Sjeiti

I’m not so good at languages. I mean real languages, not programming languages (those are easy). I’m going to a Croatian course but you have to get a big vocabulary to really say something more substantial than ‘one beer please’. Learning words from books is not really my cup of tea so I thought I’d make something online to practice. Using jQuery and Google-language I conjured up a little page. On it you can add words to categories that are saved as a cookie on your computer.
The only weird thing is that Google-language sometimes translates stuff quite weirdly. For instance: I wanted to add the word ‘bear’ to it from Dutch to Croatian. It returned ‘pivo’ (Croatian for beer) probably because the Dutch word for ‘bear’ is ‘beer’. So I tried it the other way around: I know ‘bear’ is ‘medvjed’ in Croatian. It translated that into the Dutch word ‘dragen’ (which is to carry or to bear). At first I thought Google had made another Hungarian phrasebook but obviously it first translates any languages to English before translating it into another. If you put in full sentences it mostly comes out right though.
Initially I made it Dutch-Croatian, but my girlfriend is learning French, and the girl I share my studio with is learning Spanish so I turned it into an anything-anything eeeh thing.
The Dutch word for blindly-learning-stuff-by-heart is ’stampen’ (to pound) so I called it stamp-o-matic (still a work in progress).

I ’slightly’ restyled my ronvalstar.nl site. Partly because I was not completely satisfied with it but mainly to prove a point: in a lot of cases a HTML site is a better solution than Flash. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash, especially the new features in the new version 10 (although they still didn’t bother to fix the ancient TextField/Stylesheet stuff). It’s just that I see way too many Flash sites out there that could easily have been done in HTML. And when you look at the (mostly invalid) source you will often find hardly anything that will allow search engines to index it correctly (although some can index a certain amount of the outgoing links). Plus deep linking and history is not possible in a Flash site (unless you do it yourself in conjunction with js).
So my motto mostly is: don’t if you don’t have too. And if it’s absolutely necessary (ie if the client insists) there are ways to overcome these obvious obstacles.
Anyway… I coded ronvalstar.nl semanticly and in valid XHTML strict. Hardcore use of jQuery made it very easy to create something nice and dynamic. I checked it in XP/Vista-FF/Chrome/IE6-8/Safari and on Mac-FF/Safari. The IE6 DOM sucks so that’s just a plain page and IE7 runs a bit slow, but that says more about IE than about my ability to program :-p

I’ve made some major changes to SFBrowser. It will now be able to work with other server side languages than PHP.
I also implemented a structure so SFBrowser can be extended with plugins. To show I’ve added two plugins: filetree and imageresize.
Plus a ton of other minor changes: dragging, resizing, caching, cookie support etc…
Before I merge this with the trunk I will need to test and bugfix this version. If you care to test you can get it here:
http://sfbrowser.googlecode.com/svn/branches/versionthreebeta/

In the beginning of this year I had some free time and thought I’d spend it on P55 (which had been a while). Because I’ve been doing as3 since late 2006 I’m now all used to it’s way of oo programming. The only way to do that in P55 (using packages and all that) is by doing Java and using the P55 core library.
I’m still fascinated by strange attractors and since my old P55 attractor viewer was made in P55 alpha, and there are all these useful libraries for the latest P55, I decide to rebuild it.
So I fired up Eclipse and after I while had a really cool new version in which you can create and save attractor data to cookies, render and save images directly. And the standalone version even renders out complete movies (thanks to this cool lib).
All was going well until I started testing online. Somewhere in my code was a memory leak. I’m not that experienced with Java and/or Eclipse (yeah I do my as3 in some simple text editor because I can’t get used to Eclipses lack of features like vertical selection or keystroke recording). So I spend ages trying to find that leak, read a lot on garbage collection, changed a lot of code, but it still leaks after a while. In the end I just gave up on it, which is a pity because I had all these other cool ideas to implement.
But yesterday I thought: what the hell, I’ll post this anyway, leak or no leak. It’s no use hiding in my test folder. You can still use it to render very cool images. Just remember: when the framerate slows down, save your attractor, close the page, reload it, and load your attractor again.
I’m gonna quit ranting, here it is: Attractors rebuild.

Since I use SVN a lot, both for personal and third party code, I decided to give Google Code a try. Starting with jquery.sfbrowser. It’s parked at http://sfbrowser.googlecode.com/.

For those interested: I just updated my jQuery plugins:

• SFBrowser
• TinySort
• TagCloud

For a year now I’ve been freelancing. Sometimes on location, but mostly at the studio I share with two other freelancers. One of them has now decided to leave because she rarely used the studio. So, if you are, or you know, someone who needs a place to work right in the middle of Amsterdam, drop me a line here.

Just got back from a very relaxed vacation and I’m trying to pick up the old pace (but it’s too hot and humid here). Back at the old console I got this incoming link: Perlin Clouds and Frocessing (with an F). So somebody with a lot of spare time is porting Processing to AS3 (god knows why though, I can’t read Japanese). Very cool nonetheless.
Another little newsflash in that first post is that Mario Klingemann optimized my original Perlin Noise class. It’s now almost twice as fast! Funny how two simple things (type casting and unrolling functions) can have such a huge effect.
I originally created the class for use with something other that bitmaps, but since the speed increase allows it, Mario also implemented a bitmap fill method in there (although it doesn’t seem to have any scale control).

For those of you who know Processing or jQuery… I know, that is two totally different things, but check out what John Resig (the creator of jQuery) just conjured up: Processing.js. I think I can safely say: WHAAAAAAAAAAA?!!!

I created another jQuery plugin: SFBrowser.
It’s a jQuery/PHP5 file- browsing and uploading plugin and features: ajax file upload, localisation, file filtering, file renameing, sortable file table, folder creation, file download, file/folder context menu, image resize, image preview, text/ascii preview… etc…
I haven’t got round to setting up an example page yet but examples and explanations are in the download from the link above.