ricardocabellov5.5

I hate when I see things like this:




Who is lying? The FWA or Alexa?

When my mr.doob site got featured I was quite proud, but since then, I started to take a look on which other sites got featured, and dude, a lot of the stuff that gets featured has nothing special at all (Here I tried not to say 'rotten crap').

Why non-special sites get featured? There may be 2 reasons... 1) Money. 2) Trying to have a SOTD every day, I'll bet it's the first... Either way, you have to think that, after all, this is just a guy earning money thanks to the design community, making them think that doing shitty web campaigns for coca cola will turn you in a better designer/developer, will get you featured.

This is why I always try to stay away of money/advertising on xplsv.tv, money distorts your criteria, which distorts your site, and distorts your users (the ones that doesn't leave).

Well, this is just my humble (randomly written) opinion anyway.

EDIT: After a bit more of thinking about the whole issue, I think it's just a matter of FWA (and most of design websites) not being able to follow the pace of internet users adoption. So both stats are likely to be true. But Alexa reflects more the reality of a site compared to the rest of the internet.

So, maybe it's time to improve FWA so it keep up with the pace of the internet, or maybe it's time to give up and sell ;)

More audio visualisers! Yeey!

Early December last year Marcelo invited me to join his Omega Code project where lots a visual artist were going to create a illustration/poster for each of the track on the band's first album.

My take on the project would be creating a visualiser for the website. Although at first I planned to create a tool to get some curves to match each track (which is something I want to do this year) I ended up running out of time and had to go back on trying to get the best out of the FFT.

On top of that, ever since the first time Ithaqua quickly explained on a random forum (spanish) his way of animating octopus-ish meshes in 3D I always wanted to implement it and this time, and as most of the posters were quite circular, this seemed to be a good opportunity.

If you're wondering how have it's done here it's a quick explanation. Imagine having 20 spheres each one slightly bigger than the previous one; all of the centred. Now hide them and draw lines from each point in between each sphere. That would be a line from the point 0 of the sphere 0 to the point 0 of the sphere 1 and so on. You'll end up with a hair ball. Unfortunatelly, the drawing API of flash is a bit slow and it will be a hair ball of 20 or so hairs. From there you should be able to guess the rest :)



Once the effect was done, it was a matter of spending a lot of hours tweaking parameters, testing with different tunes, and finally quickly integrating it with the website interface developed by scarpelini.

I hope you find the end result as mesmerising as I do :)

Since the last post about Wonderfl I've added a couple of new snippets. Some of them are forks of old effects and some others are effects I had somewhere on my HD.















Enjoy the sources! ;)

I was meaning to write a post about this anime last month, but I found a guy on the internet that pretty much shared my thoughts about it. So I'll be lazy and save my fingers this time:

First thoughts
Man, this is the best episode by far!
Painful second half and conclusion

On top of that, I should mention the quality of the animation cos (comparing it now with GITS SAC) it's really fluid. And also I should empathise his Augmented reality point.

Here it's the torrent you need.

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!