sakri rosenstrom blog

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…

Yesterday Den Ivanov posted a png extruder class at the papervision3d mailing list.

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).

<edit>

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, and probably will for a long time, heard this every time I spark up flex lately

(oh and, I seem to have fuXored my flash embed, so just click the link j00 lazy bastaaahdz)

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’.

See you there

…well, not really…

As a devout believer in the temple of RSS, I saw the papervision blog entry : 25 Cool Things to Do with Papervision3D way back in December. Three weeks later I now realize the Pioneer Kuro project I worked on was featured!

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

The mindblowing beyond LOBOTOMY Aliased 3d text toy

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”.

I’ve been wanting to do this for ages… Matter of fact, this was meant to be my “end of the year” post for 2007, but you know…

So, same old trick descending my sleeve. Create text, grab BitmapData from it, loop though its pixels and represent them with DisplayObjects.

Again, the ‘trick’ is to check which pixels are transparent. An interesting quality of Anti-Aliased text is that the “rounded” or “Anti-Aliased” pixels are the color of the text, except with varying transparency, meaning the text looks good on any color background.

I took advantage of this by generating “thicker” rows in the Z plane for darker pixels… Hard to explain in words, but let’s allow the screenshots and the app speak for themselves.

Click here to fiddle with my toy…

click here, or right click app for source

Naturally, the number of Planes makes it more or less impossible to animate the camera with an EnterFrame or so… It’s still cool to see the camera move around using direction keys. Perhaps with Seb Lee-Delisle’s frame by frame movie generator thingy-ma-bob…

Oh yeah, you’ll probably need a decent screen resolution for this… I didn’t bother optimize, for those screen challenged readers, I apologize.

Technorati Profile

Meh, all the cool kids are doing it.

ok, if you feel ripped off by this post, here’s one of the two seafood trays consumed at my place on new years:

Happy belated new year!

Enough buzzwords for you? I wanted to use BlazeDS, but the buzzword overlords were not that kind with me Just good ol’ E4X.

Two years ago we (nascom) made the same thing for club vaio. Unfortunately the old version is gone . It was as2 and some “custom 3d” (lol). Customized snowflakes has been done before by others (can’t find links), Seb Lee Delisle made a more realistic snowfall a few weeks back (thumbsup), but this project still has it’s merits The project was sold, with the premise of reskinning the old app, but it quickly became apparent that rebuilding from scratch using a more modern approach would be faster. (How things change in just two years!? ) Using Flex and Cairngorm made the development extremely rapid and enjoyable. I spent 6-7 working days on this. I was encouraged to go for papervision (and tweener) by Lee Brimelow’s papervision3d experiments, mainly I was impressed with how he could achieve such a nice effect with so little code.

Anyway, here’s the screenshots :



Snow fall, I have a basic ‘random wind engine’ using tweener. I set the max number of flakes to 25… on crappier machines more meant creeping slow death.



I’m quite happy with the “random floating” of the detail flakes…

That’s supposed to be my favicon smiley d00d… quite the artist I am…

Behold, The Hercules-Trophy Snowflakes greeting app!

deep link directly to the flake pictured above

Ok, Holidays start here. Happy holidays, more exciting blogging in 2008!