Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Flash CS4, ActionScript 3.0, and I know Jujitsu!

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

For 2 weeks in a row, I was tryng to peneterate into the world of ActionScript 3.0 language, the one used in Flash CS3 and Flash CS4, to program the flash animation.  It has never been easy for me to think and develope programs in the way Flash works, as it mostly conflicts with my methods.  Till know, Flash to me has been an environment which you both have to set the objects manualy into the environment, and then program them individually or in groups, and you could not just start writing a program which does load the objects or creates them and use them to animate or whatever you like to do.

I still believe this system is very unusual, but with the introduction of ActionScript 3.0 language and huge changes they have made into its basics, Now it is like a real computer language, to me.  Maybe I am wrong, but this is the way my brain works.

I tried two weeks and 5 books and lots of good hints on the web to find a point where I can understand the language and basically start the learning curve, which is the hardest point in learning a new language.  2 nights ago finally, I guess I did it.

Suddenly I had a feeling just like what Neo had, in the movie Matrix, where they upload the instructions to Jujitsu into his brain and he knows how to fight like a Jujitsu pro. And in the middle of the night, when my first pieces of ActionScript3.0 worked, I told myself; I know ActionScript3.0!

Believe me, aside from jokes, it is always very nice to know you have another language (or computer language) available in your brain.  It feels you are a little stronger in understandings.  It will take me a while before I’ll be using it like a pro, but I have already started using it for a project, and I know I will finish the project using this.

So, where to start?  Try this books and sites:

1- OReilly Learning ActionScript 3.0 A Beginner’s Guide.  This is a great book!

2- Flash CS4 for Dummies.  I guess this one is a good one as well, although it talks too much.

3- The Flash Blog http://www.theflashblog.com lots of articles

4- GoToAndLearn(), http://www.gotoandlearn.com lots of video tutorial on flash!

And lots of other sites like Adobe itself, although Adobe is containing the worst set of information, they are actually useless for an starter unless you try seaching though google on their livedocs, and that is still no use to somebody who still doesn’t know where to start.

Try finding small samples on other people’s site and be careful as they don’t put most of needed headers and starter code on theirs, considering everybody knows what they already know.  Find small, working demos and then read them and try to recompile them to get sure the code is complete.

Paymaan.

Update in life, projects, OS, Linux, and everything else!

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

Hi everybody, and Merry Christmas and Happy new year and everything else. I wish joy for everybody out there, and peace.

Lots of things are going on here, and I have been under lots of stress in the past monthes, two heavy website and multimedia software design and development at the same time, and some other unpleasing life issues.

Of course I don’t claim only bad things are happening, I am also having many good things happen to me, but ok, let internal issues aside :)

While I am developing this two projects, I am also exploring new topics in software and web design.  So far I have gone deeper into many languages, from deeper usage of Javascript, to CSS2, changing my priority web design language from HTML to XHTML and XML.

I am really going to like this change, XML is something I can not describe, but I feel enjoying using it, and for my other project, I am exploring things like Adobe Flash CS4, to Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex, to Pure Basic and even some VisualC++ of Microsoft,  while almost everybody knows I prefer ANSI C/C++ over anything which involves some kind of work from Microsoft :) .

Some other changes in the past months have happened which I have really enjoied it. First, my daughter have gone to first grade and after almost 3 month now, she can read and write and I believe this is an evolution for every person.  This is were we got our power to learn more.

Then I did something really relieving. My Windows were killing me after 4 years of not being re-installed, it would crash several times a day and you know how dumb WindowsXP is, and it can’t even keept itself clean.  MY registery was 180 MB, can you believe that?!  I tried every piece of junk software I found to clean up my registery and Windows, to no avail, and it got worse and worse, and in the past 7,8 years which I have been forced to use Windows I have always been unhappy, and missed my good old Amiga.

I have been downloading several versions of Linux since end of summer, planning to make a really big change, and to ease the life, and to get rid of Windows, finally.

I had Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Novell’s SuSE and Open SuSE, Linux Mint Elyssa, and afew others.  I have been recently uninstalled my older SuSE as it was heavy and wanted to update it in whole, but my 160 GB hard disk was almost filled and I needed its space, but I changed my mind and got a new 320GB for more freedom and for those projects I mentioned in the beginning.

I wanted to chose one of those Linux so I habe another option on this machine in addition to WinXP, and suddenly I tasted this Linux Mint, I have played with all of these diferent linuxes on different machines and none is as great as Linux Mint.  Some of Linuces can not read your Windows partitions.  Some can only read it but can not write to it. Some have fonts very different than what a WinXP user have experienced with.  Some are also very heavy, even being a Linux, consume your CPU power so hard your machine will actually work slower than with Windows!

But, Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu itself, which based on Debian itself, is almsot the fines of all I have ever experienced.

It is a Linux, who can read, and write to your Windows partitions so easily that I have shared all my pictures and music and video folders with it on windows partitions.

It is very efficient (I use the Gnome desktop on it and I am used to it very fast, it is very easy to use) and works much faster on my 4 year old machine, that I am relieved and feel no need for a new machine now.

Then its graphics power is so high, I actually have a much more fancy desktop effects on this machine using my old NVidia 6600GT than what you can see on most Vista machines.  The Desktop is actually liquid, you can make ripples on it, you can trun it and see the other 3 desktops with your mouse or key combinations.  It has some carousel like application chooser, a four side desktop cube etc. etc.

Then something really funny when you install it. It actually asks you if you want to import your windows accounts into it!  It can migrate your windows to Linux without any hassles!

Ok, I am not affiliated with authors of Mint, and they also provide it for free so this is no advertising, explore the rest your self, using its live CD.

After I installed Mint (version 5 is called Elyssa), I simply migrated all my email from Thunderbird on WinXp to Mint, also my book marks from FireFox to FireFox on Mint (and almost every software there has a twin sister here on Mint).  I also took a copy of my Windows main partition, formatted that partition, and reinstalled windows, just for when I need to play a windows only Game, or for when testing my web designs on IE, and for when clients want a Windows only software.

Now I spend most of my time on Linux, and have installed Apache 2 server as well as everything else on it, and when I am designing web sites, I design and run them on my machine and when evrything is fully tested, mirror them to the client’s web host.

I feel really free now, every tool you need, you go to package manager, search for the proper keyword, and when you find the proper program, you simply ask it to install, no money is going to be paid, and your software is ready in a few minutes.

And please don’t kill me before I say this, you have almost no virus there, although you can be extra careful and install a free virus killer like ClamAV, with just asking package manager to install it for you :)

Ok, enogh for now, my brain overflows are finished for now, I guess.

Paymaan.

Just a note

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Hi Everybody,

This is a long time I have not written anything in here, but I am still alive (for those who prefer not :D )  but just either not have been in the mood to post, or havn’t had time.  Actually, as the name of the blog says for itself, this is the place for whatever which overflows from my brain, if any at all.  Sometimes my mood is not that exciting and so it makes some kind of hibernation to my brain, and it prevents me from being creative or making new ideas (even if they seem crazy :) ).

Anyway, I’ll try to be better soon, and I am aslo planning to release one of my embedded processor board designs, for Microchip PIC18 CPUs containing 4 wire LCD output, power stabilizer, dual serial (RS232) ports, I2C interface and a very low noise design.  If anybody has a need for this, let me know so I put it here sooner.  I want to release it under GNU licence for free, although it first ment to be a source of funds for me :)

Send me your ideas.

Paymaan.

Arthur C. Clarke dies at age 90.

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Arthur C. ClarkeWhile it is just the day before the new Persian year of 1387 and also spring, I get a bad news for Sci-Fi world and all space enthusiasts.  The very respected pioneer in Space, Radar, and Sci-Fi writings, Arthur Charles Clarke died at age 90 today morning.

I was always a fan of his, and while volunteer at project SETI, I could see how strong this man is, still help SETI sending emails to people to support the project in any form they can.

He was part of Radar development project, he was the man who worked on now called Clarke Orbits, actually making sending satellites to the sky possible.

His latest three wishes at his 90th birthday back in December 2007:  Extra Terrestrials be found some day, The civil war in Sri Lanka ends, and the world to go for cleaner sources of energy.

After a work on Great Barrier Reef, he moved to Indian Ocean and stayed in Sri Lanka till the end.  He also remained an scuba diving enthusiast; “I’m perfectly operational underwater,” he once said.

Peace be Upon him.  World very rarely gets men of such quality.

Yahoo! news article.

Washington Post Article.

Paymaan.

FireFox 3 is much faster than rivals!

Friday, March 14th, 2008

Recreated FireFox 3 logoJust read the news on the new Mozilla FireFox 3 Beta 4 and how it is faster than all rivals (3 times than IE7!!!), downloaded it as my first Beta of version 3. I guess soon V3 will be stable enough for all to upgrade, but in case you too are well confident in using the new Beta as I am, then try downloading it at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Enjoy using the world’s best and fastest Open Source web browser!

Paymaan.

Middle East internet connections are back again!

Friday, February 15th, 2008

People, it seems the almost 2 weeks problem over internet cables in Mediterranean sea is almost resolved at the moment.

Since yesterday, I can surf the web and manage my sites as usual without getting disconnections and half loaded web pages.

But the question still remains the same, why everything is so fragile at this time of so called hi-tech era?

I talked to a very knowledgeable person from Renesys.com about the problems and he helped me to understand why while Iran is not enlisted as disconnected due cables problem, we still have such problems, and it seemed it is a matter of routing schemes through countries, and the fact we use a Turkish network (only, possibly) to connect to the outside world.

Lot’s of technical talk, so don’t bother, unless you are a network engineer :-)

Paymaan.

Again about data (in-)security!

Monday, February 4th, 2008

I guess the last week’s Wednesday-Thursday events is some kind of proof to my last post about data insecurity in digital age.

Last week, 2 data cable out of 3 which connect Middle East from Egypt to central Asia like India, were simply damaged by possibly ship anchors at somewhere near Alexandria port in Egypt. Almost all of internet connection of this part of world has been blacked out since then, and companies have told it will take a few days (to a couple of weeks) to repair the problems.

Even worse than that, yesterday another cable around Dubai, UAE, was cut off to worsen the problem even further. I have had even huge problems with updating this blog, almost 100% of data is being lost, and all data is being rerouted through Japan to US, possibly on very slow and bad networks.

You see, in digital age we are related on 2 inch cables placed at sea bed, and if a shark tries to brush his teeth with them, half of the world will lose billions of dollars of funds.

So let me be scared that much, we are walking almost on hair-thin ropes, and be prepared, we may lose everything so easily we may not gonna believe ever!

Paymaan.

P.S. I am still having problems sending this post, this is third time I am trying, so the problem is real!

Complexity of Human mind

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

This human brain is really something, I think. It always makes me surprised, you see people think about things you can’t believe, you see you can’t remember things when you need them, but at the same time, you remember or find things using the same brain which makes even yourself surprised.

Yesterday, I got nostalgic (again, I know) and tried to remember a song from W.A.S.P I used to listen back in early 90′s. Anyway, I got a copy an hour ago and it was “The Idol” from “The Crimson Idol” album. The song or even lyrics are not that important, it was the acoustic nature of the song which grabbed me. Ok so you say why in the hell you liked heavy metal, when you liked their acoustics?! Don’t ask me, my brain is as complex as yours, I just listen to what I feel I like.

Then listening to that song, made me remember something else, I don’t know how, again :)

I normally don’t believe I have done enough back in my life to be proud of, but sometimes even small things makes you happy. I remembered I designed a hardware dongle for a friend (and money of course), which nobody could unlock, it helped him sell some hundreds of his “IRANA” persian/farsi writing program for Amiga computers, and that made me very happy. The friend was “Ali Aarefi”, in case you or himself are curious :)

I have not revealed the design in more than a decade, but you’ll be amazed for sure, if you know what it was. I even prevented telling friends and competitors that I was the designer, taking any chance from them to even try to guess the design based on my style.

I talked to people about how that dongle was, and people continued to tell me yes that is a simple dongle and I can unlock it if I want etc. etc., but nobody did, and in that market full of pirates, it was a good thing I did, I feel. I myself have always been a victim of software piracy and I almost lost a full luxury life to it, so I know I did something good to a friend.

ok, so what was the dongle?! I am revealing this secret here:

Amiga computers’ hardware is something amazing, I can never forget it and I still have my A1200 and I love it. The joystick ports of Amiga, also have an analog input, unlike other computers of those times. My dongle idea was simply this, I used a high tolerance resistor on that port, inside a joystick connector, software would read the analog port, and if the proper voltage exists it worked, it was that simple!!!

A piece of code, would read the ports, about 3 or 4 lines of C, because it was Amiga and programming was a pleasure rather than a torture. Ali Aarefi would embed the code somewhere in his program, and I also filled the connectors with epoxy, so nobody could reverse engineer it.

An small success, still something you feel good when you remember it, it even made today a good day to me :)

Paymaan.

A few plants here, a few there…

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

Our earth lives as green plans exist, there is no doubt about this simple fact. One of the reasons this earth is alive, and living things exist on it is because of those green colors, or better say, green plants.

I love nature, plants, animals, most of them. Actually there are not many animals I dislike, I believe every existence has a reason to exist, and all should exist. I can’t set a preference here, but I surprisingly like the giant animals a little more. Mostly those have lived the earth for millions of years, like crocodiles, turtles, whales, and especially Rhinos!

Well, I am not like Hagrid, but those animals lived the earth so long I believe they own the earth more than we do.

Anyway, I like plants, and I like planting. I have no private land, and actually not even an small yard (live on 2nd floor actually :) ), so since three years ago, I plant in containers.

I have about 20 to 30 containers, all in my balcony, I plant vegetables in them, yes you heard it right, vegetables in containers!!! and those produce real vegetables, in quality much better than those you buy at market!

The story is like this, you buy a few 8 liter containers, fill them with good and light soil, buy some quality seeds, and take care of them. You see for yourself how they cultivate, grow, flower, and produce real vegetables.

Plants are also so beautiful they double as decoration, and just imagine how pretty they can be having red tomatoes or green bell peppers hanging from them. Last but not least, you can’t believe how good peppers smell, even if they are not yet any peppers on them.

To make it healthier and more fun, I only use natural heirloom seeds. By heirloom I mean seeds which are original types, NOT modified genetically and are really natural. This way, fruits taste natural, smell natural, and you will notice the huge difference between them and those tasteless ones you buy from market.

In this category, I would like to talk about these kinds of stuff, and we may have some interesting discussions for every other nature enthusiast, so be my guest, and tell me what do you like to hear!

Paymaan.