Nivas.hr blog

Alessandro Crugnola aka Sephiroth just released great new Firefox extension for Flash developers. The extension comes with all currently available Flash player plugins (from the v2 to the most recent 9,0,16) and allows you to easily switch from one plugin to another, or also to remove the currently installed plugin (eg. for testing the express install feature).

Permalink to the post on his site.

I have just updated our banner portfolio a bit. Take a look. Browse trough portfolio with top frame menu.

If somebody has any useful tips, please - do tell! Since I got my new Intel T2400 CPU powered laptop, I can't get more than 2 hours of battery work time with it. The laptop brand is Compal (yes yes...I know) and it doesn't come with auto screen dim power settings in BIOS. I would really like to know why XP doesn't have that pretty OS X feature which dimms the screen on laptop automatically when you are not working (power saving options). I couldn't find 3rd party implementation of this aether.
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Today, I have read on metapundit.net some thoughts on how to improve php coding. Don't see the real point in this, except the faster coding. Readability and maintenance is degraded slightly.

Update - 18.11.2006. - After taking some time to think about this, I have to agree with MetaPundit. Putting var names into array, and looping trough them makes code more maintainable. But I still have some issues with this, regarding more complex stuff.
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Wawa weee! Yes, first Croatian Social Network site is ready for public. If you are interested in checking out www.ekipa.hr, drop a comment here, with your email address and somebody will invite you in!

Today I'we noticed quite strange bug on google.hr. Check out the photo.

It seems that 'hrvatski' and 'Hrvatska' words owerlap. Yes, I really don't have anything better to do, that's why I'm posting this. 

Writing to a file is easy with PHP. But what will happen if 2 processes try to write to a file at once? Exactly, your data might easily become corrupted and useless. You don't want that to happen, of course. That's why you need to implement file locking. flock() is your friend. For writing to a file, you want to obtain an exclusive lock on the file. There must never be concurrent writes to a file, after all. Here's an example.

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This rotating Stargate is 19 inches tall with light-up chevrons. An RCX drives a treadmill, which spins the inner ring randomly for x seconds, then reverses direction, seven times. Won best medium space award and best brick mod at BrickFest 2005.

Link to full article.

Check out¨new amazing and addictive flash game - Line Rider!

Typeorganism (cool flash ascii art generator) vs. TCMUnderground (crazy trash movie site)

I'we just noticed crazy Mozilla Firefox feature introduced in v1.5. Go to Help / Report broken website / Problem type / Browser not supported. Easy as that. Mozilla guys implemented this option so they could contact site administrators to fix problems. No idea how they intend to do that, since those IE only sites are made by people who don't know better.

Now you can be like Lt. Uhura and stick that Bluetooth headset in your ear with this Asono Freebit-H1, giving you nine hours of talk time and 200 hours of standby. Its Norwegian makers at Asono have somehow shoehorned all those electronics into its tiny form factor, making it quite a bit smaller than the one Uhura wore. It'll be available for 84 Euros ($105) in Europe first.

Multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. An experiment aimed at providing the experience of the Minority Report interface. But without gloves. Check it out - it's spectacular!

Now we're getting somewhere! Carlos Ulloa Matesanz has been working on his Flash 8 3D engine for some time. Check out his latest demo of a 3D Rhino, exported from 3DS Max and rendered complete with textures in Flash. You may have seen this engine in real life already at the Robbie Williams site RudeBox. It's been heavily optimized since then and Carlos also just announced that this engine will be Open Source! Check out his LAB for updates, and his magnificant portfolio.

O'Reilly just announced new service - O'Reilly code search. You can search code from nearly 700 O'Reilly books. The database currently contains over 123,000 individual examples, composed of 2.6 million lines of code — all edited and ready to use. That's nice!

Adobe released a beta version of Flash Player 9 that adds new Full Screen capabilities to the Flash Player. This feature was primarily introduced into the update so that video players can go fullscreen.Full Screen mode is activated using either Actionscript 2 or Actionscript 3 by setting the value of a new property Stage.displayState, it can only be set in response to a mouse or keyboard event, which stops malicious use of this new feature. Keyboard events do not occur when the Flash Player is in full screen mode, so input fields will not work.

More information on fullscreen mode can be found at Wiki - Full screen mode documentation.

You have to watch this!

I spent two days figuring out why I can't attach movieclips inside movieclips in my current Flash 8 project. Results were pretty insane. Couldn't find answer anywhere on the net, and as my last resort I went to Macromedia livedocs (livedocs). There I saw a post dating from mid 2005. Didn't believe that solution will work on Flash 8, but hey - it does. (Happy! Happy!)
So, if you want to declare movieclip variable and attach movie clip at the same time, I would recommend using the following code:

var str:String = "identifier";
tools.attachMovie(str,str,tools.getNextHighestDepth(),{_x: -50});
var mc:MovieClip = tools[str];

rather than:

var str:String = "identifier";
var mc:MovieClip = tools.attachMovie(str,str,tools.getNextHighestDepth(),{_x: -50});

I saw yesterday night this commercial on Ad Eaters (on tv). Had to share it with ya all (it's from old campaign, so chances are you have allready seen it)!
In June 2005 Olympus Europe launched a television campaign designed to make their digital cameras the talking point of living rooms. Despite negative reactions to the dark humour presented in the ads, the campaign was awarded a Gold Lion at Cannes.

Red-eyed Baby
http://www.tonypetersenfilm.de/filme/prod_olympus_baby.mov

Distorted Dogs
http://www.distorteddog.com/

Blurry Boy
http://www.tonypetersenfilm.de/filme/olympus_blurry.mov

Cropped Tourists
http://www.croppedtourists.com/