Report:

It’s been a couple of weeks since the last, enthusiastic post. The last 14 days have been awful, and though I’d rather just forget them that wouldn’t give a very balanced account of life, trying to follow the huna way.

To start with I should have been in England at the start of the month. I had a really packed and enjoyable 3 days all lined up. Business deal first day, and excuse to deduct my expenses. Then up to Birmingham, fish and chip supper with mother, then evening meeting with my Huna guru. Next day, pub lunch with best buddy, drive up to visit dad, overnight in Audley (probably full of scotch),  bit of shopping for sausage, spices and other stuff you can’t get here, then home. Perfect!

I woke on the 2nd feb to the news on danish radio that London was snowed in. For that to make the danish national news I knew it had to be bad. Sure enough there were no flights landing in Stansted. Bummer! And there was me thinking I was in control. I decided straight away to abort, not wanting to spend the day at the airport waiting for a flight that would never materialise, and wondering how I would get on driving a hire car with summer tires in a snow storm, not to mention flying home again. For a few minutes it fealt like a gift. There was no-one expecting anything of me for the next couple of days. Unfortunately I couldn’t keep it a secret that I was home and suddenly it was me that was snowed under with stuff people needed me to do, on top of which my wife and kids got ill and I went from jet-setter to nursemaid/stressed programmer within hours. Whether the disappointment weakened my defenses I don’t know, but sure enough the next weekend I went down with man-flu of the worst kind. Unfortunately (again) on the Monday my wife was even more ill than me, so instead of a cozy day in bed punctuated by the occasional hot, sweet cup of tea and sympathetic remark, I had to look after our 4 kids who, as luck would have it, were on holiday. I supposed it couldn’t be worse, but then it was! I had to work Tuesday and Wednesday, actually in the offices of a customer, which is not my prefered environment at the best of times. Thursday and Friday I’d plans to work on the house, but couldn’t find the energy.

The upshot of all this was that negative thoughts were allowed to creep back and dominate. Frustration, guilt and worst of all self-doubt took hold. There still here tonight, but now I’m determined to tackle them. I have a stack of half finished projects I need to close. The rest of febuary I’ll just have to concentrate on clearing my desk. I don’t see where I’m going to find the time for self development, unless I get up in the middle of the night, as I’ve done to write this post. The one positive thing I can take from this is that I usually do have time and freedom for whatever I really want to do. That’s a luxury the wage slaves I’m working with may never know.

Therapy over, that’s enough feeling sorry for myself. Onward! I’ve got another 5 days working “on location”. To be honest, I’m beginning to get used to it,  so it shouldn’t be too bad. I’m through with feeling guilty about not getting the house done, that will just have to wait ’til next month, where I can actually work on it during the day while the kids are at school. See what I mean? Pure Luxury!

What else? Have started work on platform to revolutionise classroom IT. Have landed first real “digital signage” project… will hopefully have some encouraging success stories again soon.

Things to do: book new trip to England!!!

So far…

It’s about one month since I conciously decide to use Huna.

I was going to write a load of background information to explain the context of my interest and experiences. This is because I generally believe you have to know the messenger to understand the message. However, I feel compelled to dive straight in with stuff that’s actually happening.

January has been a most unusual month. Whether Huna has been the cause or merely the catalyst I don’t know, but things have certainly been going my way. I’ve started dreaming extremely vividly and really getting in touch with my inner self. (OK, that sounds far out, even in my own ears)  Confidence has been running high, people around me seem to know what I want before I even explain or ask for it. Before I go too far, it’s not that *every* customer is prepared to do what I say, but it has been the tendency. I’m sure on a psychological plane alot can be put down to the fact that when you transmit confidence others respond to this quite naturally. What freaked me out a bit today was a customer ringing to me just as I was writing to him. I’d decided I wanted to pass on the project I’ve been working freelance on. Before I’d written 2 lines of my letter the phone rings and he asked me to drop the project I’ve been working on and offers me a new one. Coincidence? Well in a way that’s what this post, and this diary is about, logging specific events to see if they can be put down to probability.

“Million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”(Terry Prachett)

UrbanHuna

The latest project I’ve been involved on is a website for an old school pal of mine who is putting on a workshop in Birmingham, England in october.

The subject is an ancient polynesian philosophy called Huna, and it’s relavence in modern urban life, hence the name of the site, UrbanHuna.com
I was curious to hear more about the subject matter. Normally when you find an old school chum on the net they’ve become an accountant, music teacher or something obscure for the council. It therefore came as a surprise to find this particular friend was training as a shaman. Not exaclty in the top 10 most ordinary jobs in the world, and possibly not within the first 1000 I would think of.

I just finished reading my first book on the subject. I wasn’t expecting much, and certainly not that it would change the way I look at life forever. OK, forever maybe an over dramatically long time, but we’ll see…

To quote Hitch Hikers (roughly), “they set out to find the meaning to Life, the Universe and Everything and in a break with tradition actually found it”.

I’ve decided to blog about my experiences with Huna and since my IT blog is sitting here doing nothing in particular it will now become my Huna diary. As an experiment I am going to apply the Huna principles to my life this year and see what happens.

The Flex/Flash Platform get’s a new website

OK, I finally made an entire project in Flex Builder. For a flasher, using a framework feels like trying to assemble a watch while wearing thick woolly mittens, until you discover you just have to press the “assemble watch” button.

If you’re in any doubt as to which platform, Flash IDE or Flex Builder to use, here’s my take in a nutshell.

Flasher: “Anything you can do in Flex I can do prettier in Flash and it will only fill a tenth of your Flex program”

Flexer: “OK, but this needs to be shipped this week, bug free”

Flasher: “I can manage that, let’s take a look…”

Flexer: “It’s a simple database look-up that populates this datagrid, and then there’s a small text editior for editing entries.”

Flasher: (to himself, “Wow that looks bloody complicated!”) “Shouldn’t all those objects whoosh in from the top corner into a 3D matrix with little animated logo’s showing what type they are?”

Flexer: “No”

If you want to really make a graphical impact, Flash, Photoshop, After Effects, these are your tools. Don’t try wrestling with the Flex framework, it will make you physically vomit. You will experience it as “not working properly” as soon as you start to animate anything (even with the built in Tweeny things).

If your coming from Visual Studio, don’t open Flash. You will mistakenly judge it as crap and start learning Silverlight. Open Flex Builder on the other hand and you’ll be right at home no matter what the backend is written in.

Any if you were looking for the actual website…

GIS, Flash and 3D…

I started this blog to talk about the 3 things that interest me most, GIS, Flash and 3D. Now my worlds are colliding. Here’s my first Flash 10 example that combines all three…

http://www.opensourcery.net/f10/3d/HG3_Flash10.html
(requires Flash10 player beta)

The map is a hyperGIS 1.5 client, written in AS1. This is loaded into AS3 and remarkably retains it’s interactivity despite running over 2 different Virtual Machines (AVM1 + AVM2). OMG!

hyperGIS 3 will be pure AS3, but it’s great to know that even the existing projects can be loaded as an interactive texture in the new player. Bravo Adobe!

Source: http://www.opensourcery.net/f10/3d/HG3_flash10.as

Flash 10 Experiments

Flash 10 player is upon us and I for one havn’t been able to resist having a play with it. After setting up FlashDevelop to use the nightly build of Flex SDK, you’re all set.

The nestable 3D Sprites are very promising, while the hardware acceleration I waited so long and so patiently for is a bit of a letdown, being primarily targeting video playback for now. (for the full dirt, check here: http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/what-does-gpu-acceleration-mean.html)

I’ve started doing some experiments, and logging some bugs. As it’s difficult to find examples out there I thought I’d compile my own list here.

my own efforts:
Panorama: http://www.opensourcery.net/f10/fov/Panorama.html
source: http://www.opensourcery.net/f10/fov/Panorama.as (insert your own image paths)

3D environment test: http://www.opensourcery.net/f10/3d/Nested.html
source: http://www.opensourcery.net/f10/3d/NestedTransform.as

Other stuff:
(Will post it when I find any!)

All in all the most exciting release of Flash ever, for both designer and programmers.

 

 

Wiimote Control

This article is about one the worst kept secrets on the internet, how to control your PC with the Wii remote control. This might be old news to some, but it was definately news to me to find out how staight forward it actually is. With glovePIE the average web scripter (like me) can be up and running in no time.

For this you will need:
1 Wii remote (though you can actually use several),
Bluetooth (I bought a dongle in Aldi for £15), 
PC and internet connection to download *free* software.

You can do alot with the pitch and roll functions, so no need for an IR bar to start with.

I’m currently invloved in a project building interfaces controlled by webcams. In an attempt to find a more stable approach, with higher definition and less effected by the surrounding environment and after seeing Johnny Lee Chungs amazing inventions , I thought I’d check out the Wii controller.

After a bit of digging I found the basic recipe (Wiili is a great resource). First you need a Bluetooth driver that can talk to the wiimote. It seems Blue Soliel is tried and tested so I downloaded the free trial version. Get it here

Then you need some way to actually connect what’s coming out of the wiimote to your application. The easy way on Windows is with glovePIE, a handy little application from Carl Kenner. Cheers Carl ;O)

With glovePIE you can map the Wiimote output to a built-in mouse, keyboard or joystick emulator. So any application that uses mouse and keyboard (and there’s a few of those around) should be controllable with the wiimote, though I wouldn’t suggest you try to use it to write a novel.

With some very simple commands you can take a parameter, say the pitch of the wii controller, and map it to the axis of the mouse.

mouse.x = wiimote.Pitch

Because the pitch is between +90 and -90 degrees and the mouse uses a 0 to 1 scale, you need to add a multiplier:

mouse.x = (wiimote.Pitch + 90) / 180

And that’s about as complex at it gets. I’ve tried adding smoothing algorithms and it’s just like working in Actionscript or javascript.

There are some sample scripts included with glovePIE and you can download all my scripts here: http://www.opensourcery.net/glovePIE/piescripts.zip
I’ve tried to comment them quite a bit so you can see what’s going on.

That should be enough to get started. I’ll post again when my NYKO bar arrives…

Ofcourse, when you’re overiding the mouse input it can be tricky to close the program again, I just use the keyboard and the task list, or the wiimote and a click on the mouse if I can control the cursor with the wiimote.

Try it, it’s great fun. Thanks to Carl Kenner for sharing his little creation. 
For .NET developers there’s a C# class
For Unity programmers there’s also a plugin under development

What’s the crack?

Here I’ll be publishing experiments, comments and observations mainly about the subjects of GIS, Flash and 3D with which I work.

I’m lucky enough to work professionally with these technologies. I couldn’t have learned half as much as I have done without the work of all those other budding enthusiasts out there in cyber geo-space, though I’ve never had a forum to publish my own findings. (that’s a lie I’ve started 2 blogs previously only to forget them again. Third time a charm?).

There’s certainly alot going on in this industry. I’ve been creating online mapping apps since 1998 and am delighted the mainstream seems to have finally caught up. We can see this in the sales of hyperGIS (www.hypergis.com). Once upon a time it would take us 3 hours to explain what it was, now we can just say “a bit like Google Earth only in Flash” and people understand.

Hello world of GIS, Flash and 3D

Welcome to my new blog. Thanks WordPress.com, it looks spiffing