Braindead Monkeys album #6
You dag-blasted crazy apes!!!
The Braindead Monkeys: Space Donut
After a 4-year hiatus, Space Donut arrives! It's their strongest album to date. Lots of head-nodding jams, and lots of smiles.
Recommended tracks:
- #3: Parody of a popular 80's cartoon
- #4: TERRORISM! "The United States is currently at war with everything..."
- #7: Nintendo (NES) + marching band
- #5, #13, #18: Delicious electro jamstep
Grab a banana and an electric drill, and enjoy!
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A Replacement for Spotlight
Spotlight has a glut of nice features, but it still doesn't satisfy me. I have nearly 2 million files on my hard drive. Depending on what I'm working on (and my caffeine-to-blood ratio), hundreds of files may be updated every minute. Then Spotlight tries to index the drive at inopportune moments, then Ableton Live can't access files because the drive is busy, and the music grinds to a halt, and .... well, I had to take Spotlight behind the shed, and put it down.
There are many ways to disable Spotlight. I don't remember which combination worked for me, but the end result is that mdutil doesn't run on this machine anymore, and my menu bar is devoid of a Spotlight icon. (Also I disabled Quick Look, since its indexing also caused problems.)
But I still want to search my files. My solution was to create an automated job that runs once a day, and saves the path of every file into a big text document. Then I created a little command-line alias called search, which prints any file paths that match a search term. Here's how to do it:
Trainwreckin’
OpenMoko is a flavor of Linux for cell phones. It's also a UI nightmare for end users. Witness these videos:
OpenMoko Train Wreck from Dave Fayram on Vimeo.
More OpenMoko Train Wrecking (Now with Qt!) from Dave Fayram on Vimeo.
There's a ton of literature describing best development practices out there. But I think case studies of failure, or good intentions gone horribly awry, are just as important. It's essential to recognize what not to do. I still regard The Daily WTF as a learning resource, full of cautionary (and hilarious) case studies.
Also, there are no "________-killers," but that's a subject for a different day.
Flocking
AI for Game Developers has a chapter on flocking, and I thought I'd try it:
Click to play! It's not polished, but it lets you explore different flocking behaviors. Here's what the controls do:
Vector Fonts in Flash
I've always liked the visual style of old vector games. I may integrate this style into my site, so I experimented with this tonight.
I borrowed the font used in Major Havoc and created several new classes to support this. First, here's how it looks:
Play with the .swf . Click the screen to set the keyboard focus (I'll debug Selection.setFocus() later.) Type letters. Press backspace to clear the screen.
Each letter is placed randomly, and has a GlowFilter applied (an attempt to simulate the look of old CRTs) with random colors and settings therein.
Here are the classes being used:
- vector.ShapeSegment (either a single line segment, or a bezier curve)
- vector.Shape (a continuous path of several ShapeSegments)
- vector.Symbol (a collection of Shapes)
- vector.font.Havoc defines the Symbols for each letter of the Havoc font, using delimited strings. Here's the string for the "A" character: "0,1; 0,0.5; 0.5,0; 1,0; 1,1 / 0,0.5; 1,0.5 ". Note that each letter is drawn on a coordinate space ranging from (0,0) to (1,1). The "/" character divides the coordinates into two Shapes (a separate Shape is needed to draw the bar through the center of the "A").
- vector.font.BaseVectorFont parses the strings contained in Havoc, and returns Symbols.
Symbol, Shape, and ShapeSegment each have a draw() method that requires a MovieClip (to draw in), and a flash.geom.Matrix (to govern the position/size of each vector entity).
Currently this code is all locked down, not for any malicious reason... But I'd let my framework & libraries mature a bit before I start accepting feedback. If you'd like to poke through my code, then I can open up my SubVersion repository; let me know if there's interest.
Up next: 3D
Typo -> WordPress
First post!
I just switched from Typo (Rails) to WordPress. Come and get me, spambots!!!!