purplemass.com

Well, not quite 100% there yet but I’m trying to control this playlist using Python on my Mac – will publish results in near future.

Amazing 3D sound from this short video on YouTube.

Put some headphones on, hit play and close your eyes. Welcome to the Virtual Barber Shop!

This was a long and laborious task.. It took a lot of research, coming across some extremely useful websites and a little bit of coding to get the job done.

I’ll write a full report on this later on but for now, here’s how we did it for purplemass:

1. Converted our Serendipity blog to a Movable Type format, ensuring the data was saved in UTF-8
2. Import data into WordPress (edited the MT import file)
3. Some posts ended having the wrong authors – this was changed manually

Let’s play a game to demonstrate that the future of movies is dead.
First, pick you favourite movie.
I’ll wait… I know it’s a tricky question
OK, Good choice.
Imagine you have it on DVD, and you ripp it to your laptop as a 5 Gigabyte file.

And then

The thing is, you only need the one file for all three movies. The data for each movie has been conformed to the same size, it’s the sequence of the data that enables the viewing of the movie – through the player that understands the codec.

This was written by a friend and co-worker, zeroinfluence – read the full thing here.

Here are some excellent articles written about HTML email design and programming:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2005/11/html_email_desi.html

[campaignmonitor.com is an excellent site for other resources]

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters

http://kickasswebdesign.com/wordpress/2007/02/the-new-rules-for-html-email/

http://webstandardsgroup.org/resources/index.cfm?resource_id=135

There are things that Flash is good for. Games. Video. Google finance. Embedded widgets. Weird interactive sites that make no sense. Replacing HTML, CSS and JavaScript and showing images, links and text content is not one of those things.

Read more

Cutting-edge computer games use different graphics subsystems — so-called 3D graphics engines. Source (used in Half Life 2), Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament), idTech 4 (Doom 3), CryENGINE2 (Crysis) or Clever’s Paradox engine are well-known among the players and the game industry experts.

It’s time to learn a new 3D game engine name: Microsoft Excel.

It is understood that Excel is an all-round office tool, but probably it is unknown that it has a bunch of features that makes Excel a high-class 3D graphics engine.

Read more

There are trends on the web (as in real world) that last days or weeks and there are things that became a classic form of expression of the geek culture and are still interesting to explore after 20+ years.

Ascii Art is one of these things. If you don’t know what ascii art is you’re probably reading the wrong blog, however for the one or two that doesn’t know about it, here you can learn more about it: Ascii art on wikipedia.

Read more

Very cool optical illusion effects done in Flash.

Check ’em out: shapirolab.net/