Your Words Travel the World Thursday 2007-01-11
By automatic syndication and by your loyal subscribing readers, the words you write, will travel far and wide. And fast! They may meet and influence people of different age and sex and from different cultures. Manuel Amador of weblog tools collection has written an interesting essay, “The wonderful journey of a blog post“, on this very subject.
It is humbling, and it makes you think ( again ), on your own blogging efforts. Is what I write about interesting enough? Would anything of it offend someone? In short, do I care about my readers enough?
Well, I promise to try. For now, I’ll say no more. Read the article and get amazed!
Yet Another Sandy Celebration Monday 2006-12-04
Yes, it’s celebration season. Not only because it is December. Here in Sweden it’s hard to believe, by the way. The temperature is well above zero, that’s centigrade or Celsius, as we use to say 
The grass is green and my mothers roses are still developing flowers.
The long awaited 1.2 version of the Sandy 3D library was launched as a public beta today ( oh, it’s late, it was already yesterday ). Lots of enhancements and bug fixes from 1.1. exciting stuff if you’re into 3D Flash programming.
You can get it here at the Sandy Forum, and don’t forget to fetch the examples too.
Sandy Tutorial Celebration Friday 2006-12-01
I’m quite happy to announce the 7:th Part Celebration of the “Using Sandy…” tutorial.
Hey, you might say, what’s so good about seven? You’re right, it may be premature. Maybe I should wait for the tenth part. On the other hand why not seven. It may seem odd, and mathematically it is.
On the other hand, seven is a magic number and deserves a little celebration. Another good reason is that I don’t know what next to write about. It may be how to use the free MTASC SWF ActionScript compiler or maybe how to use light and filters in Sandy.
Another cause for celebration is that Davide Beltrame ( whom I don’t link to yet, because his site is under construction ) has translated, or rather transposed, the tutorial into the Italian language and mode. Soon to be published. This is exciting indeed, and I’m just a little bit proud.
More on the proceedings later, and kÅ·dos to Thomas, the author of the library and Davide, my hard working translator! You know it takes a lot more words to say something in Italian, and I am wordy to start with.
You can visit my tutorial here.
The Duke of Java is Finally Free Monday 2006-11-13
As rumors buzzed as flies for the last couple of months, Sun has finally announced that it releases its Java implementation under the GNU GPLv2 license.
The Duke is free, free at last. But what does it all mean?
For a long time during the first successful years of Java, many developers urged SUN to submit Java to one or the other of the standards bodies of the world. The intention was to make sure that Java, the platform wouldn’t crash into the non standards diversity, that would make it unusable. But SUN stood firm and demanded that all additions to the platform, and all its implementations should follow the “pure Java” standards set out by SUN.
Microsoft, who licensed Java from SUN, wanted Java to be seen as just another programming language, and made additions to it, that it thought was missing. They did this in violation of the license and after a long legal battle had to pay dearly.
As Java has developed and matured over the years, many Java experts has grown comfortable with SUN:s firm grip on the language and the platform, and have come to believe, this is the way for Java to survive .
So what now? What will happen when Java is GPL’d ? Will it turn as wild as JavaScript or CSS and other web technologies, with a plethora of small differences between implementation, that will drive developers nuts ?
Read this ZDNet article by Martin LaMonica, for more!
Edit Your Photos Online
One of the characteristics of the Web 2.0 era, is the fast emergence of net top applications. Making good on the old SUN slogan, “The Net it the computer”, these applications run on some server anywhere on the globe, and only its user interface shows up on the client machine. No need for installation and immediate access from any personal computer or workstation.
One of the more nifty net top applications I’ve run across lately is the pixer.us On Line Photo editor.
It works like this: You upload an image to the server through their client GUI, and when it shows up, you can start editing away to your hearts content. You may crop and resize your image, and you can adjust its color balance, contrast and lightness. You can make it B&W if you like, and you can apply some artistic filtering to make it look like marble or an oil painting.
You can undo your last change or revert to the original, if you do mistakes. Once you are satisfied with your changes, you click the Save button and download the resulting image. You can choose the image format by clicking a button for JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP.
The application GUI is beautiful and very intuitive, so the learning is shot to none. Before you join pixer.us, you can work with a test image. Go ahead and test the pixar.us Online Photo Editor. I had great fun testing the application. From the test image I cropped out one of the girls, saturated the colors a bit and applied the oil painting filter.
The original photo
WordPress Updated Sunday 2006-10-29
In the anticipation of the 2.1 version of WordPress, here comes the bug fixed and polished 2.05 version.
If you don’t use the WordPress blogging tool, you should just download this version and follow the install instructions.
Chances are, that you already run the 2.04 version, and in that case you’ll get away cheep Mark on WordPress has put together a page with a Changed Files List, and what’s even brighter, he have made a diff file, containing all files that has changed since 2.04. You can download it in a ZIP archive from the same page, and just upload them to your old installation. You should the run the update script to get everything running again. If you don’t however, you will be reminded and offered an update link. Just click and you’re on the air again!
Really nice job Mark!
Using Sandy 3D Flash Library Thursday 2006-09-21
I was always very excited about 3D images, and the possibility of creating my own. I’ve been involved in holography in the physics lab at the University of Linköping, and written small C programs to present rotating 3D objects. When the Internet and the web hit me in the mid 90’s, I started to hand code or draw WRML worlds with a plethora of authoring tools, from Notepad to Caligari True Space, presenting them using the Cosmo Player and different Java Applets.
Since it all started, lots of things have happened and yet we are seemingly always back to square one. Great projects fail to really catch on and new attempts at creating standardized file formats pops up all the time. Proprietary file formats and expensive authoring tools hampers the swift expansion of 3D on the web. In later years, the Flash player has been the target of 3D development, and we have tools for creating 3D scenes for Flash. From a programmers perspective, Macromedia has step by step developed Actionscript, the ECMA derivative, into a full blown programming language, object oriented and with a good event handling system.
When I was involved with Sean in the development of the Flickr Spinner, I hoovered the Net for true 3D libraries written in Actionscript, and I found quite a few. One that immediately caught my attention, was the Sandy 3D API by Thomas Pfeiffer, an object oriented Actionscript library, for writing and manipulating 3D worlds. As most other modern description of 3D worlds, it has a DOM or tree model, where all geometric objects, transformations and materials are grouped into nodes. It has a global coordinate system and sports a camera within the world, that can be translated and rotated relative to global coordinates or to its own local coordinate system. the user sees the world through this camera. The camera can be manipulated as any real world camera and may be animated through functions in the library.
To learn how all this works, and to introduce Sandy to others who fancy 3D programming, I have started a tutorial series called “Using Sandy 3D Flash Library“.
Take part, experiment and enjoy!
Truth in Blogging Friday 2006-09-15
And of course an good way of getting links, and promoting sponsors
The moving Flickr API Thursday 2006-09-14
I like free services like the Flickr image sharing service, and I’m not alone. Not only is it a easy way of sharing your photos with anyone connected to the Internet. You can choose who has access to your images or some of them, you can get them commented on if you are so inclined. And new ways for presenting your images pops up quite often. It’s a popular service and developers come up with innovative applications for selecting and presenting images all the time.
The applications rest on public API:s for authentication, and request for images in different sizes and other criteria, as how they are tagged, how popular they are, who owns the image, and so forth.
There is a problem with this, if the service endpoint, i.e. the URL of the service, is hard coded into the application. For my own flickr badge, called petikr I noticed a whilde ago, that it ceased to show any images. I thought the service was temporarily down, or bogged down. I am ashamed to admit, I didn’t discover until today, that the damage was permanent.
Sorry if you have problems with it! It is fixed now.
I googled for “flash flickr stopped working”, to see if someone had the same problem. Oh, yes. And some of them knew why and had the solution, like Doug Marttila at “Forest and Trees“, author of findr. Flickr changed its service endpoint just slightly.
I wrote a tutorial on how to build your own Flickr Flash Display, in quite a few steps, each having its own demo. all of them was compiled using Kelvin Lucks Flashr wrapper for the API. The API endpoints needed by the application is hard coded into the Flicks class of the library.
I did a lot of experimenting with Flashr at the time, and now I had to find all the correct versions of the example in my tutorial, and recompile them using the same version of the flashr library, updated with the new service endpoint.
That is hard work, and although it is nice not to have external setup files, I think maybe one should. Flash can easily read in data from a text file, XML based or not. It is good for volatile data such as developing protocols or moving web services.
Akismet Jubilee Monday 2006-09-11
Hurrah!!
My Akismet has just cought it’s 500:th spam, and not one slipped through.
Time to celebrate.
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