j.

hawku

2009-06-25T14:48:00.001-05:00

A hawk on Nashville
standing in the street as if
he just belongs there

iPhone Real Racing

2009-06-12T23:57:00.003-05:00

I downloaded Real Racing on my iphone the other day and I'm feeling a bit mixed about it.

Artificial Intelligence
The irony is that the thing that I read that was supposed to be so great about it -- the AI -- is what is driving me nuts the most. The gist of it is that any time you come into contact with another car, which is EVERY time you want to pass, you get bumped in the rear corner and spin out off of the track. It's next to impossible to pass in a tight corner without being spun off and dropping off into last place. What's more frustrating is that the computer cars are rarely on the losing end in collisions no matter who is being the aggressor or who is in front. If I ram someone from behind we either continue on with little consequence to them, or I spin out. If I get past and they bump me... I'm in the grass. This isn't a good, aggressive AI. It's a lack of balance.

I don't know, perhaps the idea is that we're supposed to learn to deal with it. But one of the great things about driving games is that what you learn in one game generally translates well to other games. The concept of driving a good line around the track or breaking before a turn isn't particular to Gran Turismo or any other game. I understand this isn't physics on the same level as Gran Turismo, but it needs to be tempered a little. Frustration isn't going to keep me coming back for more.

Maps
Don't racing games have maps? Don't they NEED maps? This is something that Need For Speed Underground did very well, I think. They don't show you the whole map, just the next turn or two, constantly moving as you progress. I will give Real Racing this -- there are generally a lot of decent markers along the track to prep you for what's coming up, especially if you understand the red & white markers on the edge of the track (do those things have a name?) But just give us a map? K, great.

Settings
Seriously, do I need to turn the music volume setting down every time I play the game? Settings should be remembered!

Overall
I do like the game a lot. The mechanics of it are sharp, the framerate is good. It sounds stupid, but I like that I don't have to worry about accelerating and braking. The interface is too small for that. Let me just worry about driving a good line and competing against the other cars. I haven't gotten far enough for this to be an issue yet, but I'm sure I'm going to want more types of cars later. 8 different versions of the same types of cars is only going to get me so far. I also wish that I could upgrade my cars, or even see stats on the cars I've got. Are all hatchbacks equal? I'm going to have to assume so.

I like that this is a career-oriented, simulation type racing game. It's more my type of thing than something like Need For Speed. Though I have to say EA always puts out nicely polished games, which Real Racing could use a little more of. But that being said, it's a good game. With a couple of tweaks it could be really solid.

Cluster Map

2009-04-21T17:22:00.002-05:00

I've never been able to commit the layout of this part of the city to memory.

View Larger Map

I mean, who is responsible for this mess? I did learn the very useful shortcut Gentilly to Desaix to Moss / Jeff Davis or Wisner / Carrollton. But that stretch of Gentilly after the split always confused me. And Paris and St. Bernard Avenues, I never knew you.

Funny thing is that this is right in the middle of the city and can't be blamed on the curve of the river.

Piano Playa Hata

2009-03-25T10:34:00.001-05:00

I haven't heard this album in yeeeaaars. This wasn't the best track, but there aren't many online. I'll have to dig out the CD and rip it.

Pete and the Pirates

2009-03-14T09:01:00.003-05:00

Tap Tap and Pete and the Pirates both seemed to slip by mostly undetected, but somehow I managed to catch them both on PitchFork and have been recommending the Pete and the Pirates album lately. It took me a little while to realize that perhaps it's not just one of those quirky things that only I like. I think a track came on in the car over Mardi Gras while my ipod was on shuffle, both of my friends in the car asked about it and I guess I realized that perhaps it has a bit broader of an appeal that just inside of my own head.

Tap Tap is a little more on the obscure side, I think. I believe Lanzafame was a side project of the singer of Pete and the Pirates, though it sounds more like a 4-track demo than anything. But it's got this quality that I really picked up on when I got heavily into Grandaddy a few years back... It's very sincere and without pretension, something that goes a long way with me.

If you haven't heard either of these projects yet, check them out:

Pete and the Pirates - Lost In the Woods

Tap Tap - 100,000 Thoughts

Twitter Haiku

2009-03-10T16:15:00.002-05:00

If sixty-five percent
Of social media's crap
My tweets surely are.

Mardi Gras 2009

2009-02-27T21:24:00.005-06:00

Dang bruh, I can't believe it was just mardi gras. Even as I was going to parades, and we went to a LOT of parades, I felt like I was still waiting for it to hit me. We had house guests and many friends in town, but it seemed like it was always still a few weeks away. Not that there was any shortage of king cake up in my house and at the office. I've been a total glutton for king cake since like the day after christmas or whenever they start selling. My diet only got worse as people arrived in town and every meal became fried shrimp.

The crowds this year seemed bigger than last year and everything felt a bit more hectic. We live about a mile from the parade route and wound up walking to quite a few parades from here when it was just too crowded to try to park any closer. I've got a friend who lives 2 blocks off of the Uptown route, too, so we saw a few from his house, but he lives in "the box" -- the area of the city that gets blocked in once the parade starts going -- and we couldn't always get there.

One thing i noticed this year was a general lack of mardi gras music all around. I couldn't find it on the radio -- not even WWOZ -- and I neglected to put it on my ipod and control my own MG music destiny. And now the time has passed.

I did, however, have a costume! Here are some pics:

AS3 FLVPlayback seekBar problem

2009-02-10T15:12:00.001-06:00

I'm customizing the FLVPlayback component with the individual video control components, but the SeekBar wouldn't work no matter what I did, though the PlayPauseButton worked fine.

vidPlayer.seekBar = controls_mc.seek_mc;

Turns out that you need to set the SeekBar property of the FLVPlayback component AFTER you call play().

It took me a while to find the resolution to this annoying issue; hopefully google will index this post and help someone out.

obama haiku

2009-01-28T22:59:00.003-06:00

Black man, president.
Mom says "what's gone happen now?"
Don't listen to her.

I hate Flash

2009-01-22T11:40:00.001-06:00

This is my least favorite thing:

Fred Tomaselli at Prospect 1

2009-01-19T22:57:00.005-06:00

A few months ago Dan Cameron came and spoke to the creative department at Peter Mayer about an upcoming city wide art show -- a biennial -- the first of which is called Prospect 1. The show is meant to happen every two years (hence the title) for 10 years: Prospect 1, Prospect 2, ... Prospect 5. He talked a bit about his background, the background of biennials in the art world, and a bit about the artists being showcased.

One of those artists is Fred Tomaselli. From Wikipedia:

Fred Tomaselli (born in Santa Monica, California in 1956) is an American artist. He is best known for his highly detailed paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin.

This past weekend was the last weekend for Prospect 1 so I took the family and a friend out to see a few sites. Fred's work was hung in the old U.S. Mint on the corner of Decatur and Esplanade in literally the last room of the last museum we visited, but for me it was the pinnacle of everything we'd seen. When Dan first spoke to us and showed us slides, I was impressed by Fred Tomaselli's work. But seeing a few slides (or a few pictures on the web) does not compare to seeing these pieces up close.

He works with mixed media: paint; pictures of eyes, hands, lips, etc from magazines; pills; leaves... then coats his pieces in a thick layer of clear epoxy. My friend and I were discussing how most of the art that we like has a lot to do with the creative process, not just the end results. Honestly, many artists' end results just aren't that impressive. Something my wife and I discussed was that as a whole Tomaselli's compositions aren't necessarily that great. That sounds a bit harsh, but what I mean is that the real beauty in his work is in the details. He creates these great swirling patterns, made of dots of paint and tiny pictures of eyes and butterflies and leaves from his garden and benadryl tablets and all of this stuff. The pieces are huge and you stand in front of them and look at this massive black space full of fireworks. There's so much depth and texture, yet it's all trapped in this thick epoxy. I don't know what the symbolism is in these magazine cut-outs of life, arranged in this dazzling display, yet trapped like they're stuck in amber.

But I don't think it's about symbolism. I don't think that symbolism is really as premeditated as people expect that it is, anyway. Fred Tomaselli says that his works are "eye candy" and I'd believe they're not necessarily meant to be anything more than that. But that's also why they work, it's what makes them good.

Of course, everyone in the city sees this and thinks "Mardi Gras beads?"

aahh.

2009-01-16T00:25:00.003-06:00

I can't wait for it to get warm again. I'm totally spoiled on being warm and have no patience for this cold anymore. Stupid 40s - 50s. It's actually supposed to hit the freezing point tonight. Everyone bring in your plants! Warm your car engines in the morning!

I looked at the forecast this morning for my old zip code in South Milwaukee and it was currently -9 degrees at 9am; -30 with the wind chill factor. I was thinking about how angry I would be with myself right now if I were there. There are few decisions I've ever felt so immediately gratified with than the one to stay here this past summer.

my ecosystem

2009-01-13T22:54:00.002-06:00

I have this 10 gallon aquarium in my kitchen / living room. These two newts kinda came with the house, so I upgraded their aquarium from this little piece of plastic and got them two gold fish to get anxious about, a couple big snails, and a few plants, one of which had this these baby snails on it: lagniappe!

The big snails died during hurricane gustav while the power was out. But the little snails would appear from out of nowhere every so often, then disappear in the rocks again. For a while I thought there was only one, I saw them so rarely.

I've also got a piece of driftwood and a rock in there, things I had found years ago and had kept on my desk, and a Mason jar we found in the cabinet when we moved in. About a month and a half ago I was standing over the aquarium looking in and noticed a little clear blob on the driftwood. I scraped it up on the end of my knife and saw tiny black dots in it, so i turned the mason jar right side up with the open end up out of the water. I dropped the eggs in the jar and let it sit. I figured if this blob really was eggs, whatever it was would have a better chance of surviving in a closed environment.

About a week went by and I didn't see anything in the jar except for small bits of algae forming on the bottom. Perhaps the blob had just disintegrated and it was nothing. Who knew. Two more weeks went by and I started to notice that stuff was moving around in the algae. I pulled the jar out of the water and saw tiny little snails moving around the inside of the glass. The next week they were big enough that I could count them... there were 19 or 20. I was pretty excited about all of these snails. Obviously.

My brother and his family came in town for Christmas and we all watched their progress. In the two weeks that they were here the biggest snails got to be about 3mm, which I thought was actually about the size of the baby snails that I'd first gotten for free on the plants.

I got anxious to let the snails out into the wild, so one day after lunch I decided I'd turn the mason jar back on its side. I faced it toward a pile of rocks that buried two plants, figuring the snails would get lost in the leaves. I sat down to read for 20 minutes, then looked back up at the aquarium wondering if the snails had begun to come out at all. But they hadn't, the goldfish had found their way into the jar.

How about I conclude in haiku? Obviously.

Twenty baby snails,
goldfish caught you unawares.
Now you are just one.

Live Oak Haiku

2009-01-02T10:10:00.002-06:00

I am certain that these bore everyone but me...

A haiku:

Boughs arched over streets,
Roots push sidewalks to and fro.
Oak trees rule the day.

SNOLA!

2008-12-11T16:48:00.001-06:00

Uploaded - 12\11\08-6
Originally uploaded by jvanpelt

One more finger down, counting the number of times I've seen snow in New Orleans. This was for real, soft fluffy snow too, not the sleet that's passed for snow in years past. I think it was about 34 degrees.

My mom was convinced I wouldn't have work today. "You don't understand dawlin, when it snows in New Orleans EVERYTHING shuts down." Not Peter Mayer.

A Haiku:

2008-12-08T23:52:00.001-06:00

Paying it forward
Is still 4 bucks for coffee.
Just not your coffee.

bulkloader content null problem

2008-11-24T15:57:00.005-06:00

Ok, so i've been trying to track down a BulkLoader bug in my framework for days now and I FINALLY managed to figure out what it was. First let me say that I don't like try...catch statements very much. They obscure where an error is occuring in your app.

The way the framework works is, when it initiates it starts loading all of the external swfs that it needs, starting with home.swf on down the list. If you navigate to a page that isn't loaded it'll display a loading dialog and force BulkLoader to move that page's assets to the top of the queue. This works well with SWFAddress, which allows you to start the application (site) from any page via deep-linking. Bla bla bla. The problem I was having was that the first item loaded by BulkLoader, no matter which page it was, would sometimes error out.

What I eventually found was that in BulkLoader's ImageItem class, where the actual loader exists, the COMPLETE Event was being called but there was no content in the loader's content property. But ImageItem's onCompleteHandler doesn't verify that the content exists, it just sets _content = loader.content and calls super.onCompleteHandler(evt). Flash has always had these weird little timing errors that'll pop up where something is supposed to be ready to go, but it's just not quite there.

override public function onCompleteHandler(evt : Event) : void {
   _content = loader.content;
  
   if (!_content){
       var t = new Timer(50, 1);
       t.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER_COMPLETE, onCompleteHandler);
       t.start();
   } else {
       super.onCompleteHandler(evt);
   }
}

So I added in a quick check to see if the content is there. If it's not, run a timer for 50ms then try again and Yay! it works. I don't know if the other LoadingItem types have this same problem, but I do know that I had trouble finding any info on this issue. Hopefully this helps somebody.

haikus for the modern urbanist

2008-11-22T22:50:00.003-06:00

I had this funny idea about writing a book of 100 haikus and naming it "Haikus for the Modern Urbanist." Then I thought, maybe I actually should do that. How hard could it be?

Sprint contract is over.
iPhone's now on T-Mobile.
Consolidated!

referencing library items in an external swf by "linkage name"

2008-11-18T14:50:00.005-06:00

I'm working on a base framework for Flash projects at work using PureMVC, SWFAddress, and BulkLoader. I've gone back and forth for a while now on the issue of loading one 600k swf that contains all of your assets, or loading page assets as individual swfs, which I think is the better way. What I wanted to avoid was having to compile individual "functioning" swfs that aren't really part of the system. I want to simply use swfs as asset libraries and nothing else. The problem comes when you go to add an object from your loaded library.

If I try to add a graphic asset from the external library to the stage in my mediator I'll get an error because basically that object does not exist yet. After doing a bit of research yesterday I found a work-around that I don't particulaly like, but it works.

First of all, you have to define an ApplicationDomain in your Loader -- or in this case, BulkLoader -- with a LoaderContext object:

var context:LoaderContext = new LoaderContext(false,ApplicationDomain.currentDomain);
bulkLoader.add(HomeMediator.ASSETS,{context:context});
bulkLoader.add(AboutMediator.ASSETS,{context:context});
etc...

Then you have to use the handy getDefinitionByName method in flash.utils. I have to say, though, that as useful as this little bit of code it, I don't really like it. It feels like a hack. But it works, so let me show you the difference. First, the old way:

var header_mc = viewComponent.addChild(new HomeHeader());
header_mc.init({x:100, y:200, name:"header_mc"});

became:

var ClassName:Class = getDefinitionByName("HomeHeader") as Class;
var header_mc = viewComponent.addChild(new ClassName());
header_mc.init({x:100, y:200, name:"header_mc"});

I can tell you, I hated this right off the bat. The idea of adding another line of code for every graphic element I add to the stage made me cringe. You'll notice I've got this init() method that I'm calling on my objects as well. I'll explain that in a minute.

The final solution I came up with for addressing adding elements to the stage was to create a DisplayManager class with a single static method:

public static function attachObject(viewComponent:*, ClassName:String, initObject:Object = null):Object{
   var _ClassName:Class = getDefinitionByName(ClassName) as Class;
   var _mc = viewComponent.addChild(new _ClassName());
 
   if (initObject){ _mc.init(initObject); }
 
   return _mc;
}

which boils three lines of code in my mediators down to one:

var header_mc = DisplayManager.attachObject(viewComponent, "HomeHeader", {x:100, y:100, name:"header_mc"});

Lovely.

Ok, so let me quickly fill you in on the init() thing, which I thought I had posted on in the past, but it turns out I had only posted about the thought that lead up to it, simple proptery setting. I took this idea and created a very simple class, DisplayClip, that extends MovieClip and adds an init method that takes an initObject as a parameter and transfers those parameters to the MovieClip. I've got TypicalBtn and TypicalMenuBtn classes that extend DisplayClip, and I have to say it's come in extremely handy.

package com.peteramayer.as3.display {
    
    import flash.display.*;
    import flash.text.*;
    import flash.events.*;
    
    public class DisplayClip extends MovieClip implements IEventDispatcher{
        
        public function DisplayClip() {
            trace("[DisplayClip]");
        }
        
        public function init(initObj:Object ) {
            for (var prop in initObj) {
                this[prop] = initObj[prop];
            }
        }
        
    }
    
}

radio shack aint ALL bad

2008-11-16T22:06:00.002-06:00

I went to Radio Shack this morning to buy a new cassette adapter for continued car-stereo ipod goodness. (My old one recently broke.) When I got in the car, I realized that it was made to fit the iphone as well. Yay! I couldn't even find one of those at Best Buy. Thought you might like to know.

isan or i.s.a.n. or ISAN or icing

2008-11-15T15:50:00.003-06:00

I got into isan really heavily around the time that elise was born and a lot of their technique and sound really influenced my music in that period. In the evening I would sit at my desk with elli, when she was so small that she still fit on the sofa pillow in my lap, and we'd listen to the song Cathart and others like it as she'd just relax and fall asleep on my arm.

A few interesting notes about isan - I had recently finished reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace when isan's album Lucky Cat came out. Isan had set up a Yahoo Group for themselves, basically a predecessor to a MySpace page. I noticed the song Kittenplan A on their album and asked if it was named after DFW's character Anne Kittenplan, a minor character from the book.

While Kim was pregnant with elise someone gave me a couple of free tickets to a Depeche Mode show. The highlight of the show came while they were playing music over the P.A. before the band started, and I heard this song, Skink, playing. It sounded incredible. Kim and I were probably the only people in that crowd to recognized the song.

ISAN - Skeek from the album Beautronics

as3isolib Actionscript 3 Isometric Library

2008-10-25T23:11:00.001-05:00

need to remember this link to as3isolib for future reference

Virtual Earth on Parade

2008-10-22T09:36:00.002-05:00

The real estate site I use to check out houses in New Orleans recently switched to Virtual Earth. I was looking at the location of one on the satellite map and, when I scrolled over a few blocks, I saw this congregation of people and realized -- it's a Mardi Gras parade on Virtual Earth! This obviously isn't mardi gras day. Judging by the size of the crowd as you go down the route I'd say it's probably two weekends before Mardi Gras. Still, it's a funny thing to come across.

There is a hole where the Cocteau Twins used to be

2008-10-11T01:51:00.007-05:00

I was sorting through a bunch of mp3s and came across this first track, Those Eyes That Mouth and... sometimes Cocteau Twins songs just grip you like nothing else can.

Those Eyes, That Mouth - you can hear in the production that this track is older (holy crap, 1986!) but it doesn't suffer for it.

Frou-frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires - the drama is a bit over the top, but this song becomes amazing around the 1:50 mark:

The Story of Stuff

2008-10-08T11:57:00.002-05:00

This is an excerpt from The Story of Stuff, a documentary I saw online a while back about the nature of consumerism in America. It's pretty eye-opening and makes you question the way you buy and use things (kinda the same that documentary about Wal-mart makes you consider where you buy things). The full, high quality version (it's short, about 20 minutes) is available at http://www.storyofstuff.com/. I recommend you watch it there.