I found this site a few months ago – codewars.com – and having mentioned it to a few friends of mine it seems not everyone in my social circle has heard of it.  It’s a great site that gives you programming problems to solve, and supports a variety of programming languages.

I’ve mostly been using it to keep up my javascript skills during the house build.  There are a ton of interesting problems and you can learn all sorts of different means to solve them, I’ve found it really useful and highly recommend it to other developers.  They make it more interesting by turning it into a bit of a game, where you “rank up” the more problems you solve (and at higher ranks, you get harder/trickier problems to solve).  Really enjoyable way to start the day with the morning coffee!

This post is unrelated from our house building activities, but I wanted to put it out there as I had trouble tracking down this information myself.  When our satellite internet was provisioned here yesterday, we noticed that it would work when directly connected to my laptop, but wouldn’t work when connected to our router, which is a Netgear WNDR3700.

After a fair amount of searching I was able to determine that the router was operating in NAT mode, and the satellite modem also operates in NAT mode, resulting in some kind of double-NAT configuration which is, I guess, a problem (not a networking expert here.)  It seemed that I needed to be able to put my router into “Bridge mode”, to disable NAT.  Unfortunately there is no way to do this with the Netgear admin software that is loaded on the router.

I searched some more and found that many people recommended installing DD-WRT on the router, which is an open-source router software and sounded like it could solve our problems.  The upgrade was trivial – just grabbed the DD-WRT firmware file for our model of WNDR3700 (it’s a first generation unit), and uploaded it using the Netgear web admin panel.  The upgrade takes a few minutes and after we logged into the DD-WRT software we were easily able to configure it to work with the satellite modem.  Here’s hoping this post helps out someone else one day!

At long last, I have posted version 1.0 of my DAECleaner Adobe AIR application, expressly designed to help you strip out the extraneous XML from within your Collada/DAE files.

It also has the ability to save your DAE within a zip file, you can then use my DAEz class to provide transparent loading of the zipped DAE models.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

In my on-going quest to improve load times when dealing with Collada (DAE) models in Papervision3D, I decided to write a DAE file cleaner (or optimizer) in Adobe AIR that will remove extraneous information from the DAE file that Papervision3D ignores anyway.

I do all my modelling in 3DS Max 2010 and it exports lights and so forth that are unused in pv3d and might as well be removed to save on filesize.

Additionally, and more to the point of what this post is all about, I have written a new class for Papervision3D which extends the DAE class and provides for loading zipped DAE files – this *really* crunches down the file size.

See example usage here and download a copy below!

[as3]import org.therossman.pv3d.DAEz;

var autoPlayAnimation:Boolean = false;
var DAEName:String = "MyColladaModel";
var loopAnimation:Boolean = false;

var myDAE:DAEz = new DAEz( autoPlayAnimation, DAEName, loopAnimation );
myDAE.addEventListener( FileLoadEvent.LOAD_COMPLETE, onModelLoaded );

var zipFilename:String = "mymodel.zip";
var asyncParsing:Boolean = false;
var myMaterialsList:MaterialsList = new MaterialsList();

myDAE.loadZippedDAE( zipFilename, myMaterialsList, asyncParsing );[/as3]

Download the DAEz class here!

And check back real soon for the DAE Cleaner utility!

Just got around to checking out the new Adobe Social beta, and it’s a pretty neat service. It will be interesting to see what they charge for it when it’s released.

Here’s a quick test I did with it, click the Connect button and you can log in using any of the social services listed, and it will retrieve your nickname, thumbnail image, and friends list.

No data is saved or anything like that, this is just a test!

I put together a quick test of Andy Zupko’s Papervision3D Shadowcaster class, seems to work pretty good, nice and fast at least in this trivial test.

For my day job at CTV, we recently had a Holiday Rewind promotion, where we brought back old episodes of popular shows to our video player.

I got the opportunity to put together a fancy ad unit that we’ve taken to calling an “ExtendAD”.

Check out this page to view it, roll over and click the bigbox ad to view the enhanced experience!

Was messing around with Papervision3D and JiglibFlash, and managed to build out this simple Formula 1 Racing game prototype.

Play F1 Racing

It’s a little taxing on the ole CPU but if you have a reasonably new system it should run fairly well.

Still lots to do to convert it into a full game experience, but still, a fun exercise!

Just wanted to take a minute to say Happy Holidays to everyone out there, hope you enjoy the little christmas scene (left) that I put together this afternoon for the launch of the new site.

Always fun playing around with 3DS Max 2010, Papervision3D, and Flash!

Welcome to my newly redesigned and greatly improved website. After numerous revisions over too many years to count, I finally have a complete, SEO-friendly, Back-button loving, Flash accentuated website which should make updating things much easier in the long haul.

The core of the site is powered by some custom php I wrote after being inspired by SWFAddress 2.2 (an open-source project to which I am a minor contributor).

I still have a great deal to do but things are being migrated over bit-by-bit.

I also discovered during the changeover how to implement a proper redirecting solution so as to not break any old links to the site!