Today I attended Collin Moock's AS3 From the ground up tour. This was organized at the same location of FITC which ended yesterday.

I heard some stories about the though material to get through during this 9 hour training day. Good preparation and a good night of sleep where required to follow his presentation. However it was a long day sitting at very uncomfortable wooden chairs, it was really good to follow. Collin mentioned some very useful tips and information that where new to me.

The audience was mixed from really beginners to pro's. I can understand the real beginners needed the preparation before attending, but for the professionals only the last few hours where really interesting. I think this training would be perfect for people who're now working from the timeline only and are thinking about starting with classes. They could learn a lot from Collin's clear explained and well organized information.

I've a lot of respect for Collin's knowledge. Like a walking reference guide he knew without looking at any documentation all answers to very specific questions which came from the audience. He's very talented and the right person to be on tour right now!

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Yesterday was the last and second day of FITC Amsterdam. Based on the program titles and descriptions I expected the first day being the most interested for me. But that's not true at all.

The second session of the day was called "The circle" by Jared Tarbell. It should teach in a creative session about getting a better understanding of why the circle is considered as the most perfect geometric object. I'd expected this to be a designer session, but in fact it could be inspiration for a designer, but to get all his examples done you really should be a genius mathematician and coder like Jared Tarbell is. Hopefully he'll post his examples online very soon to see and try to understand how he made those fantastic examples!

The other session that surprised me was Ralph Hauwert's session about 2D and 3D effects. I'd expected this would be a papervision talk, but it was more than that. Ralph shared in a enthusiastic and motivating way his thoughts about dealing with the limitations we have with actionscript. I'll soon post some video's I made during this session.

I didn't joined Koen De Weggheleire's session about playing with bitmaps, because I already saw this session at Adobe Max last year, but I heard some positive feedback about his session. Off course I didn't expected something else since he's a good presenter with a great topic to talk about.

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I just woke up after FITC's first conference day which was a great day full off inspirational sessions!

Some sessions really amazed me, cause I didn't knew about all the details for example about Kaboom!!! by Seb Lee-Delisle. I just knew it existed but I've never used it before. For those who've never heard about kaboom!!!, it's a really great particle system. Within just a few lines of code you're able to create some great effects! You should check it out yourself.

Another session which was quite inspiring was Samuel Agesilas Pastel's one about Saffron, an UML tool build in AIR. I've never heard about this application before, but it sounds verry usefull to me! Let's check this out as soon the first release will come out!

Offcourse the sessions about Paperworld3d, Papervision3d, Actionscript4 and Red5 where good as well, but the above surprised me, not knowing they existed or what was possible in such an easy way.

I'm planning to post some video's I made during the conference early next week, this week I won't have the possibility in my schedule...

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In this article you'll learn about some basic functionality with the latest version of Papervision3D. After reading and understanding this article whith it's examples you should be able to build something like the simple example from above.

(more...)

Tags: Actionscript, Papervision3D // 7 Comments »

This month we finally finished migrating our servers to PHP5. Migrating to php5 was a big thing for us, since it isn't completely backwards compatible. After a lot of research on the running PHP4 code and a lot of testing we had a list of problems for each account to fix. The most common problem we experienced was based on the use of DOM XML, this extension is no longer supported under PHP5. Unfortunately we had a lot of code using this so we had to solve it without reprogramming all these parts. Lucky enough, Alexandre Alapetite wrote a fix for this, which made it actually work under PHP5 without any code changes. The only thing we needed to do was including his class when functionality of DOM XML was needed.
Beside this there where only little account specific problems which are not worth naming here.

After we finally tested all the accounts and made clear what problems to expect and how to fix these, we could start the real migration. We planned to do this at night during some weekends, so the inconvenience would be minimal. Beside of only upgrading to PHP5, we also installed suPHP for supporting PHP4 in CGI mode. We configured this in a way so we can change to PHP4 on the fly on an account base, so other accounts won't change and keep running under PHP5. I would advise this to anybody who needs to migrate. It's a good fallback solution in case of any problems.

Thanks to the good preparation the downtime was minimal and we didn't faced any unexpected issues!

The whole reason of this migration is off course PHP4's end of life. Since the developers of PHP stopped supporting PHP4 from 2007-12-31 almost 3.5 years after the first release of PHP5.
Personally I think it is good to move on and I understand from a developer point of view that they don't want to support out-dated software anymore. But when you look at the current PHP usage statistics you'll see still 73% of PHP installations are using version 4! They need to take conclusions out of this! The world isn't ready for PHP4's end of life! Still so many applications are depending on this version!

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Last week I've been working on some simple tests with the latest Alpha release of Papervision3D. I found out there was no documentation available yet (or at least I couldn't find it). That's why I generated my own ASDocs documentation and published it online. I think that I might not be the only one who’s looking for this.

The documentation is based on the the Public Alpha 2.0 - Great White release which can be found at Google code.

Please notice that this release is in Alpha status, so as Ralph Hauwert mentioned here, don't use it when you need to deliver a project by tomorrow, the code isn't optimized yet!

You can find the documentation here.

I plan to post some examples of it early next week.

Tags: Actionscript, Papervision3D // 3 Comments »

Finally I found time to set up my blog. From now on I’ll write on a regular base about my findings about Flash, Flex, Air, PHP and everything else that got my interest.

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