Posts

When the iPhone came out, I thought it was a brave move, but I couldn’t see myself getting one, even though I’m a bit of an Apple fan (my MBP and Nano/Nike+ are irreplaceable). But since then I’ve been using a friend’s Jailbreaked iPhone I’m utterly sold on it (and the Touch), but for a different reason…. The combination of large touch screen, fast processor and accelerometers makes this device a sleeping giant in the handheld games market. The Nintendo DS and PSP have widened the audience considerably, with games like “Brain Training” on the DS, and World Series of Poker et al on the PSP squarely aimed at adults, and many games specifically targeted at girls. They are making gamers of people who would probably not consider themselves gamers at all… even after spending 3 hours straight playing 42-in-1 😉 ...

My colleague James Hay has been experimenting with Processing, working with some public data made available on the UK government’s statistics site: http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/Download1.do The end result has been captured below, showing cylinders whose height relates to the population and whose position on the map relate to the GPS coordinates for the post-codes in the data. ...

It’s that time again, the Adobe sponsored London Poker Event is back. Luckily for me I can make it this time, and I hear from friends it was a great night last time round. It’s been a while since I’ve played but with such a mix of people there the prizes are anyone’s 😉 Huge thanks to Sean and Adobe for making this happen. Here’s the info, link at the end: The second Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament (organised by Sean McSharry) is taking place on Monday 25th February at the famous Loose Cannon poker club in Cannon Street EC4. The event is FREE and open to all professional Adobe software users. Adobe are taking care of the bar tab and providing some impressive prizes for everyone who makes it to the final table. Don’t worry if you’ve never played poker before, there will be lots of novices and you all get 20 minutes of training before the event begins. ...

So there’s a problem with using gotoAndStop() in AS3 classes, as soon as you call it, you temporarily lose access to items on stage (on the timeline) whether they are defined as member variables, or using getChildByName(). This is different from AS2, items on stage were immediately accessible. Why use the timeline at all? For one you might have a simple button using named keyframes as button states, or when dealing with assets created by designers that include animations with portions that require localisation of text. So like before you use gotoAndStop() or gotoAndPlay() to manage which “state” your MovieClip is in, but when you go to access anything on stage, it is null, even if it was on the previous keyframe. Here’s a snippet from a typical AS3 class: ...

I recently posted on using a mobile phone’s data connection with Mac OS X, and I’ve just had some sucess with my new eee Linux based laptop, again on Vodafone (but I imagine other operators will be similar). To dial up a connection, plug the phone in via USB and setup a new Dialup Connection in the Network Connections manager with the following information: Phone number: *99***internet# User name: web Password: web The difference here is that I’m putting the access point name in the number to dial, no doubt the script I was using on OS X was doing this for me. These settings worked on a plain vanilla eee PC without messing around in /etc/ppp. So that might vary operator to operator. Best of luck, please post in the comments if your process varied for other operators or devices.

So I’ve just moved house and I’m without Internet. It seems I have to pay a total of £384 ($729 USD) for the priviledge this year. Unbelievably only £120 of this is for 16mb no-monthly-limit broadband from Sky, but the rest is on an obscene £124 activation cost to get a BT line set up in this place (I was told it has been 7 years since one was active), the rest is line rental for said line from BT. So that’s all going to take at least a month, because living in a town of several hundred thousand people counts as being “in the sticks” when compared with London, and they just don’t make enough phone engineers… ...

The other week I picked up an ASUS eeePC Linux based laptop from, believe or not, Toys ‘R’ Us, for an incredible £220 GBP ($429 USD). I have recently started commuting to London on the train with around a 40 minute journey time, so for me this was a purchase that would save my sanity and hopefully my (considerably more costly) MacBook Pro from being stolen. It’s small enough to have on one knee so don’t worry about a table and I’m currently using it to surf, code in Ruby, read books and watch videos. ...

I’ve just finished reading a paper I picked up over at BoingBoing titled “The physical world as a virtual reality”, by Brian Whitworth. It’s a very interesting read so I’m recommending it on here. It’s not a long read, but it does help stop that grey matter seizing up. As a result I see the word “computer” in a whole different light. The paper doesn’t try to say that the world we live in is a virtual reality simulation, as we see in the movie “The Matrix”. Instead it examines several theories, including one that I find very pleasing for some reason; which is that the World is not necessarily a virtual reality, but it *is* calculating, and the mathematics we continue develop year upon year simply unfolds these calculations piece by piece. ...

For the “cyber nomad” (cyber-cafe frequenter), Jooce is a new web-based venture which aims to give: Multi-network-chat – instant message your friends from your jooce desktop, no matter which IM client they use Instant file share – share files instantly with your friends just by dragging and dropping YouTube upload – upload your favourite YouTube videos to your jooce desktop and share them instantly with friends Public desktop – express yourself with your fully customizable public face on the internet Media Player – play music, watch videos, create playlists; File Storage – secure online storage of all your files – accessible from any internet connection anywhere in the world. This reminds me somewhat of Wallop, a kind of MySpace evolved. It’s probably important to remember that you or I might not be the target audience for this sort of thing. Generation Y (and later) eats up the sorts of features on offer by the bucket-load, and the not-so-tech-savvy of all ages could perhaps enjoy the way it brings together a lot of functionality into one manageable entity. Geeks like myself might prefer to use other disperate services that are potentially harder to use but offer extra functionality or features, and this can make it easy to pick holes in these sorts of things, but in reality I think there’s a lot to be said for this sort of thing. For one, having your music collection online (ignoring the issue of DRM for a second) would mean that you can hotdesk or visit a friend and not worry about where it lives. It’s one for the “coffee shop generation” perhaps. ...

That means iTunes’ current model will be due for some drastic changes, no more downloading things “to keep”. Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought all our media consumption (music, video, insert-other-media-here) would be entirely subscription based in the near future. I gave a definite YES in response. This is something I’ve had on my mind a few years, and personally I’m of the opinion the only viable solution to the increasingly complex problem of content management and ownership -whilst maintaining the rights of artists and authors- is to consume all of our content as the result of a subscription to a media conglomerate or third party broker. ...