Category — Random

I know, it’s a bit late for the Merry Christmas part of the title, but never the less. I would just like to wish you all a happy Christmas and have a great new year, and decade!

I myself and very very excited about next year, as for me it is a real turn point. Next year I finish school and am off to college, finally doing subjects that I’m actually interested in, which the exception of maths (Business Studies, Computing, Maths and Photography), at a college which is close to home, which is nice seeing as my current school is a quite a drive. Before that can happen, I have to take my GCSEs which is a pain, but in a few months they’ll be over and I can finally get back to updating this blog more regularly.

Talking about my blog reminds me that I’ve take the chance to draw up a few comps of what my new site is going to look like, and here’s a preview of the homepage.

I hope you like it. I was aiming for a very clean, but interesting look. I don’t know how long it will take me to get this live as my HTML is very rusty, but this is a good chance to get it back on top form. I plan to use ExpressionEngine as my CMS as it’s very customizable, and suits my needs better than the other CMSs I looked at.

I also have a book review in the works on Unity Game Development Essentials, which should be up within the next week or so. I have to say though, this book is really good and very easy to understand. After than I intend to hopefully write a few tutorials for sites like Activetuts and sell a few things on FlashDen.net to get a bit of extra cash.

Finally there’s the case of my portfolio. I’m shelving this for the time being as I there’s so much else I want to learn like C# + Silverlight, Cinema4D, Better AS3, Obj-C and the list goes on, so once I’ve got my new blog up, with a basic works section I will get to grips with some of these and then see how it goes from there. I feel I’ve lost focus over the past few months with school, fitness and a few other things, but this new year is a great time to get back on the ball and catch up.

So I hope you all have a great time over this celebratory period and are looking forward to the new decade as much as I am! I feel this decade is going to be the most important one of my life.

Speak next year :p

Harry.

Over the past few months I have acumilated quite a few interesting links in my ‘Favorite’ section on Twitter. So I thought instead of being an anti-social nerd, I could share them out to my readers. So here we go!

1. Open-source ActionScript libraries for creating Flash games : http://bit.ly/3BqFjr (via @mesh)
2. A showcase of some of the best PV3D projects out there : http://www.papervisionshowcase.com/ (via @c4rlo5)
3. Very interesting blog about games & flash to add to your reader: http://www.stephencalenderblog.com/ (via @mesh and @bartekd)
4. Amazing stop-motion video! How do they do this? http://bit.ly/wwALI (via @michaeledge)
5. ARhrrrr – An augmented reality shooter prototype http://post.ly/seY (via @rickwilliams)
6. 43 iPhone Development Resources http://bit.ly/jn3ra (via @creattica)
7. Stefano Dembro’s Robots http://www.stefanodembro.com/index.php?l=item&q=Papalote (via @joshspear)
8. Version 1.0 of today’s most popular applications, a visual tour http://bit.ly/b4Mkx (via @PSDTUTS)
9. Nice video of Flash builder 4 Developer Productivity new Features shown by David Zuckerman http://bit.ly/2XIafH (via @swfgeek)
10. Plug-in Media’s Big & Small Papervision site blends 3D with 2D very smoothly. A cut above, very nice job indeed. http://bit.ly/EXWge (via @richardleggett)

So there you go, my top 10 links for a while! I hope they are useful to you.

Harry.

Some of you may have read my twitter updates about technical trouble with my PC, and I thought I would post the solution here.

After many hours trying to figure out why my computer was coming up with the error:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
 
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

I still had no solution. The Windows XP CD install just hung on ‘Searching for previous Windows XP Installations…’ and the Windows Setup recovery tool just hung as well after selecting which Windows installation I wanted it to fix.

I then had to get on to Dell support, which is never very pleasant. After running the Dell diagnostics CD, it reported the error:

"Error Code: 0F00:0650.
Msg: IDE Failed: The self-test failed the read portion"

They then sent me 2 new hard drives, which for some reason we double the size of the original :) After installing these and trying to install XP again it still didn’t work. I ran the Dell diagnostics again, it reported the same error. I was stuck.

Then I went into the BIOS settings and turned RAID control off on the 2 hard drivers. You do this by selecting the drive, and changing it status from ‘Raid on’ to ‘On’. This seemed to solved the problem. I am now thinking that it was not really necessary to get 2 now hard drives as well! It so happened that my warranty had run out 10 days earlier so I had to pay for these! >(

I know this isn’t related to the web, but seeing as I couldn’t find a solution I thought I would post it here.

Now, over the past 10 years there have been many new and exciting technologies appear which help us create and develop more advance apps. Over the past 3 – 4 years, companies and individuals have been taking a different approach on the research they have been doing. Instead of creating new technologies (languages, software, etc..) to solve a problem, they have been using existing products in different roles. The two best examples of this is Adobe Alchemy and the Microsoft Research project, Singularity. If you don’t know what either of these are them a) be ashamed ;) and b) keep reading.

Adobe Alchemy.

This is a project Adobe developed that lets you take any C/C++ library/code and use it in Actionscript. Now, if you know anything about C/C++, then you will be aware that the number of libraries and open source tools out there vastly exceeds that of Flash’s, so there is something for everyones need, and now the need to write you own is going to be almost completely redundant in the future. You may have seen some of the extreamly cool projects being developed out there, like Doom in Flash (don’t open this at work, you’ll never close it). Although this isn’t perfect, it is still quite an achievement. In time, the desktop will become the web. Going back to the original topic of this post, role reversal, who would of thought a few years ago, that the same type of code that powers the worlds most famous operating system would be able to run on the web? Now, I hope you see what I am getting at. Instead of Adobe creating a whole new language, they just took an existing language, original designed to be a low level language and made tools that let people use it in another way, which was completely unrelated to its original purpose. 

One way to look at this is that nothing new has been created here, nothing has moved forward. You could say that things have moved sideways or expanded in a different direction to what has been happening in the past few years. Using the same thing, just in a different way. 

Singularity.

Microsoft Windows is developed using a mix of Assembly, C and C++ (the well know ones all are), and anyone who has done some serious development with these languages know that it is very easy to go wrong and that you, as a developer, have to watch you back. C/C++ are unsafe languages which means there is a lot of room for error, but they are also extremely fast, so it’s the best choice for an OS. Now though, people at Microsoft Research have been developing their own OS, Singularity, which is developed using minimal Assembly and C (for the boot code, as you have no choice) and then using a modification of the C# language as their main programming language. Seeing where I’m going here? A high level language that is used as part of the .NET framework and for developing Windows Applications, is being used to write an operating system! Now, this isn’t going to replace the current version of Windows we are using now, or any time soon, as for now it is just a proof of concept. This is amazing though, as now you get all the safety of C# (well, Spec#) in an OS. This means auto garbage collection, array bounds checking, which means a lot less chance of a buffer overflow and the whole system would be so much more stable, but not as fast as the original Windows. The modification of C# they are using is called Sing# which is a superset of Spec#. The difference between Sing# and C# is that Sing# has support for channels and low-level programming language constructs that are needed for system programming.

You can read an overview of the Singularity Project here, and you can download it from CodePlex here. 

The Final Word.

Now, these two projects are the best I could think of to prove my point, which I hope you understand. The fact that no technology is limited to one purpose and that instead of creating new languages/software, there is always the option to bend an existing one to shape your needs. 5 years ago, who would of thought that this could be possible? It will be interesting to see what happens in the future….

-Harry. 

Over the past few years there have been some seriously successful and creative sites pop up. Ranging from the ones like YouTube who base themselves on a simple idea and stick to it. Others like Wordpress who started off as a simple extension to another CMS, then grew to a fully featured system with a plugin and theme database and on top of all, use by millions all over the world! Along side these sites there have been millions of sites/creations who fail trying to achive the same effect as the two previously mentioned. Now I’m not going to mention any names here, mainly because I don’t know that many and of course, it’s just not nice to say someone’s creation is a failure.

Now, this brings me to my main point, how do you come up with a killer idea?

The answer?
There is no simple one. (Annoying, I know :()

I have been thinking about this for quite a while now, and the need for even greater talent is felt more than ever.

With what seems like all the simple, brilliant ones taken, and people coming up with new ones all the time, how do you create something unique? Now the way you do this depends on what sort of service you want to create? Whether it is a way to integrate 3rd party APIs together in one easy place (e.g. linking Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress together) or if you want to create something completly different (e.g. Digg – unique back in the day, but now there are a lot of reps).

I tend not to limit myself to any one type. The way I do it is list all my different services I use, what my work flow is between them, and then I think how I could make it easier and/or simpler to do this. Or if there is anything major I wish these services had to offer, then it would be work building my own, with this feature and others included. Think Blogger to Kontain. Kontain is the same as blogger, with a lot of features added in or changed.

This is the basics of it, but you can go into a lot of detail and complexity on this, so there is really no limit to what sorta stuff you can come up with. This is my prefered way of coming up with a new idea, but it depends how you think and the way you work (visual, pratical, etc….).

I look forward to seeing all the progess that is make in the next few years and hopefully I’ll be at the front of it :D

Harry.

Here is a piece of artwork I did, continuing my series of emotions. The latest one is Curiosity.

This piece uses a render from Cinema 4D and the adds a little Photoshop magic.

Harry.

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of ITT Tech. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com. Holly taught for two years before becoming interested in writing full time for a variety of online publications with venues in education and nursing.

When people find out that Harry Northover is just fifteen years old, they are astonished. At such a young age, Harry has proven time and again through his blog and tutorials that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to web design, Flash media, Photoshop, and even making music with his MacBook. What makes people like this tick? Read on for some ways to capture the entrepreneurial spirit.

Inquiring Mind

When a new technology or application becomes available, you have to jump on it and learn all that you can about it. Learning about something when it first comes out gives you the opportunity to manipulate the hardware and software as you see fit. Once you have learned how it all works, the sky’s the limit as to what you can do.

Adventurous Spirit

Trekking through uncharted territory can be difficult, but if you maintain an adventurous spirit, chances are you will find far more than you initially set out looking for to begin with. Taking the time to explore different ways of using programs and truly taking ownership of the possibilities is another characteristic of successful entrepreneurs.

No Obstacle is Too Large

Figuring out solutions to problems is part and parcel to the young entrepreneur. Whether it is rewriting some code to customize a web page or making an entire flash-enabled page, taking the challenge head on is the only way to get the job done. The size of any undertaking should never be the main determining factor when taking on a task.

When There are No Resources, Make Some

The entrepreneurial spirit cannot be satiated by the status quo; entrepreneurs are always seeking to find access to the newest and latest equipment and technologies to continue moving forward. If this isn’t possible, they find ways to use their skills to raise money to continue working on their next project or to purchase new equipment.

The basic lesson here is to never let anything get in the way and not to give up. If you continue working toward your goals, anything truly is possible when you set your mind to it.

• Complete the redesign of this blog in Flash
• Finally get round to doing my portfolio/labs
• Get as good at AE as I am at Flash. (No smart comments ;) ) 
• Improve my Matte Painting techniques. 
• Get myself invited to more studios. He he :) 

So, there you go, there’s not that many aims, but I will probably get distracted by other things, I’m thinking iPhone dev here :) But being the future, we can only guess what happens this year. 

So, good luck this year, whether you are going to need it or not :)

Harry.

Well, here’s another little demo that uses the Nano After Effects piece I created a while back, but sticks a preloader on it and some animation. Why am I posting this? Well, because it is fairly cool and I didn’t have much else to do :) . The technique behind this is having one SWF to load in the other SWF. Now this technique became a rather famous preloader technique when Web Designer (or was it .net ?) posted an article/posting on it and also that Lee Brimelow mentioned in one of his tutorials that he uses this technique.

So there you go, not that exciting.

Harry.