Why your Flash website sucks
March 15th, 2008
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.
This one is worth a thousand words
March 12th, 2008
An indigenous woman holds her child while trying to resist the advance of Amazonas state policemen who were expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land on the outskirts of Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon March 11, 2008. The landless peasants tried in vain to resist the eviction with bows and arrows against police using tear gas and trained dogs.
Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?
March 10th, 2008
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.
How to save money running a startup
March 7th, 2008
#1 Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department
#2 Buy second monitors for everyone, they will save at least 30 minutes a day, which is 100 hours a year… which is at least $2,000 a year…. which is $6,000 over three years. A second monitor cost $300-500 depending on which one you get. That means you’re getting 10-20x return on your investment… and you’ve got a happy team member.
Asciify – Actionscript 3 Ascii Art class
March 6th, 2008
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.
Palestinian loss of land 1946 to 2000
March 1st, 2008
For The Love
February 28th, 2008
Occasionally encounters with human intelligence can be entirely bewildering. Suddenly you’re faced with the fact that other minds move in the same world and speak the same language, and yet have thoughts and intellectual processes going on that are entirely alien – and superior – to your own. That’s certainly how it feels to be shown the work of Eskil Steenberg, while sat at a spare table in a GDC conference hall. Steenberg’s temperamental laptop might not have wanted to help out, but what we saw flickering on that screen was astonishing and somewhat unsettling.
From rockpapershotgun.com – here’s more:
The game itself, dubbed Love (as in For The Love Of Game Development), is an exploration-based moderately-multiplayer FPS with astounding impressionistic visuals and a procedurally generated universe. Since Steenberg is a one man show, he’s relying on clever maths to build the world for him and then clever gamers to come in and help him figure out where to take it, and what to do with it.
The Orwellian censorship of Wikileaks
February 22nd, 2008
Internet censorship is something we normally associate with countries such as Iran or China, but increasingly Western governmental and legal authorities are aggressively restricting the ability of users to view information unimpeded.
Such is the story with Wikileaks, one of the most essential websites launched in the last year and designed to publish leaked material from across the world, including the US Rules of Engagement in Iraq and news about Guantanamo Bay officials conducting covert attacks on the internet.
For some reason the original article cannot be accessed at the moment (too much traffic may be the cause) but here’s a cached version of it which you can read here.
What Europeans think of each other
February 20th, 2008
This is a basic backgrounder for Americans, primarily, who might think Europeans do nothing all day but bitch about Americans. Don’t get me wrong—they do love bitching about Americans. But they also like bitching about each other, as well. Bordering countries, especially, have complex caricatures of each other, even when an outsider might think they’re more or less the same.
Optical illusion
February 16th, 2008
Very cool optical illusion effects done in Flash.
Check ’em out: shapirolab.net/