hexcelle: 100k plays

Heh, who'd've known? My little Flash game, Hexcelle, hit 100,000 plays today on Kongregate. I just might have to follow it up with a sequel...

Loaders

I wanted to make a note to myself for the next time I pull my hair out for too long hunting down this ... bug?

In short, after a Loader object has completed loading, references to its DisplayObject content as well as its LoaderInfo content are not reliable. I found that occasionally simply using the Loader class as the DisplayObject to add to the display list was inconsistent, too.

For now, I'm finding that saving references to the Complete Event's currentTarget.content is the most reliable choice for accessing the loaded content.

finding the farm

I've been playing with Adobe's Flickr library (link), and have been stumped in locating how to pull a pic's static farm id from a person's public photos list.

After too much time googling, searching, and reading documentation, I finally weeded thru the source to discover the library simply fails to record the farm id retrieved from flickr. Oops.

I have updated two of the Actionscript files to correct this:
http://adam.gimpert.com/docs/farmfix.zip

Two things needed to be added:
1. The Photo class needed a new property (farm), and
2. The parsePagedPhotoList method in MethodGroupHelper needed to record the farm id from each photo's xml.

Now I can build photos' static urls. Yay.

Lollapalooza 2009 Thoughts

Before I completely forget the fest...

Ben Folds - Still wonderfully talented, great tongue-in-cheek, funny, nerdy, rocks a piano. What's there not to love?

Thievery Corporation - Groovy music, good group deal goin on, and a dude jamming on a sitar. Good fun.

Of Montreal - Strange, bizarre, a bit disturbing stage acting, yet the music was thumping. Worth seeing and dancing.

Depeche Mode - Classic, but their music is showing its age. I wish they had more anthems. And what was with the boring sphere visuals? I can't help but feel they could do better.

Gomez - Great jams. Good listening.

Arctic Monkeys - I have a soft spot for these guys. The show was a lot of fun, but I think they could up the stage presence.

Santigold - Only listened because my legs were failing me at this point. This is a fresh sound, and was totally welcome.

TV on the Radio - From where I was in the crowd, these guys sounded like a high school garage band playing thru a rubber tube. I later heard that the sound on my side of the crowd was "bad" due to breaking speakers... I haven't given up on these guys, yet.

Tool - Still amazing. They rock their formula with expert precision. But I kinda wish their formula was a bit broader. The visuals are always a treat.

Bat for Lashes - Another fresh sound, and how can you not dig a female drummer? Oh, and the leotard was kickass.

Kaiser Chiefs - Probably my biggest surprise of the weekend. These guys know how to rock a live show, and their songs are great and lasting.

Vampire Weekend - Yep. Just what I was expecting: preppy boys riding a big-ass popularity wave. I hope they have the chops to churn out another great album.

Snoop Dogg - Digested the first few songs. That was sufficient. I was a bit surprised how his/their songs have lost all original context. It's a new generation, I guess.

Silversun Pickups - A bit too whiny. I would have a hard time listening to a lot of these guys. But in small doses, it's worth every aural second.

The Killers - So many great songs. I didn't know the singer was such a pretty boy. They actually made me want to seek out the albums I don't already have. The crowd was so pumped, lots of dancing, all energy was spent. It was a perfect way to end the weekend.

hexcelle and looking ahead

I was inspired by a game on Kongregate called Bubbletanks 2. I found it to be very simple, fun, and full of potential, but it fell short and remained a dumbed game. However, it's still one of my favorites on the gaming site.

So I set off early this spring to experiment with some cell evolution simulations in Flash. This evolved into a little demo, which developed into a small addiction that I needed to complete by the 1st of August. A week ago today, on the 30th of July, I posted the results of this project here. Hexcelle (short for hexagon cell evolution) is an online 2d flash shooter / builder.

In a week's time, I've been surprised that the game was so well received. As of this writing, it's been played over 35,000 times and even gets a decent rating despite all the lurking bugs. I am more than satisfied.

Looking ahead, I now focus on two exams: the first is the Fundamentals of Engineering, which I'll take in October. This is an "easy" exam that most engineering students take in college. However, I -- with a relatively untechnical background in architecture -- am at a disadvantage. I get to spend the next several weeks reviewing calculus, limits, electronics, physics, chemistry, and who-knows-what-else. The second exam will be in April, and that shall be for licensure as a Structural Engineer in Illinois. I plan to take a review course for that one over the winter.

And that's a quick update on me. Lollapalooza is this weekend - should be awesome.

And here's a crazy video someone took of Hexcelle's gameplay:

Bones and Concrete

Bone is built of two basic components: flexible fibers of collagen and brittle chains of the calcium-rich mineral hydroxyapatite. But those relatively simple ingredients, the springy and the salty, are woven together into such a complex cat’s cradle of interdigitating layers that the result is an engineering masterpiece of tensile, compressive and elastic strength...

Bone also has a crack repair team, in every sense of the word: osteoclast cells that dig around the cracks, using acids to wipe away the old matrix, and osteoblast cells that migrate in and secrete fresh spacklings of bone.

Read it.

In the lab, self-healed specimens recovered most if not all of their original strength after researchers subjected them to a 3 percent strain—enough to severely deform metal or catastrophically fracture traditional concrete. Traditional concrete fractures and can’t carry a load at .01 percent strain.

Read it.

better building business in the future?

Graphs from AIA, for actual words and stuff: archrecord.

BumpTop

I've been enticed by the prospects of 3d environments for every-day workflow efficiency. A while back I saw the preview for BumpTop, and today the program has left beta for the public's consumption. So, of course, I grabbed it and am giving it a go as we speak. I thought I'd leave a few of my comments (from a perspective of work efficiency).



First, it's fun to play with. Second, the fun wears off, real quick. So what's left:

1. Different sized icons. You can shrink and grow icons of files and piles as you like. This is probably the most beneficial aspect of the program I've found, as it gives me a quick and easy way to visually organize my files beyond the constraints of the desktop's two dimensions.

2. Piles. A quick and convenient way to pile up a bunch of files, so they don't take up so much visual space. Unfortunately, piles do nothing more than normal folders do - or at least, I haven't found such a function. When you view a pile of piles, you see all the files in all the piles. Not very helpful for organizing (why wouldn't I just make a big ol' pile in the first place?). Althought it would mess with the physical metaphors being used, keyword piles would be helpful, where a single file can be part of multiple piles sorted by keyword.

3. Gestures. Probably another best-of feature. Love the pie menus. Circle a bunch of files to make actions on them, such as pile by type. When viewing images, drag to the left or right to navigate between images, etc. BumpTop also uses drag-n-drop features, such as dragging files onto the email icon to automatically attach them to an email. You can also drag icons onto walls, but I find that every time you click them or double-click them, the slide down the wall. A bit annoying.

4. Photo frames. Who cares? If I want a cool way to view images, I'll use a real image-viewer. However, if you want a constant distraction, you can set up a photo frame to cycle thru pics from a folder or rss feed. Neat?

5. Facebook and Twitter icons. At first I thought these were just dumb links. They're actually "widgets" to which you can throw or drop files such as pictures to share them via each service. Slick.

9. Physics and 3d: I find the physics to be a bit clunky, but I think that's more a matter of me getting used to the gestures (such as a 'throwing' a file towards a pile to add it to that pile). I have noticed that larger objects are more difficult to move - I'm anxious to see if this helps organize tons of files or not. I think the 3d aspect is one of the stronger aspects of the program. This allows users to spatially attribute organizational control to many more files than a simple 2-D desktop.

Conclusions: I've always avoided using the desktop as ... well, a desktop because Windows offers such crap options for the way to view it and organize it. Therefore, I always stick my working files in a folder (aptly named, "Working") so I can view by list or details or what have you. BumpTop offers a fun way to keep all my working files in one location, so I'll be giving it a try. The extent of its usefullness will be determined in the future.

Wish list:
- Keyword piles
- Make one of the walls a browser
- Keep your metaphors consistent: piles of piles should be piles of piles.
- A way to view details of files as well as sort and search by them

modern art

big spending

I read this economist's posts, and today's has some scary graphs about projected government spending.

http://www.thredgold.com/html/leaf090401.html

I Just Twoted All Over the Place

Twitter, explained:

bloody fun

A bit sick and twisted, but silly fun:


Play free games at Kongregate

fish moment of zen

Gimme back that filet-o-fish
Gimme that fish
Gimme back that filet-o-fish
Gimme that fish
What if it were you
hanging up on this wall?
If it were you in that sandwich
you wouldn’t be laughing at all!



This song gets in my head like nothing else. And it makes me laugh every time. And, amazingly, make me kinda want to go out a buy a fillet - o - "fish."

arch.unemployed

"There it sits among the produce and fish, amid sellers of honey and jewelry and pastry in the Ballard Sunday farmers market. Simple and unadorned, it reads like a wry joke -- except maybe to anxious students in the University of Washington's Gould Hall."

Crisis of Credit

Saw this shared this morning (thanks, Mark!):


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

level 3

level 3
Originally uploaded by Archigeek

I gained enough experience at work today to level up again.

Level 3 engineering geek.

Happy V-Day!

it's been a while

Wow, it's been a while. That's what happens when the holidays hit, and then I just check out of reality for a while. I suppose a trip to Colorado, and a subsequent one to Cairo don't help.

So a quick update on things new: I've been indoor rock climbing several times now - enough, I believe, to call myself a beginner instead of just some lame ass on the wall. The economy has affected even my side projects, canceling a website project I was ramping up to do. The bright side of this: I've redone the koasynth site because I had some time, and I was sick of the flash placeholder that had been there for almost two years. My day work is still solid, though the number of projects has slowed dramatically, leaving some days a bit longer than they should be.

I'm still flabbergasted at how differently browsers render sites, still. It's frakin 2009, and still they can't settle on a standard that they all follow correctly? Amazing.

And speaking of frak, BSG has nearly gone off the deep end. It's now the 'Weekly Kill Show.' Yet still entertaining...