sakri rosenstrom blog

Not in Brussels apparently?!

Luckily my son has a day off for some unrelated reason, so I figured I’d just walk to work and save the stress of traffic. I left at 8:30, and minutes into my walk it became apparent that THE WHOLE CITY had made the same decision! If you commute in Brussels by car, prepare to hallucinate :

This is a tunnel near the European commission… Normally a snail pace zone between 8:30 and 10:00.

Porte de Namur, a great place to get run over or watch road ragers scream at each other in a gridlocked roundabout :

Finally, my Pièce de résistance : Place Stephanie, DESERTED :

I could have made it to work in about 5 minutes?! The walk takes me 40. Oh well, exercise is good for my develpers gut, plus, I had a chance to disapprovingly eyeball all those disgusting polluters in their tincans on wheels

So, I was digging through some old papers and found this:

It’s some kind of a breathmint in the form of dissolving little papers. I bought this a a good 4 years ago because I thought the “flash strips” was funny, but apparently not funny enough to even photograph it. Now in the Flexy hott current times o’ today, the Eclipse part was sufficient to tip over into a useless blog post.

If you feel that you’ve been tricked into reading this or in any way cheated, here is a picture I took Saturday night:

It’s that little plastic bull you get from Sangre del Toro bottles, with a shadow looking like a gun. meh.

About a month ago I had the pleasure of representing nascom and participating in the second Belgian Adobe AIRCamp. Yes, the Summer event where 40 nerds travel to the beautiful nature and surroundings of Dinant, only to hide in a basement where frantic AIR hacking takes place for unhealthy durations of time…

After a random brainstorm, I teamed up with Jeroen de Vos from Amaris to create “Shifty Chess” (yes, that would be the two highlighted mugs in the pic). Behold the unmatched graphic design skills invested into the splash screen:

The idea is to shamelessly slack off at work, in plain sight of colleagues. The game generates a set of “folders” and “textfiles” (seemingly) on your desktop (using native OS icons for full shiftiness).

There is a faint checkerboard in the background. Each Folder and TextFile has the name of a corresponding chess piece. Note, these are not actual Folders and Textfiles, just replicas presented on the flash stage.

We used LiveCycle messaging for all server/client communication. The “lobby” consists of a real .txt file on the desktop called “lobby.txt”. The Air app updates this with a list of logged in players. To start a match, just open “lobby.txt”, select the name of your desired opponent, copy it into your clipboard and game is ON!

Sure, it can be a wee bit disorienting to look at a mess of folders and files, so there is a fake text file just below the checkerboard. If one just so happened to mouse over it, Tadaaaa :

The idea was that the game could be halted at anytime, and AIR would automatically connect users into their games on startup. We had some difficulties with Life Cycle messaging, and didn’t actually manage to get a running demo of two players getting Shifty…

However, the crowd liked it and we got second place after a techtribe and mediamonks.nl combo. As a consequence, my iPod got a little brother :

with the added touch of an engraving in the back :

Thanks Adobe, and thanks Serge and Bert !

ps. Big thanks also to Marc Meewis for staying up with us untill 4am just helping out with the livecycle issues!!!!

We took the kids to the Brussels Toy Museum last weekend. Good times, good times. On the second floor, I bumped into a toy which made me scramble for the curator(?). He didn’t tell me the date or country of origin, just mysteriously wrote down “akzente” on a PostIt note and said : “type this into the internet and you will find it immediately”.

I complied, now behold teh TETROMAX:

Now behold me ROCKING teh Tetromax:

(apologies for the miserable skills, and equally miserable attempt at whistling )

There I was, surrounded by all sorts of toys from the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, so I assumed the Tetromax is also a relic from times before…

After a frustrating google session, I found plenty of info about tetris , yet NOTHING about the history of Tetromax.

Did Alexey Pajitnov play Tetromax as a kid?! Or is Tetromax a copy of the video game?! One of the tetris concept links claims Alexey was really into Pentominoes, which is not surprising, what I’m curious about is who came up with the “falling geometric shapes”. The lack of info, it punishes my mojo .

In anycase, it’s neat.

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.

Turns out Akismet had been deactivated?!

wtf? How?

Then, somehow magically about 100 links were inserted at the end of my 360flex post. 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’.

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…