Aldo's blog

The house I grew up in is for sale.

This is your chance to own a piece of history. You never know, I might become really famous ;-)

Gliese 581 C, an Earthlike planet spotted outside our solar system is the first found that could support liquid water and harbor life, scientists recently announced.

Back in december last year, I participated in the first Bright Live event; an 'innovative lifestyle' event organised by Dutch lifestyle magazine Bright.

At the fair, I demonstrated my first foray in panoramic video; the panamorphosis table. This setup combines current technology (hd video, beamers) and very old tricks (cylindrical mirrors) to share a panoramic experience with more people. It is still very much a work in progress, and Ianus and I barely got it working in time for Bright Live.

Adobe released an update for Shockwave yesterday, with better support for Vista.

In my cursory test of the new release on a machine using Vista, it seems that hardware acceleration of Shockwave 3d content is working again! SPi-V content now works like you'ld expect it; nice and smooth.

Two weeks ago, SPi-V for Flickr stopped working for newly added images. A shame, because SPi-V is getting quite a following over at Flickr.

If you're looking at the site now - instead of reading it through a feedreader - you will notice that the site looks... different. Otherwise, you might have noticed that the feed, along with the rest of the site has been offline multiple times this weekend.

Some serverside problems allegedly caused by 'scripts' on hoeben.net prodded me to bite the bullet and update to Drupal 5.x. The update did not go as smooth as I have come accustomed with Drupal updates, but things seem to be working ok now. I hope to reintroduce the subthemes for different sections of the site soon(ish).

Yesterday I released the first beta of SPi-V 1.4, adding support for (streaming) directional audio, amongst other things. Here's a demo showing streaming directional audio.

Note how the directional audio not only changes in volume as you move past, but the sound actually travels from left to right (and when you are looking 180 degrees from the sound source, the left and right channel are actually reversed!).

Lately I have been working with Flash Components in Director to some extend. There's a bug in the way the Flash Xtra handles 'undefined' values that's proving rather inconvenient.

When no items are selected in the List Component, selectedIndex, selectedIndices, selectedItem and selectedItems are all set to 'undefined' in Flash. Unfortunately, the Flash Xtra thinks that means the property does not exist, and an error is thrown in Director when getting the property: property not found.

When Macromedia released Shockwave 10.1 (and by the name Macromedia, you know that that has been a while back), they introduced support for Flash 8 content. Unfortunately, the update broke the builtin eventlisteners for Flash Components, a feature that was introduced in Director 10.0

I've been putting lots of time in the IVRPA site. Most of it is behind the scenes work to keep things running, and I fairly often get to contribute changes to Drupal modules back to the Drupal project. But now for the first time, I have contributed 2 new modules to the Drupal project, which I will maintain myself.

'me aliases'
Provides shortcut paths to current user's pages, eg user/me, blog/me, user/me/edit, tracker/me etc.

This means logged in users no longer have to know/remember their uid, and it makes it easier to link to user-specific pages from a site help page (without resorting to using php to put $user->uid in the link).