Flash, arts and happiness

Hello and thank you for waiting.

I have been rather busy lately (and been on vacation for a few weeks) so updating my weblog didn’t go as planned. Sorry for that…

As I have told, I have been working on the website for ‘The Selfish Gene‘. It has worked out very well and I am very pleased with the result - as is Lola, who commisioned the project. All the lamps you can see on the website are dynamically generated, based on the genes Lola enters in the database. We did have a few headaches concerning the mathematics though.

Unfortunately, I still cannot tell you much about the project I was enrolled in last time. However, we’ve had a few very promising meetings and it is most likely that two of our three concepts will be implemented in the real world outside our school. I’ll keep you posted.

Although I was planning to write a simple CMS on my own, I put that crazy idea out of my mind. I wanted to do something nice and smooth in Flash but I simply lack the time (ah, I even skipped dinner twice this week because I was working to hard to notice!). Since it’s becoming a pain to update the HTML each time, I knew I had to come up with something. Since many bloggers out there use Wordpress, I figured there must be a reason for that and thus I downloaded and installed it. I wished I did this from the beginning… it’s really a breeze to work with.

I’ve just converted all my old post to Wordpress, but some links have vanished in this copy/paste-galore. I will soon check them all. Now, let’s make that dinner, or it’s going to be the 3rth time this week I skip that…

Lately, things are a bit hectic and will continue to be so for a while. Our recent project had its deadline and I am fortunate to be able to tell you that we made it. For a school project, this is quite an accomplishment because, often, teams have one or two ’slackers’, making the whole project block. Even though we’ve had our troubles (on which I will not eleborate) we have finished all our three installation prototypes. This week will be spend on straightening out a few crinkles, which wouldn’t be a problem but since we still have time… Friday we’ve our final presentation, so keep your fingers crossed!

Also I’ve met a beginning artist who’se working on her final assessment in school. She’s on a very cool project. In short, she’s designed a series of lamps. Each lamp is described by a set of ‘genes’. Clients who want to order a lamp are to pick their two favorite lamps of the latest generation and the genes of those lamp will the determine the shape of their lamp. The next two weeks, I will be working on her website. Man, it’s gonna be cool, I tell you that.

As if that isn’t enough, the next two weeks I’ll also be following an ‘Advanced Flash’ course in school. Although I doubt I will learn much, there’s a prize of €750 for the best production so I’m doing my very best to win ;).

Last, but not least, I’ve been toying with the socket-class in Flash CS3. It’s really a breeze to work with, were it not for the Flash Security Model. In less than one hour I whipped together a simple chatroom, including a local server (not in Flash). It’s not really worth showing, but it’s been a good exercise.

Well… back to housecleaning now - but first a lunch!

So… here’s another update. A rather large one, for I’ve been silent for a time. Been busy, I bet you know the drill. I’ll post them separately though, just to keep things organized.

As you’ve been able to see, the quality of my webcam is not that great. Actually, to be honest, it sucks. I thus decided to get a new one. I bought a used PS2 EyeCam, since those are rather cheap (€17.50 for this one), compared to high-quality PC-webcams, which often cost over €40.00. The quality however is very good, although, since it has to squeeze all data over a slow USB 1.1 connection, compression is certainly visible. However, I can live with that, so it’s a big value for money, I’d say.

Compare that to the picture of my garden you can see in my previous post!

Hello there and welcome to my new blog on Flash, arts and happiness. As you may have already read, I study Digital Arts. To be more precise, I follow the Digital Media Design course at the Utrecht School of Arts in The Netherlands. As such, my main interests are anything artsy, digital and interactive. Of course, I like everything concerning these topics that is new and innovative, especially anything that attempts to exceed its current paradigm.

At school, at work and for leisure, I work a lot with Adobe Flash - practically only sleeping goes without. Since I use it a lot, I come across various challenges, some of which turn out to be real problems. Often, I am able to find a solution and then… it’s kept somewhere on my harddrive, hiding from daylight. I thought that a real pity, so that’s why I set up this blog in the first place: to share my solutions with the world (and to keep them somewhere I can find them!). Usually, it’s probably not really groundbreaking, but still some people might benefit from it.

To juice it up, I also intent not only to blog about my actionscript troubles but also other interesting things I do or stumble upon - anything from wicked sites to fascinating new games or brainfarts about how the world really should be.

Well… that’s it for now. The site will hopefully soon be updated with more functionality - especially some CMS so I don’t have to blog by editing this HTML-file and so you can post your comments. I hope you’ll find my blog interesting and useful - in the future, that is, for now it is still a bit empty.