Hah! It’s only been nine months since my last post, so all of you who bet on a year between posts, pay up!
So much to talk about, but for now you’ll have to live with this little teaser.
I’m building a multi-user Flash application, and having lots of fun doing it. The guts of the enterprise is a open source Flash Socket Server called Palabre, written and maintained by Conort Célio.
This has required a number of things of me, not the least of which is brushing up on my Object-Orient programming in both Python and Flash, and becoming my own little mini-ISP, of sorts, to run the socket server.
It also means I’ve started to extend the server software by writing add-on modules. At some point, there may be an archive for them, but for now, I post them here for your enjoyment.
This module is exceedingly simple. The client sends a user nickname, or a room name, and the modules tells the client if it exists.
I’ll be moving this site over to the new server soon. If all goes well, you won’t feel a thing.
Wow. My friends are really kicking ass this week. Rich and Tina launched their new show, and now Gareth grabs a little national media attention.
You go!
I’ve talked about my friend Gareth Hinds here once before, when he signed a deal to publish with Candlewick Press. While King Lear is still working it’s way to the shelves, Candlewick has released a magnificent hardcover edition of an earlier work, a graphic novel adaptation of the old English epic poem, Beowulf.
I was thrilled to hear from Gareth that Beowulf was getting a review in today’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. The review compares three adaptations of the work, and they lead with Gareth’s new edition.
While I am enough of a geek to cringe when they call a graphic novel a comic-book, I can’t grouse too much, as they give the book a very
nice review. Here’s snippet:
Hinds stages great fight scenes, choreographing them like a kung-fu master and then drawing them from a variety of vantage points, with close-ups, wide angles and aerial views. In its way, the result is as visceral as the Old English, which was consciously onomatopoeic, and by changing his palette for each of the poem’s three sections he evokes its darkening rhythm.
It’s a fantastic book, much (all?) of which was hand painted on wood, which gives a subtle and beautiful sense of weight and age. You really should go buy it right now.
Theatre is alive in well in Los Angeles, in no small part due to my good friends Rich Alger and Tina Kronis. They are the creative force behind Theatre Movement Bazaar. They’ve just announced their new show, Monster of Happiness. This is their tenth (by my count) original show, and going strong.
They consistently choose interesting and challenging themes to explore. This time they take on…well, I’ll let them explain it:
Monster of Happiness is a psycho-physical, science fiction love story based on the myth of Adam and Eve and examining a cornerstone of the American Dream: the pursuit of happiness.
In this work the company pursues the 20th century aesthetic innovations of early American modernist literature, Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, and post revolution ‘Soviet Style’ cinema. Integral to this process is a feedback loop, an invitation for the public (via the TMB web site) to provide personal views on happiness.
That last bit is important. They are asking the web public (that’s you!) to fill out a brief questionnaire about happiness. Some good, thought-provoking questions, and it can be answered anonymously, so the government web-spiders won’t find out your views on questions such as:
- If you had to choose between happiness and peace, which would you choose?
- What do you imagine to be the happiest era in world history?
- What’s better than being happy?
The show premieres at the 24th St. Theatre.
Show Times
June 15, 16, 22, 23, 29, 30, July 6, 7, 13, 14 @ 8:30pm
Late night shows June 30 & July 7 @ 10:30pm
You can buy tickets for the show online.
Use the hidden secrets of the cosmos to impress your friends and family, see things otherwise hidden to the human eye! All this is within your grasp with an astounding new tutorial.
Head on over to the How-To section and learn the secret of checking the batteries in your remote control with nothing but a cellphone camera.
A movie is included for your edification and enjoyment.
The Game Design section was starting to look a little overrun by Flash and ActionScript tutorials, so I’ve added a whole new page for Flash and ActionScript. Check there for the latest experiments.
Speaking of which: Drawing Regular nGons in Flash.
That’s right. NGons, baby! Try to curb your enthusiasm.
I’m working on a project that requires the drawing (or at least calculating) of regular nGons (pentagons, hexagons, octagons, etc.), so I threw together a demo movie. As usual, source code is included.
WARNING: What follows is a game only a Geek could love.
Today’s design is a twist on the venerable game of chess, via quantum mechanics (See…I warned you).
If you’re the kind of savvy reader that hangs out at the Chrome Cow, you doubtless are familiar with a certain theoretical feline belonging to one Erwin Schrödinger. This cat has the misfortune to be confined in a box with a deadly device that has a 50-50 chance of triggering with an hour. At the end of the hour, goes the thought experiment, the cat, sealed from observation inside the box, is neither dead or alive, but is in superposition, a combination of these possible states. The cat does not live or die until the box is opened by an observer, who through the act of observation collapses the possible dead/alive states of the cat into one or the other state.
So what’s that got to do with Chess? What, indeed!
Enter Superpositional Chess (Super Chess? EigenChess? Quantum Chess? Schrödinger’s Pawn?).
Continue reading »
When a problem rears its head, Chrome Cow Labs leaps into action. I recently had some time-tracking chores to bring under control, and my first instinct was to write a series of calendar tools in Excel, driven by a couple of different Perpetual Calendar algorithms.
I geek, therefore I am.
Follow the link and download the spreadsheet. There is a monthly calendar, and two graphing implementations, in addition to several worksheets that expose the workings of the perpetual calendar.
For the monthly calendar and graphs, simply enter the Month and Year in the Title line, and the proper dates and days will auto-generate.
This workbook uses native Excel functions. There is no Visual Basic scripting driving the calendars.
Just remember, these calendars are only valid after 1752, probably.
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