Blog

  • The Dark Underbelly of PCI

    October 11, 2004

    Computer Hardware Alert! This is a somewhat technical article about the device manager in Windows XP and (gasp!) BIOS settings and how they impacted installing an Adaptec Firewire interface. You have been warned!

    I had some hardware conflicts installing the card (sleepy yet?) into my (yawn) Athlon 2000+ rig. If you’re still awake…

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    DSri Seah
  • Return of MovieClip “Duh”

    October 11, 2004

    I was drifting in and out of sleep, it being 520AM and as such was an appropriate time for such drifting, and I was dreaming of MovieClips and Events. I was thinking how MovieClips were kind of ungainly affairs, and like a lot of old Flash objects were of the dynamic nature…that is, they don’t require explicit declaration of properties, and in the process of referencing a non-existant property you will bring it into being. This is the sort of behavior that makes debugging Flash somewhat trick, causing experienced programmers to roll their eyes at the laxness of the environment. But then it hit me: the technique I outlined earlier to re-establish object-context for a callback method was completely unnecessary…I could just store the object context right in the MovieClip itself! This would eliminate the hashing array and lookup!

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    DSri Seah
  • Fresh Electronic Delivery

    October 10, 2004

    My buddy Jeff over at Scintus has been busy as always, but had time to point me towards Fresh Electronic Delivery. It’s a design-oriented e-newsletter that serves up examples of great online design. It’s similar in scope to portals like linked up and gecko9, but it feels more focused in the editorial sense. I like! Not to mention that the design is clean and lovely.

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    DSri Seah
  • Random Image

    October 10, 2004

    Barry Birthday CardWas just browsing my archives, and came across this image I made for my friend Barry’s birthday party. Barry had just moved into his house and was consumed by painting. We thought it might be a good idea that he had something to distract him. Because we’re evil.

    This is a good example of some clip art scrounging + shameless use of built-in Photoshop layer effects. This follows some good advice from former CGD mentor Bill Colgrove, who taught me that clip art was not to be despised for its humble ready-to-wear origins, but to be used well.

    The wax, unconvincing as it is, is all Photoshop effects, so it was easy to change the shape. The better way to do it would have been to render it in a 3D program that supported subsurface light scattering, but I am several versions behind on my 3DS Max license. Anyway, the result is a slightly cheesy rendering that reminds me of multimedia from the 90s, but Barry is also slightly cheesy :-)

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    DSri Seah
  • Screwing around with Headers

    October 9, 2004

    I was curious what a 100K JPEG image would look like below the rather bland navigation bar. Not too bad, actually! The image whitespace at the top looks cool with the category tabs.

    But yes, it’s a big JPEG, both in terms of bandwidth and layout. The tick marks on the side are also a problem, because they blur out if the JPEG quality isn’t high enough. And you can’t really see very much text. Annoying? I guess I’ll find out.

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    DSri Seah