Eat as fast as you can, for as long as you can. Ready, set, go! 

The Farm racked up $420 worth of Yum Cha over lunch.

Zilver (www.zilver.com.au) in the City. Great food.

 

Canada Day is fast approaching so i decided to take the time and show some Canadian pride. Firstly the Hockey Night in Canada theme song debacle was a shame but at least we didn't lose it all together but it does suck that it won't be played every saturday night for the actual Hockey Night in Canada. Secondly I've made a top 10 list of the greatest Molson Canadian ads and lastly have attached one hell of a hockey fight for your enjoyment. OH CANADA! 

The most important song in history:

 

Molson Canadian Top 10 Ads: 

I AM:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRI-A3vakVg&feature=related

 

No doot aboot it!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1RrncVgLFY&feature=related

 

Nice beaver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZrNWEPUsH0&feature=related 

 

Pet beaver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUqsF8vbR_Q&feature=related

 

Your sister:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBEe_4rBezw

 

The code:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plCgrspcAAY 

 

Finding meat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFNVKouaNq4 

 

Spit it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie06fsB52a0&feature=related 

 

500 Miles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeWG6YG2oOA 

 

On my way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRPe6OG_7fQ 

 

Curved sticks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtIl06KCp_s&feature=related 

 

Greatest hockey fight!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1-25s4uwFQ&feature=related 

 

HAPPY CANADA DAY EVERYONE! 

[June 2008] Relaunch of the The Glue Society's website built in Flash with a content management system for the Client to manage all video and image assets across a number of templates which builds the content tree. The challenge for the programmers was to make the website as lean as possible to take advantage of the simple but effective design, relying on code to generate the look and feel as opposed to imagery.

 

Would have liked to talk about cycling, but didn't think a discussion around alloy vs steel in a market full of bushings and bearings for 4 bar linkages and single virtual pivots would float everyones boat, so this morning's Morning Tea was about what interests me, and what makes it interesting? Like in any industry we service our clients to produce a digital "product", but it could quite easily be another medium, whether it be in print, film or tv... there are  so many things that influence us that digital is but a product of that thought and the industry in which we work. What we all have in common is that attention to detail. Below are some sites which reflect this:

Raising Children
http://raisingchildren.net.au
Clean look and feel - a challenge considering (a) amount of content, (b) number of stakeholders involved. Excellent navigation

Jonathan Yuen
http://www.jonathanyuen.com
Good use of video optimisation, storyboarding

Shaun Tan
http://www.shauntan.net/books.html
Illustration - very python-esque

Schweppes
http://www.schweppes.com.au
Excellence in execution - viewing with the sound off is compelling in itself, with the sound on it is so much more.

Memoirs of Hijiyama
http://www.curiousique.com/jykh/major
Dedication to atomic bomb victims this site demonstrates well executed design but lacks that attention to detail with the build - rollovers not preloading.

Where The Hell Is Matt
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com
Guy quits job > guy goes travelling > a mate suggested he dances in each location > brought to the attention of a company wanting to sponsor another trip - nice idea. In it's third year, and the latest video is due any day now. Simple and effective.

iBar
http://www.i-bar.ch
Twist on technology and interior design

Sculpit
http://users.telenet.be/sculpit/
Belgium architects - residence and studio for themselves in what they call "Antwerp’s narrowest house" located in Anwerp’s former red-light district. They took a 2.4-meter wide space between two buildings, erected a steel skeleton in it and installed four wooden floors, one each for work, dining, relaxing and sleeping, plus a bath tub on the roof [www.thecoolhunter.net]. The architects website does little to sell the design to it's audience, unlike another link found online of how the premises looks at night http://elultimoquecierrelapuerta.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/sculpit1.jpg. A marvellous display of ingenuity working in what are extremely challenging constraints.

Baumraum
http://www.baumraum.de/index.php?pid=7
German architects - the humble tree house takes on a new dimension!

Stats eg. Australian Bureau of Statistics
http://www.abs.gov.au/
Hardly used for bedtime reading, but more of a point that much of what we do for our clients can be coupled with the analysis of statistcal data of our clients existing website to better approach our clients objectives. 

I've posted another Umbraco patch here:

http://www.codeplex.com/umbraco/SourceControl/PatchList.aspx

The forum post is here:

http://forum.umbraco.org/yaf_postsm25747_Fun-with-Trees--New-patch-released.aspx 

A breif overview of what new features this adds:

• Allow users to “Browse” nodes without being able to view/edit them so they can edit child nodes of that node. This is set by permissions. Browse will now be the minimum permission that must be set for a node to show up in the content tree.
• Allow developers to put any ITree in any application including their own application. This is done by modifying the umbracoAppTree and umbracoApp table data. Previous to this patch, you could not add trees to the content, media or user applications.
  
• If an application contains only one ITree the system will not encapsulate it with a parent tree.
• Allow any user to have the “Send To Publish” capability
• Allow developers to extend any of the Tree’s which will allow them to modify it’s context menu, amongst other things
• Allow developers to easily create Trees using BaseTree (see example files)
• Increased performance with less overhead when loading ITrees, IActions, IActionHanders, etc… when using reflection.
  
• Increased performance when referencing the built in IActions as they are now all Singletons.
• Removed a lot of hard coded values (the other Trees apart from loadContent still need some updating)
• Ability to put the Recycle Bin for the content node anywhere you want.
  
• Fixed up some of the missing language terms for the English language file

 

Some amazing photographs on Boston.com documenting some of the events that have happened around the world so far this year. Well worth a look.

This morning I did a quick presentation about "Live Coding", and more so about Live Coding in regards to music. Its a very cool concept whereas the coder creates music in real time. For example, you could create a small loop that simply plays a kick drum every 600 milliseconds and compile it. While it's compiled and playing you could modify that same loop to play a hi-hat every 300 milliseconds, then compile that on-the-fly which would replace the currently running process on the correct timeframe. (This is a VERY basic example).

So far as I've seen there's not many people trying this and from those that i have seen, there's not many people that are good at it either. Theres a few platforms that are out there to get started:

• ChucK
• SuperCollider
• Impromptu
• Fluxus
• Quoth

I haven't tried them all (only ChucK and SuperCollider) but ChucK is heaps of fun to play around with. Quite a huge learning curve but i think i'll stick with it and see if i can come up with something worthwhile.

Here's some links and examples:

• http://cobb.stanford.edu/courses/cs547/071116/071116-cs547-300.wmv
• http://livecode.access-space.org/
• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2295676135942462117
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O5DJTOy6EA
• ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTt8r3LhCFM

 

 

  A tiny bit of research into rendering cylinders in actionscript (using a displacement filter) has resulted in this example.

 For the sake of anyone out there who is interested in building a renderer for PV3D (or any of the AS3 3D engines) I have included the class code (it won't compile without our supporting libraries, but it will give you an idea how it's done).