I went to the cinema yesterday and watched ‘Hitch, the Date Doctor’.
Great movie, really great movie. I guess I even learned the one or the
other thing about women; who knows..

In other news: Apple announced 10.4 Tiger to be released on the 29th
April. I took a quick glance at the list of features and.. totally…
fell in love. Core Image and Core Video *and* the additions to Core
Audio seriously make me drool

Just imagine, adding tons of blur, distortion, color-correction, alpha,
blend-modes etc on Video and Image material. In realtime. Calculated by
your Videocards GPU. And if the GPU lacks some power the CPU does the
rest of it.

High speed.

That’s wicked.

And Core Audio now allows to create one logical audio device out of
several physical ones; So you can take your built-in audio-card, add a
pci-card, add a firewire-card and, create one big 8in 8out audio-card
out of them, and route between them as if it was one card. Ah. I could
continue for hours. Great stuff.

More about this soon.

Due to popular demand there’s now the option to save your settings in
the comment-dialog, so that they’re automatically loaded next time you
wanna give an insightfull comment.

In addition to that, there’s now a little XMLRPC bridge between this
blog (www.terhech.de) and my LiveJournal
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/el_zeratulo/). I set me up the
LiveJournal some months ago but never really wrote anything in there;
So I connected this blog and that Livejournal, and from now on most of
my Blog entries here will appear on the LiveJournal too. This is
especially cool since some of my friends hang out there. Next topic on
my todo-List ist to beautify that LiveJournal, it’s damn ugly right now

And I’ll create a seperate category for my Track-A-Day Posts, so they don’t fill the whole blog.

Yeah, I’m still at it. This is my 2. Track-A-Day release, once again
nothing I’m too proud of, but what to expect if there’s only limited
time.

This time it’s a piano piece, Sequenced in Renoise 1.5 Final
(Registered! ) and recorded and exported in Apple Garageband. I
really wanted to work on something slightly classical piano like today,
so I’m actually glad that this worked out as planned; here we go:

• Length: 1:06 Minutes
• Software: Renoise 1.5, Apple Garageband
• Title: Generali Krebs
• Download the File here

It’s so boring it doesn’t even deserve a title.
Ok, so instead of starting a track I went for a jog and had a long and nice phone-session with a friend;
So like 20min ago I felt a bit guilty for not really adhering to my
Track-A-Day proposal. That’s why I started Apple Garageband and
recorded some chords as well as a nice bassline. Nothing special, just
8 Chords, 2 Basslines and the familiar Garageband Sound-Quality (All
these Instruments come right out of Logic Audio). However, in case
you’re still interested:

• Length: 1:10 Minutes
• Software: Apple Garageband 1.1
• Title: OneOneZeroFourZeroFive
• Download the File here

I’ll honestly try better next time!

Most of you should know that I publish self-composed/created music under my own little net-label, SARBATKA.

There’s been a steady decline in releases though. That is due to other
important undertakings I had to participate in. Another reason is that
the steady news & action bombardement on the Internet kinda made me
brusq. I developed a frighteningly short attention span. “No fuckin blood? Nobody died within the last 2minutes of that movie? Goddamn boring, switch the channel ma!”

However; from today on I’ll commit myself to a new little game I forced
upon me: ‘Track-A-Day’. I’ll try to release a new small track everyday
(That is every day I actually am at home after work. Like for example
tomorrow I’ll go to the cinema after work and probably won’t return
until 10pm). This has the advance that It’ll stay in range of the
above-mentioned short attention span, so I won’t end up having 365
half-ready-never-published tracks collecting dust on my harddrive.

No matter how bad the track is, no matter how short it is. I’ll release
the shit. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll publish it at sarbatka or or
here, but I guess that’s not important as of yet. I’ll start with my
first track now.

-ez

Those are awesome stories, thx to DiggiDis for linking me up this shit

I mean; There has to be a developer.. someone who studied mechatronic
or engineering, someone who is… sane? How much money do you need to
pay him to develop this?

And of what use is it?

I rethought my Ideas I had concerning developing Flash Applications without the IDE.

I still like that Idea, but it would be quite nice to achieve something
along the lines of Content/Code seperation here. Basically developing
the code in Actionscript 2.0, creating the Vector-Elements using
SVG->SWF Conversion (or SSWF Scripts), and defining compile-time objects in ming. In the end one could compile all these files into an application using MTASC.
The interesting part would be that one could glue all these elements
using a nice XML Schema. Something along the lines of Glade or XUL,
just more enhanced.

Maybe some sort of compiler could even generate the gross of SSWF/SVG/Ming files out of the XML Description.

The more I think about it, the more I like that idea; think about the
relationship between XHTML, PHP and Javascript. PHP would be the Ming
part, XHTML, the XML part and Javascript the Actionscript part.

There’s another advance in using this method: One could fix or change
applications on the commandline, without the need to use the Flash IDE.
This is especially handy if the Flash Application is deployed on some
sort of Linux/BSD system, or if one does use Linux on the Desktop.

It’s of course quite useless if your primary flash focus is on
Gfx/Effect style stuff, in particular as there’re already really good
specialised Windows applications which significantly simply the process
of creating SWF effect animations.

I guess I’ll try to invest some time into the design of such a language
and write a small python application which compiles these XML files
into a set of ming/as/sswf files. Sounds like a fun project

In other news – and while I’m talking about it – here’s a nice
Actionscript editor which I’ve been using for some time now in favor of
the Flash IDE.

SEPY it’s free,
works on Windows as well as Mac OS X (and should work under Linux too,
as it’s all just PyQT/Python as far as I remember), and has some nifty
features which ease your development routine.

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Link:

The Commonly Confused Words Test written by

shortredhead78 on
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Dating

I’m almost exclusively using Linux at work now. It’s been working quite
well, many tasks can be achieved faster than on windows, other tasks
can’t be achieved at all

One of those latter tasks is generating Flash content.

I did install Flash MX using Wine, and it runs. But I wouldn’t call it
fast, nor wouldn’t I dare to describe it as ’stable’. So I only use it
if I really only have to take care of small things – and even then it
fails from time to time.

So I thought that it could be a good idea to switch from IDE-Based
Flash development to Code-Based Flash development, just as I do it when
developing Python or PHP/Html applications. In Flash one usually draws
all the elements, creates transitions, writes some code, and lets the
Flash compiler generate a nice SWF. That’s what I thought. After I
considered the process again, I realized that I – especially when
developing Intranet-Applications – mostly create/draw the layout in
Photoshop, export the elements to PNG24 from there, import those in
Flash, and just use those thingies in Flash. Without doing almost any
drawing at all.

That’s of course a pretty bad way of doing things as the vector-based
nature of Flash would allow for greatly reduced filesizes if I’d draw
these Objects and Elements in Flash or any other Vector Software. But
especially when developing Intranet-Applications, this reducement in
load-time doesn’t run up to the loss in development time I have when
redrawing many of the Elements in Flash.

So, if most of my Flash usage is reduced to writing ActionScript and
importing images anyway, why shouldn’t I get rid of the Flash IDE at
all (think Flash MX 2004 brrr) and completely code the whole
application using Actionscript or something similar.

So I went on to explore the current state of open source ActionScript / SWF compilers. Here’s what I found:

MTASC:

MTASC is a complete commandline ActionScript 2.0 compiler.
Multiplattform, quite bugfree and faster than the standard Flash
compiler. Especially the multiplattform thing sounds nice since I use
Mac OS X at home. I sincerely hope the AS2.0 implementation outstants
the Flash MX 2004 one, as I’ve had severe problems with this one,
mostly due to weird bugs in the compiler (like, compile-error: Wait,
drink a cup of tea, try again – compiles!). One can even use Flash
Components (although one needs to prepare things in Flash MX in order
to do so). The whole idea sounds good, and it has a nice double double
plus side: One doesn’t need to learn another new language. It’s all
ActionScript – and if you’re currently reading this you should be
familiar with it.

However, one problem is that everything it produces is real-time SWF.
There’s nothing pre-compiled, every line, every textbox, every polygon
has to be calculated and drawn at run-time on account of the User’s
cpu. (of course, one could include a seperate SWF-File filed with
Objects and Elements, but that would require the Flash IDE again).

However, I still like MTASC alot, and I’ll try to use it on some small future projects.

Ming:

Most people know ming. It’s the standard PHP library for creating flash
content. It provides a nice API, has included functions for importing
Audio or Video, can include fonts, and even offers wrappers for various
programming languages like c, c++, python, perl etc.

However, the last release is from 2004.02.02, and it seems (or smells)
a bit stalled. So I checked their CVS and saw that there’re still
people actively working on the project (last commit I saw was something
around 3 days ago).  I’ve had problems compiling the python extension
before, and on the downside one needs to learn a new API in order to
develop ming, but since most PHP distributions allow it anyway it would
be a good thing to learn this if you’re into PHP. I’ve used ming before
(in order to create some commandline Flash generation utilities) and
I’ll eagerly wait for a new release.

SSWF:

SSWF is some sort of language in order to script SWF files. Looked good
at a first glance, until I saw that including ActionScript works much
like coding in Postscript. Using a weird stack and registers and
whatnot. It includeds Mp3 support though. I’m not sure I’ll ever use
this, but might be just the right solution for someone out there.

f4l:

Flash for Linux. I first saw this in 2003 or 2004, and I’m not sure
what I should think about this one. On the one hand it’s nice that some
people are developing something like the Flash IDE for Linux, and on
the other did I write this whole article in order to find solutions
which help in not using the Flash IDE anymore. So this one is quite
abundant here, but I thought I’d include it anyway.

So.. That’s it. I’ll try to write a nice small application using either MTASC or Ming, soon – if I find some time, that is.