Aboutme – blog

Multi-Mania 2008 registrations open now

Published on April 29, 2008 in Conferences and multi-mania. 0 Comments

We’ve just opened registrations for multi-mania 2008!

Multi-Mania is a yearly one-day conference and award show in Kortrijk (Belgium) where 800 people from the multimedia industry in mid Europe come together to share knowledge, to get inspired or to connect and network. More then 30 speakers from around the world are presenting sessions on audio, video, design, development, 3D and game development .

During the evening there is an award show where you can see the best multimedia projects from the upcoming talents. We close the day with an exclusive 2M08 party till the late hours ! Entrance for the Whole Enchilada is FREE but you need to register to reserve your seat!

multi-mania: first names announced

Published on March 22, 2008 in Conferences, kortrijk and multi-mania. 5 Comments

We’ve just announced the first names for multi-mania! Peter Elst, Jason Levine, Ralph Hauwert, Dave Schroeder, Stephanie Sullivan, Aral Balkan, and Marco Casario will speak at our event.

It’s also possible to sign up for our open awards. Send in your work in one of our 4 open categories, and maybe you will win a prestigeous multi-mania award!

http://www.multi-mania.be

Multi-Mania 2008 announced

Published on February 12, 2008 in Conferences, kortrijk and multi-mania. 1 Comment

Multi-Mania 2008 was just announced! This year’s edition will take place on friday 23th of may 2008 in the XPO meeting centre, Kortrijk. Already looking forward to this awesome multi-media fest!

Flex Flowcharts

Published on January 30, 2008 in Actionscript 3.0 and Flex. 15 Comments

Last saturday I went to the Adobe Usergroup meeting in Gent (Belgium). It featured the Adobe Prerelease tour, Christophe’s presentation about Prana and, last but not least a presentation about lovely charts. Loverly Charts is an application to created flowcharts and diagrams online. This reminded me of a project I’ve been working on now and then the last 3 years. It doesn’t have a title / name yet, but it is a flowcharting application aswell.

You can created flowcharts, which are stored in a database. The flowcharts have metadata, like the perspon who is responsable for that chart, name, description, etc… Each step in a flowchart has metadata aswell. Charts can be linked to eachother, so you can describe a main proces which links to sub-processes aswell.

I’ve put a little demo online at: http://labs.aboutme.be/charts/

Enjoy!

benchmarking cakeswx/amfphp

Published on January 20, 2008 in Actionscript 3.0, amfphp, cakephp, cakeswxphp and swx. 1 Comment

Cakeswxphp enables you to use the cakphp rapid application framework as your remoting backend. No longer writing complex sqls, escaping query strings,… As some of you have noticed, cake does slow your remoting down a bit, as more classes are loaded to give you this ease-of-use. I did some benchmarks, comparing amfphp and swx with cakeswxphp 1.1 and cakeswxphp 1.2. I ran the echoData service 10 times, and took the average speed of those calls. These are the results:

SWX: 346ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.1: 350ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.2: 369ms
AMFPHP: 57ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.1: 111ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.2: 126ms

As we already know, AMFPHP is fast as hell. The CakePHP version is 2x slower because of the extra classes & functions cakephp executes. The difference between SWX and CakeSWX isn’t that big.

After that, I turned out eaccelerator (PHP caching / accelerator system) and ran the benchmark again:

SWX: 347ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.1: 364ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.2: 362ms
AMFPHP: 50ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.1: 64ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.2: 67ms

Not much difference between the first results without the caching, except for the Cake AMF gateway: it seems like using a php accelerator makes the cakeamfphp almost as fast as the native amfphp!

I’ve included the benchmark scripts:

cakeswxphp SWX benchmark
cakeswxphp AMF benchmark (AS3)

cakeswxphp: simpler and on cake 1.2

Published on December 18, 2007 in amfphp, cakephp, cakeswxphp and swx. 6 Comments

After some user input, I updated the cakeswxphp packages. I also started a branch which supports cakephp 1.2. There is a change in the gateway locations: you no longer connect to cake_swx_gateway.php or cake_amf_gateway.php, but to swx.php and amf.php (default locations in swx). This should make it even simpler to start with (cake)swx!

Again, you can download it at the cakesxwphp page…

hacking the ipod Touch firmware 1.1.2

Published on November 16, 2007 in apple, ipod and ipod touch. 0 Comments

I just love it. My new ipod Touch. I bought one last week, and I didn’t regret it for a second. The navigation and animations are so intuitive, Apple is really pushing the boundaries a little further again :-)

However, running 3rd pary apps on the touch isn’t that simple. I tried hacking it yesterday, but ran a hack for the earliers 1.1.1 firmware, which didn’t succeed and included copying DMG files and doing SSH and SFTP. Today, I resetted the firmware and tried another hack, WITH succes. I won’t repeat the proces over here, but check it out at Koos Kaspers. I’m already running the iPhone apps, and some 3rd party ones like Apollo (IM client), NES emulator and iSplit. Any other good apps you know of?

FOTB07 rocked

Published on November 8, 2007 in Conferences. 1 Comment

Wow, just got back from Flash On The Beach and I must say… awesome! So many inspirational sessions, such a great atmosphere… I’m gonna post some quick video’s / photos this weekend, when I can hook my cellphone to my windows laptop (unless anybody knows a way to get the files on an N80 imported on OSX? I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the speakers at our own multi-mania event this spring!

SWX contest deadline extended

Published on October 24, 2007 in swx. 1 Comment

Aral Balkan just announced he extended the deadline for the SWX competition to midnight December 2nd (GMT). So… no “not enought time” excuses anymore!

SWX explorer with code generation

Published on October 14, 2007 in Actionscript 2.0, Flex and swx. 0 Comments

I took the time today to add a simple code generator to the SWX service explorer. Right now, it spits out inline AS2 code for your service methods. I’ll add AS2 class generation and ARP code generation in the near future…

Download the source code
or
Try it online