Alias

So I’ve been alerted to the ridiculously cool Pokercoder event by my old pal Sean McSharry. Despite being probably the worst poker player on the planet, and having sworn never to play again after a high profile and humiliating defeat at Flash on the beach last year* I’m pretty tempted to go along. In fact, I’m definitely going along.

Apparently, it’s free entry, free booze, and really, really awesome prizes! Plus free tuition if you’re not sure of how to play (it’s Texas hold-em rules).

Check it out:

In order of finishing position, these are the prizes:

1. iMac 24” 2.8GHz (plus cab fare home)
2. MacBook 13” 2.1GHz (plus cab fare home)
3. Sony Playstation 3 (plus cab fare home)
4. iPod Touch 16GB
5. Nintendo Wii
6. Nintendo Wii
7. iPod Nano 4GB
8. iPod Nano 4GB
9. iPod Nano 4GB
10. iPod Nano 4GB

PLUS £20 free bet on Betfair for those players finishing in places 11-20.

Gift / goodie bags will be handed out also. At this point we don’t have the final details on what will be in them or how many of you will get them. Check back later on to find out.

Register now at pokercoder.com. You’d be crazy not to.

*Last time I played poker was at Flash on the Beach 2007, at a table with Sean, Nicolas Canasse and Joshua Davis - I managed to lose horribly in front of some of the people I most respect and admire
… still, makes a good pub story, I guess.

This is a video from the Flash / Arduino workshop I led for tinker.it last month. This is me demoing my flash based RFID reader - the hardware drivers are all written in flash, and should be totally platform independent. I really like the idea of writing hardware drivers in Flash, and it’s something I plan on exploring further over the coming months. Obviously there are limitations as to what can realistically be achieved, but I think it’s a lot more satisfying to be able to, say, interface directly with a wiimote via a hardware connection and a serial port than using something like glovePIE. Also, it opens up all kinds of new creative areas which were previously the domain of the hardcore assembly level coder.

Anyway, here’s the video. Basically, flash is controlling the hardware, then reading back the 4 byte unique ID of the standard, publicly available Oyster card, and rendering it as a colour and rotation value. I think this has a lot of potential for further development and will be working on other ways to do cool stuff with this technology.

A lot of people ask me why flash development is so expensive and difficult these days. One reason that I’d point to is the increased complexity of modern flash websites as compared to the stuff we were doing ten years ago.

I think this is best summed up in the  Wikipedia article on the Inversion of Control (IoC) design pattern:

” The price paid for that additional flexibility is greatly increased complexity and the fact that the program is no longer deterministic: it’s no longer possible to tell what functions will be called just by looking at the code; one needs to consider the code and the environment to be able to determine the order of events. The code is also much harder to write and reason about, and computations that are naturally sequential (A needs to happen before B, such as User name must be provided before the login can be successful) can be much harder to write and understand.”

I think most people who’ve come onto any reasonably large AS2/AS3 project which is already in progress and had to get their head around a large body of code will know this.

Complexity = Cost.

What are we going to do about it?

In other news, I’m also talking at the LFPUG about messing around with Arduino - check out the event page here. It’s free - and as it’s in Cosmo Bar, you can get progressively more drunk as the evening progresses!

In April, I’m leading a workshop with the Arduino folks on physical computing wih flash and arduino - a neat microcontroller board that lets you connect switches, sensors, motors, lights - anything electronic, really - to flash.

The event page is here.

“Lead by Alias Cummins and assisted by Brock Craft, this workshop is aimed at people who are comfortable with Flash, and want to start experimenting/working with Arduino, but have little or no experience of physical computing. The workshop will focus on getting them through the first few steps, which are usually the most difficult, and give them the tools and knowledge to continue learning on their own.

First, you will quickly cover the basics of getting your Arduino connected up and writing simple programs and finally getting Flash to talk to an integrated circuit via Arduino. All the while you will be approaching this from a flash perspective, with our primary development language being ActionScript 3.

What do I need to bring?

- A laptop
NB: Prior Knowledge of electronics is not necessary to attend this workshop but you MUST have prior knowledge of Flash.
What we will provide

- The beginners Arduino kit which you can take away with you after the workshop.

When?

April 5- 6th 2008
From 10am to 6pm”

I’ve just finished a flash build for China Now, which is a festival aimed at promoting Chinese culture in the UK. There’s a nifty drop down menu and a shiny apple-dock style homepage. Completed on time, with a minimum of fuss.

Credits:

Art Direction - Pete Hamblin
Creative Tech - Alias Cummins
Project Management - Lizzie Cooper, Gustav Radstrom

Well, the talk went well last night (apart from the venue being double booked with a pole dancing class) - we had a good turnout, and people seemed to enjoy the presentation.

I’ll do fire next time, I promise…

So - first off, new work up on FINITESTATEAUTOMATA.ORG

And here’s the source code:
Vapour.zip

Feel free to post questions to the OSFlash mailing list, if I can help I will.

Video should be up on LFPUG soon too.

Thanks for coming everyone!

So, I’m doing a talk at the LFPUG on the 22nd February. That’s in about a week…

If you don’t go, I promise not to hold it against you and secretly hate you for years, or add your name to my “people to kill” list.

Promise.

So, things have been quiet here for a while. I’ve been really busy at work, and haven’t been very involved in the community for the past while - I’ve been concentrating more on doing experimental stuff, like my VJing work and more art based work. I’ve been working with performance artist Hellen Burrough on some video art, which is still WIP, and doing interactive and installation work with Finite State Automata, which I’m pretty excited about.

However, I am planning to present at LFPUG in the next couple of months, so keep an eye out for that. I’m also planning on keeping a regular portfolio of work, as I’ve been doing lots of stuff at Republic which I’m quite proud of.

The latest version of ASUnit has a new cross platform XUL application for creating your classes and automatically creating classes for your unit tests and test suites - this version solves a lot of . issues and strangeness that occurred with the JSFL command version, which I generally found a bit mystifying. XUL is pretty interesting as technology, once you get it working. I must admit, though - everytime I see that

xmlns=”http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul”

tag, I just want to scream NEEEEEEEEEERRRRRDS!

But that’s just me.