you one which isn't even done with Flash! Here you have!

It's not accessible, but, who cares? It's doing the business it's supposed to do, and a clear example is that I'm sharing the link with you ;)

What a silly bug made me lose quite a bit of time!!!

Ok, If you were planing of doing a game controled by the keyboard for Flash player 8 you'll find a little BIG issue. Using this code:

var keyListener:Object = new Object();
keyListener.onKeyDown = function() {
    trace("PRESSED -> Code: "+Key.getCode()+" ASCII: "+Key.getAscii()+" Key: "+chr(Key.getAscii()));
};
keyListener.onKeyUp = function() {
    trace("RELEASED -> Code: "+Key.getCode()+" ASCII: "+Key.getAscii()+" Key: "+chr(Key.getAscii()));
};
Key.addListener(keyListener);

Then, if you doing this sequence:
1. Press DOWN  (40)
2. Press RIGHT (39)
3. Release RIGHT (30)
4. Release DOWN (40)

You'll get this result exporting to with Flash player 7:
PRESSED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:
PRESSED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:

However, with Flash player 8 player you'll get this:
PRESSED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:
PRESSED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:

As you can see, Flash player 8 forgets which Keys you pressed as soon as you press another one, but without releasing the previous ones. Which may cause that your ship goes down automaticly.

Well, atleast looks like they've fixed this issue already in Flash player 9.

Ok, good news! Ryg released a new version of kkapture (0.05). With this version you can now render the demo in segmented .AVI files, which fix the problem I found before that Quicktime wasn't able to load big files (2GB+).

Requirements:
+ kkapture 0.05
+ Quicktime 7.0 Pro

So the process is like this:

1. Using kkapture, render the demo using the encoder .AVI (VfW, segmented) with the frame rate of 30.00 and compressing to Full Frames (Uncompressed)



2. This will create a couple of .AVI files (depending of the length of the demo and screen resolution). Now it comes the silly part... Using quicktime player (pro) we open the first .avi (File / Open file), and then we move the cursor to go to the end of the time line, after that, we drag and drop the next file to that window. This will attach the new file to the end of the other video. We have to do that will all the different files.

3. File / Export... Once there, just select the quality, the Video size and everything. I usually customise a little bit based from the Broadband - High profile.

And there you go!

Here is an example of how the quality it will get:
xplsv_tokyo.mov - 640x400, 30fps, 24Mbytes!!

I usually don't attend to many festivals, meetings... I got the feeling that I should be working instead of listening or chatting, but some exceptions! Here is a list of some events i'll attend.

Netaudio (today)
http://www.netaudiolondon.cc/
That one was a funny one, I was on my Spring's leaving party when a guy was giving us flyers about it. A festival about netlabels? That's up my street ;)

London Flash Platform User Group (28th September)
http://www.lfpug.com/28th-september-2006-28092006/
Following sole's great idea of attending user group meetings, I'll see how this one goes.

Sundown 2006 (6th-8th October)
http://www.sundowndemoparty.org/
The BEST DEMOPARTY in UK! (And the only one :D) Last year I tried to attend but I had to do a move offices at Spring the same weekend. Oh, a shame... (Also the train tickets were ridiculous). Not sure if I'll have time/inspiration for doing a demo for it. I'll do my best!

So, expect a review for all of them :D

Hehehe, this thingie end up being quite fun! Didn't expected it to be that dificult for everyone!!

The GIF format was the shit years ago. 256 colours (8bits)! You could do a lot with that!! But, all of these 256 could be exactly the same colour, you can customise the palette however you want, in fact, with good old programs you could even move the colours in the palette. Quite a lot of games used the trick of using the first colour in the palette as transparent colour, so the graphician had to setuop the palette of the graphic like that.

The trick was that 2 colours (even 3) where black (I added a transparent one because a "bug" with irfanview). In order to show the text, you have to change one of those colours to any other colour :D That trick was very used by graphicians long time ago, they used to add hidden text (greetings to other graphicians) in the empty parts of their graphics. Isn't it cool?!

Here you have the steps:



Select the first colour:



Change it to white, and that's it!



Now you should see this:



Here you have a bunch of cool pics that use this trick.

I sent an email (by mistake, as I was going to do it on Friday) to the Spring designers with this image, well, it was actually a file called "byebye", without extension. So they had to figure out that it was a GIF, then they had to learn a bit about the format and find the text inside it and ready it. It's a message for them. One of them saw the text but was because a Irfanview bug (?). I've amended the image so irfanview doesn't show it. By now, nobody was able to read the text, even the Dev guys :/



I guess some of the readers of this blog already know what it is, as it's an old pixelling scene trick :D

Let's face it! do you think that there is any REAL improvement? Is still the same window-based enviroment, with the same Start button, single and static desktop. Evolution? Where?!

Can you believe there are almost 15 years of difference between the screenshot above and the screenshot below?



Let's talk about real evolution!

Today Madgoblin sent me a link to a video of Luis Von Ahn Speech at Google engEDU. The speech is quite interesting, it shows how sometimes you can solve big technical problems using bored humans minds (which there are billions!). He explains the concept of all of his games: ESP game, PeekaBoom, ... And hey, what a clever guy! Now I can't stop my mind trying to see how to apply this concept to other areas.

Also, looks like Google liked the concept and 'ripped' the ESP game for his brand new Google Image Labeler.

Hmm...