Do I Creep You Out by Weird Al Yankovic.

White and Nerdy

Check out the video here. How to transform a multiplication into few lines? This is great and you can verify with your calculator!  :)

Watch it here! This is the follow up to the popular Animator vs Animation where an animated stick man attacks his creator inside the Flash IDE and the animator has to fight back. This time, the fighting goes beyond the Flash program itself as it is partially destroyed due to the fight :)

Inverse kinematics is the process of determining the parameters of a jointed flexible object in order to achieve a desired pose. The topic is old as man it self, but I just recently had opportunity to play with it in Flash. The whole idea is relatively simple, but adding realistic tone to it is a pain.

If you are not into ActionScript, and you need quick method of creating inverse kinematics based animations with flash at author time (in timeline) checkout extension iK'motion toolset.

Check out some crazy, more advanced examples: Falling girl (evergreen), Comcastic.

Stefan Esser  posted on his blog an interesting read about how  badly configured crossdomain.xml file can lead to the  Cross Site Request Forgeries.

This was posted 7.11. on Mozilla Press center, in the case somebody missed it:

Adobe Systems Incorporated and the Mozilla Foundation, a public-benefit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet, today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe Flash Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications.

The Tamarin project will implement the final version of the ECMAScript Edition 4 standard language, which Mozilla will use within the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, Mozilla’s free Web browser. As of today, developers working on SpiderMonkey will have access to the Tamarin code in the Mozilla CVS repository via the project page located at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/. Contributions to the code will be managed by a governing body of developers from both Adobe and Mozilla.

“Adobe’s work on the new virtual machine is the largest contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since its inception,” said Brendan Eich, chief technology officer, Mozilla Corporation, and creator of JavaScript. “Now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser. We’re excited about joining the Adobe and Mozilla communities to advance ECMAScript.”

“This is a major milestone in bringing together the broader HTML and Flash development communities around a common language, and empowering the creation of even more innovative applications in the Web 2.0 world,” said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe. “By working with the open source community we are accelerating the adoption of a standard language for creating and delivering richer, more interactive experiences that work consistently across PCs and mobile devices.”

Read the full Adobe and Mozilla Foundation to Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine news.

John Grden came up with great idea to deal with coordinate conversion in Flash - localToLocal! He first implemented it way back in Flash6.

class com.rockonflash.utils.CoordinateTools
{
public static function localToLocal(from:MovieClip, to:MovieClip, origin:Object):Object
{
var point:Object = origin == undefined ? {x: 0, y: 0} : origin;
from.localToGlobal(point);
to.globalToLocal(point);
return point;
}
}

Just use it to create your point object and you’re done:

var point:Object = CoordinateTools.localToLocal(from:MovieClip, to:MovieClip);

Read this, and you will be enlighten! :)

• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-convert.html
• http://mysqldba.blogspot.com/2006/07/rebuilding-40-data-into-41-data.html
• http://textsnippets.com/posts/show/84
• http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/01/turning_mysql_data_in_utf8_t.html
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Convert_utf8_to_UTF-8_in_MySQL
• http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8/mysql

I have hard time getting my Flash files run on FPS I want. I don't mind spending hours and  hours on optimization, and constant quest with only one cause - getting the most out of every line of actionscript code. I don't mind IDE or standalone performance aether. What I do mind is frame rate limiting in browsers. Ok, what's the deal with that? I know that there are guys with malicious ideas, and that browser makers have to protect their users, but what about all those good guys - developers? :)
Interesting read:

• Frame rates in the Flash Player
• Performance Improvements in Flash Player 8
• Tight FPS Solution by Andre Michelle
• Get your 25fps flash movie to actually run at 25fps in IE (old forum post on flashkit from 2001)

[photopress:msff07box.jpg,thumb,alignright]Tired of slow image rendering? Microsoft Firefox 2007 can deliver online pornography at blazing fiery speeds. By using a proprietary dynamic algorithm, anything that remotely resembles a tit or a boob will download up to 10 times faster!

http://www.msfirefox.com