As mentioned in my previous post, we’ve just gotten back from the UK where my sister Corine got married to Rob. It was a wonderful party at which we enjoyed ourselves very much. I pondered long and hard on what to get them, thinking about doing something on the guitar, but I didn’t think it was the right kind of party for that. I thought about doing a speech, but I knew there were already going to be a few very good ones and didn’t want to bore them with mine, although I do regret for passing on the chance to say something to a special person who made all the difference for me in getting through some rough days at school when we were young. Instead I chose to draw/paint something. They say a picture says more than a thousand words, but then again ‘they’ haven’t heard the great speeches so I’ll never trust that statement again ;). Anywayz, this is my way of saying ‘guyz we love you very much and wish you all the best together!’.

And the sketch which I created first:

Sooo it has been kind of silent around here lately. It’s annoying really. Although I normally keep these kind of post to myself, I thought I’d make an exception. Silence may give you the wrong impression that nothing is going on here, while the truth is quite the opposite. So what’s causing it?
Well first of all, I’ve been working on the same project for the past few years, and it’s gonna stay in AS2. Although the project is great, I feel AS2 is .. well .. so last year (for a few years already). On the other hand except for performance reasons I’m not jumping up and down to move to AS3. We’ve come up with a lot of ‘fixes’ for problems in AS2, which are now mostly standard features people are praising in AS3, such as solid error handling, reflection, logging, dictionaries etc and in addition nothing beats MTASC as a compiler:). Besides that I’m still not too sure about migrating the project to AS3, although I myself feel I might need to move on or miss the last rowing AS3 boat entirely.

So what is going on on that front is that AS2 development continues, while I’m turning to AS3 as well, for example by developing new stuff with Gaia (Steven Sacks’ framework), doing some tutorial work, and I’ll probably do the next NeuroFlasher game in AS3. Migrating the current project is kinda hard because of the 30 or so people involved and the 1000+ fla’s that have to be migrated as well (although AS2 to AS3 communication might help us out there, the garbage collection problems in the current FP9 player will not).

One of the other causes of radio silence is… truth be told.. family & social life. Yep I know if you are a workaholic this will sound sad :). Roan just turned 1, Leon is almost 5 and we share many a happy hour which couldn’t be further from the concept of silence than it is already. Besides that I enjoy playing AD&D, AT43, and a lot of other computerbased games such as starcraft, diablo, warcraft, with a bunch of friends where I live and online… and yes once you start …. Although this only happens about one night in a week, if one night is all you got to do something extra, it diminishes the output by about well yes a 100%! But of course that is entirely my own fault.

So what else is there? Ah yes, exercise woohoo. I set myself a goal to gain (yes you are reading it correctly) some kilograms, and up to now it’s working quite well, although the muscle/fat gain ratio could be improved :). In addition I’m working on a tattoo for Jeremy from New Jersey for his son Aidan, like I have one for mine. Up to now it’s going nicely, although there is still a certain amount of work left to be done. I’ll post some pictures of it. Which brings me to my most recent painting, a work I did for my sister Corine’s wedding in the UK, from which we just got home. An awesome party with a very nice family, but I won’t go into details here (but I’ll post the painting and some pictures). Last but not least, the beta version of NeuroPuzzles 1.3 is close to completion, and I’m very excited about it’s release (and yes I’ll post some pictures and more info about that too!).
So here I am, on Sunday morning, with a few hours of holiday to spare, before I’m getting back to work to tomorrow, full of plans for improving the frequency of my blogposts with the images & words promised above!

Today I got some funny comments on my blog, and with even more weirdness in the comments management panel, so it was that time again to change the passwords and perform another security upgrade. So welcome to this new version of wordpress. Installation was as painless as ever.

I was thinking about how I used to program Java before I got hooked onto Flash. I started on Java because of its conceptual beauty. And I loved how all the academic OO concepts taught and studied at the University could be tested and implemented in Java. Hell, I even swore Composition Filters amounted to Object Oriented Salvation for a while .

My thoughts wandered back to my first java projects at TriMM back in 1999 and onwards. My boss at that time (more…)

Today my project manager informed me that a dutch organization, M&ICT, which came about through an intensive cooperation of several departments of local government such as the department of Justice, Eduction, Culture & Science and more, is holding another competition (the 5th to be exact), called ‘Serious Gaming and Simulation for better safety’.

The documentation can be found here (although it’s in dutch) http://www.m-ict.nl/, and to my pleasant surprise, Behrloo, the system of which I am the lead frontend architect, is prominently featured as an example project and might even be a contestant as well. Check out page 11.

Another preliminary research report can be found here: https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/rws/wnt/toolbox/ Rij-Assistent%20-%20Rapport%20Serious gaming%20-%20mei%202007.pdf, check out page 40 onwards!

Very nice read, although not all the information is correct. For example they mention that Behrloo has been built in .Net using flash for the graphical elements. The truth is that the backend was built in .Net and the frontend is a fullfletched object oriented system, which -yes- displays graphical elements, but has no less than 300 classes and several subapplications under the hood. No timelines were hurt during the development of this system :).

Nice to see TriMM is mentioned as well!

Signing off!

Hans Wichman

Sometime you come across posts or pages that really amaze me.

At times like that I am amazed at the amount of bunglers that are in this line of work. I am amazed at the poor level of self-knowlegde these individuals posses. And I am amazed at the arrogance & cockiness with which these people go through life. And last but not least I am amazed at the ease with which these people seem to twist the facts without any remorse or sense of shame at what they are doing. I cannot conclude otherwise than that these individuals have been hiding behind, or rather are glued face first onto a solid brick wall, since apparently all the do’s and don’ts in the industry (or in general for that matter) got lost on them over the years.

Coming across an article like this:
http://maximporges.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html, shows I’m not alone in this and I couldn’t agree more (only the locations are different).

Anyway I’m getting side tracked, the main reason I’m writing this article was a page I came across yesterday.

The person who created this page was involved (more…)

There are some new exciting developments going in Behrloo. The number of hits in Google seem to grow every day, and we have some exciting new plans for upcoming releases. I wish I had more time to develop content and cases myself, but being the (frontend) technical architect of a system this big is challenging enough as it is.
At the moment we are diving into the controversial subject of application frameworks, which is something really enjoyable to sink your teeth until it’s dark outside and everyone’s sound asleep

We had some very nice talks with Stefan Richter from FlashComGuru last week as well when he came over to TriMM to discuss one of our other projects called YPKA. We managed to sneak away to a mexican dinner for a while with the other Flash Geeks to share ideas etc.

All in all an exciting and good week, which ain’t over yet, so if you’ll excuse… I’m off back to work

Yesterday I took a big step, I removed my screatoris site, and put a collection of my best work online at Art.Objectpainters.Com. This is more of a psychological step then anything else. A decision to get back to the basics of fun, doing what I like and trying to do it professionally.

Yeah I know, it’s a technical blog, but hey I warned you about the odd post now and then. Well there it is :). Alive and kicking. 12 weeks and growing. In the left bottom post it’s even waving at you .

I think one of the things that slows some of us down most now and then, is the drive to improve on the way things are done. That’s probably why starting something new is tiresome, since there is so much to improve upon, in turn slowing progress itself. If you do not carefully state priorities, this kind of backtrack improvement can quickly lead you off track, and you’ll be improving things you never knew needed improvement in the first place, and you probably can’t remember why you are doing what you are doing anyway. Luckily “look for things to improve” is not our only mantra :), “don’t do things yourself, others can do better” is another one of my favourites, and not only because I liked the Dragon Prince series.

But look here, I’m getting side-tracked myself, the point is that looking at my earlier post, I could see straight away that I was going to need to improve on source code postings. I wanted a few things from my source-code-post-mechanism:

1. provide source code in a readable format (keep the pretty printing)
2. provide linenumbers that will disappear when you copy & paste the code
3. not necessarily break formatting (wrap lines etc)
4. provide long listings inline, with scrollbars if needed
5. allow sources to be downloaded

Armed with my checklist I set out in the World of Wordpress plugins (it’s a pun only understood by Warcraft players). Which reminds me, if you see me reverting back to some kind of awfull shorthand, such as kk hf m8, cu l8r (okay have fun mate, see you later) it is because I play too much online games :).

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