Shunjie's blog

Ok, seventh movie is coming. Another ghost movie The Maid coming to Singapore. But I think they may have overdo the publicity. I was at Plaza Sing at the evening when I saw this standing right in front of the ticket booth



Pretty eerie huh? Note that it is around the corner, so anyone who was chatting with friends and so on and suddenly turn around will get a shock, and I had seen it when I was there. If this is not enough, they also paste similar posters inside the toilet. My frens got a shock, and I saw passerby who come out of the toilet because of that. We had seen a lot of such publicity before. I still remember during The Eye 10, they had this woman dress in black and walk ard Orchard road to create publicity for the movie. But to paste posters in toilets and to place life size doll around until the shoppers dare not to go toilet is something else.

This is Shunjie blogging with IE7 using Windows Vista..haha.. Finally managed to get it running. Initially want to run it on VMware, but I got an error message halfway so I decide to install it on one of my empty partition. I have install the previous releases directly on this partition and they all run fine (no screwing up of boot table), so I am quite confident it is quite 'safe'. The installation takes about 1 hour, and I have just created a new hardware profile and install my wireless driver.For those not using VMware or VPC, I think its important to create a new hardware profile before installing any new driver, just to play safe.. The performance of this build is much better than the previous one. Comes with IE7 too, which is completely a new look. Problem is that I only nagivate to 2 pages and both show problem rendering. When I login to my blog page, there is an extra 'panel' to the right. Now, in the add post page, my tools disappeared, leaving only a textbox for me to type on. then again, its just beta. I will try to install and play with it more and perhaps blog more about it later..=)
Heres a screen shot Update : The performance is pretty good. I managed to install studio mx 2004 and msn on it. Pretty cool. =)

I have been rushing a project these few days and to do that, I had to perform 2 things, basically have a stock of coffee so that I can magically transform them into code, and next, is to keep my laptop running for a few days while I do my work. Things are fine at first. I had did this in the past and I know my laptop can 'endure' such onslaught. Not this time

On the second morning, my tablet pc crawls. Initially, I though flyakite is causing the memory leak, and thus I uninstall it. By noon, my laptop is crawling again. Before my installation of flyakit last month was the installing of Tablet PC 2005 (upgrade to sp2) on my tablet pc. Asking Mr google confirm my suspecious as I found this post :

http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2005/07/05/435922.aspx

Seems like tabtip.exe and tcserver.exe is causing the memory leak and it is a known issue (although unknown to me, lol)

I have patch my laptop with this patch

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c4eebb54-14e3-408e-8c63-0a382e8d9239&displaylang=en

Anyone running Tablet PC 2005 should do it too before the tap runs out =)

In the past, development for Flash is simple. Movieclips, press F9, input some codes, add in some tweening, and after spending a few days or every weeks, wasted quite a few cups of coffees and the website is done. Go to client, client not satisfied, so I went back and open the massive .fla file. The first look will turn me off. All the tweening, movieclips are there and done, tons of stuff in library and tons of scripts in frames. Now, where do I start?

Things start changing when I start defining everything nicely in AS files. Instead of dumping everything on frames, the entire flash movie will run on a main class, which will be linked to other classes and so on. Each movieclip will be nicely linked to an AS class. At the start, the process is a bit slow, since we have to define classes, package them and switch between the main .fla file and the AS files. However, as the project progress, I realize that past nightmare are gone. Any updates can now be easily done. Whats even better now is that scoping problems are solved with mx.utils.Delegate, and basic animation can be achieve and modify at any time using mx.transitions classes, without even touching the timeline and frames. The entire project is now more streamline and much more manageable. I am not saying that the usual way of inserting scripts into frames and movieclips are not good, we have seen countless impressive projects accompolished with that.

What is your personal preferences? External classes ? or Scripts within frames and movieclips?

Created a simple Flash newsletter for my school. Implemented with Flash, mx.transition classes, AMFPHP, and PHP-mySQL. Screenshot as below.

Disclaimer: All the newsletter information shown are merely fake data input for testing purpose and are in no circumstance linked any of the party mentioned.



I have unloaded it at http://thecoldroom.net/amfphp/newsletter/eveui.html to test it out. I will appreciate if you could drop me a comment on any bugs you spot, especially if you are using Safari or Netscape. Thanks.

I have come up with an example on AMFPHP 1.0 milestone 2

Link : http://www.thecoldroom.net/amfphp/shockui.html

Source : http://www.thecoldroom.net/amfphp/shockmail.zip


Feel free to give any comments!

Screenshot :

Just received 2 more batch of photos from Ronald and Wee Ching, so decide to post some of the highlights up. One of it is me in scuba suit, pretty cool. =)



The one in short is me =)


Lilin, Me, Ronald and Thiam Joo


"Hello!"


Food is good. Roti Prata, Tuna, Hashroom and Curry for breakfast
"Today, I shall not have RSS feeds for breakfast"


My dive buddy, Bee Eng, holding a (Box)Starfish.. erhm..I mean Box Starfish

Alright, I will be putting up the rest at imagestation. Link it to here after that =)
Back to work..=(

I am back from my scuba diving trip from Tioman. Actually very reluctant to come back, but I guess all good times are short, haha. The entire trip, I am say, is mavellous. After 3 lessons on last monday, tuesday and thursday, we embark on our trip to mersling on friday night, where the yatch we will be staying at are docked.

The yatch is fabulous. We got a cozy living room, bedrooms, clean and nice toilets with heater, a dinning area on the deck, and on the top of yatch, a platform for us to gaze at the sky , enjoy the wind and sun tan. Friday night we basically just move to the yatch, and slp in the cozy room allocated to us.

Come saturday morning, I woke up in the morning at around 7.30. Walk onto the deck and welcomed by the vast sea view and tioman island. Have omelette and hot dogs prepared by the yatch captain (who is a fabulous cook) and relax on the deck and enjoy the wind before our first dive. There are 8 open water divers, including me, plus our instructor Brandon. Around 9 plus near 10, its time for our first dive into open sea.



Gather up for lunch. From the left Ronald, Wee Ching, Our instructor Brandon,
Bee Eng, Rose, Lilin, Me!!! , Thiam Joo, and Noelle


Group photo with Ginny, our friendly dive master. Great trip with a lot of fun people!

The first scuba diving experience is magical. I am in a giant aquarium! We dived around 6 m deep then stay there to feed the fishes. My hand got sort of nipped by them, but the experience is great. Then we move around the area and under the jetty. Under the jetty, I am pretty shock to see the number of sea urchins around me. They are not only on the seabeds but on the pillars on the jetty to. One of my friend actually kneeled on one of them by accident. Good thing he only got 3 holes on his knees. I think could have been much worse.

Over the weekend, we got a total of 5 dives. The best one is our last dive, where we go 15m down the sea. There, a lot of corals and bigger school of fishes. Along the way, our instructor picked up a sea creature the size slightly bigger than a football, red in color and show it to us. I dunno wat is that, but its really facinating to see all this with my own eyes.

Overall, the food is great, the people are good and the instructors are professional. I think I will definitely be going again. If you are interested too, take a look at their website @ http://mvseaborne.com/

I am developing an admin panel for a commercial project using ajax (with ajax.net). The result is pretty satisfying, as the application is very responsive and with minimum postback and most importantly, the client is satisfied with the prototype. One thing which I have added in is state management. With ajax, the page can change drastically and if a user bookmark the page and send it to someone else, he / she will not be view the state of the page correctly. What I did is to provide a url on the page with querystrings appended to it, and the url will change according to the state of the application right now. When a user goes to the page, the page's javascript will check the querystring and change the state of the application accordingly. The same theory is used for to make the 'back' button for the application. Instead of 'history.back', the application will post back to page with the state the last page is in. Ok, I admit this idea of maintaing state sounds familiar, haha, I got the idea from Macromedia Podcast #1 when the idea of maintaining state in Flash was being discussed. I simply take the idea and reused it on ajax applications.

The project is almost done. All the backend business logic layer and the DAL are done, left the UI (which is taking quite a lot of time with all the custom javascripts). Reluctantly I am unable to use Paladin for this project as the db is mysql. Hope the next project will allow me to use Paladin. =)

I will on my scuba diving adventure from tomoro til Sunday, hope will be able to bring back some photos to post up here..(don't worry, pictures of corals and marine life, not me half naked in swimming trunks)

=)

It seems that Podcast is the 'in' thing right now, with itune allowing us to subscribe to podcast and we are getting podcast from blogs, newsfeeds and more and recently, Macromedia started their podcast too, thanks to Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell. I actually downloaded it onto my handphone and listen to it as i travel to work. I was thinking it is quite geeky to choose technology podcast over mp3..lol..but I do really feel its quite interesting as it feels like listening to radio news. Just that this time, instead of listening to the happenings around the world, we listen to the happenings in the developers' world.

I am quite interested of tech podcast, but IMO, news on personal stuff should stick to words. As compared to reading (which definitely will take less time to listening) , I dun find it nice or interesting to listen to someone talking about their own life unless I am a close friend to him / her. So, I hope to see more podcast of different technology coming in the near future, but stick personal lifestyles and likes and hates to words.  So far I have hear from .Net Rocks, Asp.net, Macromedia and even Oracle..wonder whos next..=)

The new version of You subscribe, named Attensa, is now available for download. You subscribe is a rss reader which download newsfeeds to outlook. Pretty neat andvery user friendly and most importantly, its free. Those who used outlook intensively should give it a try =)

Well, just reach my school after attending Bill Gate' s LIVE. I skipped the last presentation as I need to grab a meal before coming here, but it seems that I am early afterall so I decide to write down what I feel about the talk while it is still fresh in my mind.

For the start, it is quite a big event. I never realize its that big. The host said that there are 6000 attendees, although I dun think there is actually that much, haha, but still a considerable figure. The talk by Bill Gates is not really very engaging, basically talking about the capabilities of .NET framework, possibilities and so on. The Q n A session are more interesting, especially the question on "Why is microsoft so against open-sourced", lol

The interesting part comes in the session presented by Colin Png, whereby Howard pops out and introduced about the creative portable media player and shows snippets of himself in Eye for a guy. That part was one where I laugh my head off. There is also an interesting demo on Longhorn beta1, quite impressive, nice transparency and transitions effects we seen in Rich Internet Applications. But one question I have in mind is what sort of hardware do we actually need to run that smoothly?  Also, since the files are now sorted by several parameters, including filename, keywords and such, wun it takes up more processing power to index the files? 

Maybe its time for me to get a new desktop, lol