Wired Sandy 3D Sunday 2007-11-11
In the late hours of development before the Sandy 3.0 official release, there emerged a fascinating project named redsandy.
This is a net based collaborative 3D world, or chat and shootout environment, or .. well I really don’t know what it is.
The reason is that it is quite new to me and everyone, except possibly the developer Andy Shaules.
The name of the project comes from the combination of the open source media server Red5 and the likewise open source Sandy 3D engine.
On names, by the way – one peculiarity is that Andy popped in to the Sandy forum under the signature AndyS. How about that?
AndyS on Sandy. Create the next permutation as home work!
For further explanation of the redsandy project and its ramifications, I’ll give the word to AndyS at GoogleCode 
I’ll make sure to learn a bit or two about this creature, but first on to some more basic Sandy tutorials.
Sandy 3.0 Released
Woppie!
Today Thomas released Sandy 3.0, the state of the art AS3 3D ActionScript library.
After an intensive development period, the new library is here, leaner and meaner, than the AS2 versions 1.x.
If you think of creating 3D worlds for the latest Flash Player, taking advantage of the faster flash engine, that comes with Player 9, you should go ahead and download Sandy 3.0.
It comes with a JavaDoc like API documentation and a growing set of introductory and advanced tutorials.
To get a feeling for the possibilities, take a look at the demos. It is early days, so more demo apps will emerge from the steadily growing user/developer community.
My congratulations to Thomas and coworkers for an amazing development, and to the 3D designers/programmers for the availability of a really fine library!
Also to expect later on, is a “back porting” of the new engine to the Sandy 2.0 AS2 version, which will be a good alternative for developers, who for some reason have to stay with AS2.
Petit Labs on Sandy 3.0 Friday 2007-10-19
As we are traveling towards the next release candidate of Sandy, the humbly numbered RC1, I have been busy bringing my tutorial “Using Sandy 3.0 Flash Library” forward.
Already the Sandy 3.0 is a big leap in usability and performance, and it is still under development. The naming policy may be questioned. What I mean is that what we have is stable in a way and very usable, so we could have had a release instead of a candidate.
I guess the reason for this humbleness is that Thomas want to present something extra, and he continues to develop heavily, with the risk being, that the API will still break at some point.
So we will settle for a RC1 release fairly soon.
In the meantime, come visit the Sandy wiki and forum and of course my tutorial, directed at beginners as well as pros 
Sandy 3D and AS3 Saturday 2007-09-22
Finally, after a long development period, the first release of Sandy for AS3 and the flash 9 Player is here.
It’s faster and slimmer, as it should. It is released as RC0, which is a bit shy. I would say it is at an RC1 state.
The engine is new, even if the transformation matrices are the same as always. The engine is faster, maybe mostly due to the faster Flash engine. Transformations are simpler and and the camera is now part of the node graph, a great improvement. It makes it possible to give the camera complex movements.
What was called skins in the 1.x versions is now called appearances and materials, and has undergone some good rework.
I want to congratulate Thomas and all users of the Sandy library. Hopefully we will see a flood of interesting applications in the near future.
Here is the release statement. Go there, download and take it for a ride – if you are so inclined
WordPress Shot in the Foot Saturday 2007-03-03
This is to alert you to immediately update your WP 2.1.1 installation, if you downloaded and installed that version lately.
As I wrote, not long ago “WordPress is Secure Blogging“. However destructors traveling cyberspace are getting cleverer each day. If you cannot penetrate the installed blogging platform, why not attack and change the distribution?
According to word from the WordPress blog
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.
So, earlier versions of WordPress are not affected, and bloggers at wordpress.com are safe too. Only if you installed WP 2.1.1 lately, go ahead and install the update now!
WordPress is Secure Blogging Thursday 2007-02-22
There is high security awareness in the team developing WordPress. Today, the 30 days new 2.1 version is getting a maintenance upgrade to 2.1.1, mainly containing smaller bug fixes, but also some security measures. For the earlier 2.0 version, which had its latest maintenance as 2.0.7 at the same time, there’s now a 2.0.9 security upgrade.
It’s really nice to be in good hands,and whether you took the bold step from WP 2.0 to the famed 2.1 or stayed with the 2.0, you should take the new face lift.
Just make sure you select the correct upgrade.
Next Sandy 3D Beta Monday 2007-02-12
Deeply involved as I am for the time being, I had the pleasure tonight to release the next and seemingly greater version of the Sandy 3D library. I have done nothing to improve the library, the version being Sandy 1.2 beta 2 for AS2, credits go fully to the smart and knowledgeable developers of Sandy – you know who you are, and I bow to thee
It’s only in the power of my time zone and my working schedule, that I was delegated the launch of this version.
Hopefully it will be faster and more consistent and hopefully we will get comments and bug reports to be able to release the final stable 1.2.
The brain trust is already working hard to get an AS3 version out, and I know they find it well overdue to do so. As the the head dev and owner himself put it the other day:”The future is already here”, and indeed it is. The flash 9 Player and the Flex framework is pushed forward, and the OOP developers shakes by eager anticipation of all the good things the Flash 9 engine will bring.
At the Sandy camp we always look ahead of everything and everyone else, so we are impatient to hear from Adobe, that the Flash rendering engine will support/rely on Open GL and/or DirectX. We can do that, as we are not responsible for the implementation and throw the whole responsibility on the Adobe Macromedians. It’s just a simple demand, and if they meet that, we don’t have to optimize so heavy.
For now, get the Sandy 1.2 beta for AS2 from the Sandy forum.
Using Sandy in Italian Wednesday 2007-01-31
Fabulous indeed! It really never happened to me before. My tutorial on using the Sandy 3D Actionscript library, has been translated to Italian, and is beginning to roll out as a guide on HTML.IT. The hard working and patient Davide Beltrame took on the work of translating, or rather transposing, the tutorial so it will appeal to an Italian public. Much more than is published at this time is already translated, and I believe I have some more parts to write.
Thanks Davide! You’re gold
Spammers Go Away Wednesday 2007-01-24
Yeah, they really should disappear. I have Akismet installed for the benefit of my blog and my occasional readers. During the fairly long time I had it installed not a single spam comment has slipped through. Hurray for that!
It is still annoying, to have to log in to the admin page and delete spam messages on a daily basis.
Yes of course I’m spoiled. Just came to think about it. What if the wizards behind Akismet hadn’t done such an ingenious work, my gosh! I would have waded in spam comments spread out all over my blog, even contaminating old posts, that I had already given a good cleaning. Now I find them gathered in Aiksmet’s own container, and can select to browse them or kill them on sight.
Until this day Akismet has caught 8999 spammy messages, after todays record amount of 218.
I’m really happy about this neat and effective catch and destroy tool.
Most common fake comment lately is
Actually i am not an active serfer, but this this site is really great, i will spread it through my friends.
No, whoever you are, you are not a “serfer” at all. You are a dumb program sending dumb messages from fake adresses to make my blog unreadable. You’ll not succeed, but as the unnecessary piece of code you are, you don’t care. So what am I doing here, talking to evil code somewhere. Here endest that silliness
[Edit 01-27] Oh, I love inventions, don’t you? Today I got a really nice spamment, which wasn’t caught by Akismet, because a machine would find it reasonable.
It goes like this:
I always have terrible trouble with comment-related plugins that require me to put some line in the comment loop; I can never seem to find the right spot. Can anyone tell me where I should put the php line in my comments loop? I haven not modified anything much, and I would be very grateful. Thanks!
I certainly could have been tricked into letting it through from my second defense line, the moderation queue. If it hadn’t been for the stupidity to send the same comment to three different posts. Then again I’m not that good at PHP anyway.
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!
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