not like king of the koopas, more like my new flatmate:

sos i was watchin superman II today and in the scene where that really dumb kid jumps falls into niagra falls and the s-man saves him, some lady shouts, ‘what a nice man’ immediately followed by, ‘well of course he’s jewish’. it’s true (click to play):there you have it folks. superman: jew-ball.

check this out. procedural programming’s pretty side.
now how come they didnt teach me that in college?

see more of jared’s stuff at levitated.net

here’s some photos from rome, if you’re interested. i’ll show you some other stuff in a minute.

part of the project im working on for the bbc is a multi-screen projection for the entrance into the new building. in order to test the setup the beebs have sent us six shuttle xpcs, loaded to the hilt, and a bunch of monitors. the madness that ensued:

the machine on the top is the server for the six slave machines. one of my favorite things was setting up synergy so that the mouse (attached to the server machine) moves side to side across all six computers—one ring to rule dem all. it looks even cooler with the application running, but im pretty sure an nda somewhere prohibits me from sharing that juicy bit with yall.

ps. ill throw up some roma photos soon.

the other thing about getting my internet going is that i got to finally got to set up my dualphone 3088. for those of you not familiar, its a cordless skype/landline phone that doesnt require a pc! it just plugs directly into your router and phone line and there ya go. i know, i know, it is the greatest thing ever invented.

it really makes skype much more usuable, especially with my skypein number. someone call me so i can test the quality…please *tear*

when it came time to finally get all my freelance work back onto my mac pro i set out to install subversion, which dreamhost kindly and freely supplies, and made a fantastic discovery: scplugin.

scplugin is basically a mac version of the fantastic tortoise svn (as in finder context-menu, pretty icons, etc). plus this dude makes pkg installers for current versions of svn for mac. i feel very official…wanna give me some work?

i finally got internet in my flat. it only took them a month and a half, but those chaps eventually got their ass in gear and its actually quite fast, so im happy.

ive been reveling in the glory, gluttonously downloading software updates, finally trying out my joost beta (i dont think im impressed), setting up the chanel guide for windows media center (never missing an episode of life on mars again) as well as downloading a lot of porn.

for the project we are working on for the bbc we’ve decided to build it as an apollo app. using some adobe prerelease softwares ive been experimenting with apollo (and as3) for the last week and i must say, im impressed.

first of all, mxml is fantastically easy. setting up an app and adding components is as intuitive as it should be. the level of control between mxml components and actionscript is really amazing. stuff like parsing xml (as in rss feeds for example) and simple ui interactions (like radio buttons etc) are really straightforward. i suppose for those who have used flex before, this aint so new, but it was for me and i was left thinking, ‘why haven’t i been doing this all along?’. but one of the biggest things apollo brings to the table is the ability to render html inside flash apps. finally. furthermore, you have almost full integration with the page’s javascript from an apollo app (read: ajax, hi how are ya). i havent played with the javascript much, im still just impressed i can even show a page.

what i have been playing with is actionscript 3. it would seem adobe is doing it right this time. packages and classes as they should be: everything in its place and a place for everything, means that my cs degree is coming in handier than i would’ve thought. initially i was worried about the overhead, but other than a lot of restructuring its not so different—well, in terms of coding that is. the performance on the other hand feels light years ahead. par example: x-wing as2/as3 comparison. the app we’re building is very visually intensive and has lots of motion and interactivity. effects that would surely have brough as2 to a crawl now seem to chug along at just the right pace. applying these effects, when leveraged with flex, is also a vast improvement of pure as2. flex’s built in effects (zoom, rotate, fade, etc) work right out the box. so by extending the UIComponent class, you’ve all of a sudden got yourself a whiz-bang animatable thing (whatever it may be…) that can actually keep up in a real world situation. props adobe, props.

on a side note, i accidentally discovered one of the coolest things ive seen in a long time. when i set the final alpha of an fade effect to 100 (as opposed to 1), the result was a hole in the middle of my app. i should take a screenshot and show you, but literally you can see through your app to whatever is behind it, and whats more, you can directly interact with what’s underneath. im not sure if this is intended functionality (i know its something apollo is supposed to be able to do, just not sure if this is the situation they had in mind) but it was pretty sick…for one thing it allows you to make an app of any shape that can dynamically change shape on the fly (desktop strippers, here i come).

well, surely more to come once i get more into the project, and if youre lucky (and its legal?) maybe ill post a demo of something.

after mentioning it at work i was informed that all americans have an [unexplained] fondness for the bbc show top gear. but seeing as i almost pissed myself watching an episode last week, ill take the hit and join the rest of my fat lazy gun-toting ignorant countrymen and declare of top gear, “it’s good”

this week they launched a rocket. a fuckin rocket for god sakes man…
if ur into rockets and shit