Blogs

My fish have returned! After a long period of no fish and a sad empty tank :-( Although it had its uses during Christmas. An empty aquarium makes an ideal extra light-and-greenery feature.

Pictures of my new fish will follow suit!

For the second World Wide Panorama event I shot the windmills near Kinderdijk. At the time I whined that the 20 or so windmille Kinderdijk were really nothing special (compared to - say - the Taj Mahal or the piramids of Giseh); looking out of my window I was looking at no less than 4 historic windmills in Schiedam... Since then Tessa and I have moved to a better part of Schiedam, and though I am more than happy with my new view the windmills just fall outside my viewing frustrum on either side of our house.

When Apple released the Mac Mini last year, I immediately wanted one (and bought one too). Over the past couple of weeks, rumors arose that a new, Intel based mac mini was to be released at yesterday's Apple Special Event. And it was.

Few people may have noticed though, that there are clear signs that the end of the world is upon us. Steve 'I-wear-sneakers-because-I-am-vegan' Jobs presented a leather pouch for the iPod, and the mac mini has a green led! Or has it?

I started working at Tremani a couple of months ago. If any of you are wondering how I spend my days there. Here is an example of what I do.

Tremani recently set up a website called LoveSafeForever.com. If you love someone, your car(s), kite(s) or your cat. Here is the place to declare your love. Safe for all eternity! They've set up a special system ensuring your love declaration will be safe for eternity.

People who visit the Portsmouth Kite festival often also visit the Bristol Kite Festival. Since they are held only one week apart and it's only an hours drive away. We try to visit both but unfortunately we don't have a car (or a license for that matter). This year we made an return trip to Bristol by plane. It's sounds stupid but that's actually a lot cheaper than staying in England for the week.

Last year August we went to the Portsmouth Kite Festival (again, third year in a row) and again we had a GREAT time. Blue skies, fair breeze, beautiful kites and lovely people.

We took a lot of pictures which i planned on posting as soon as we got home... Didn't happen but no worries, the time has finally come.

Bas Vreeswijk is a regular visitor and as always he brought along a shipload of beautiful traditional Japanese kites. This is just one of many. 

I've changed jobs recently as you all must have noticed by now. My overall happiness has improved by 500% and what better way to celebrate this than by building a new kite!

My new colleagues really enjoyed our kite display (during a company boat trip) and demanded a Tremani kite. I don't know if they really expected me to go along with this but I did so here it is... (drumroll)

We took these pictures on a very drab, windless (newyears) day. But we couldn't resist finally testing the kite. It flew absolutely perfect (tears are forming in my eyes just thinking about it). Not all my kites are this well behaved...

Director has a bit of a bad habbit of ignoring the mime-type, or even the filename in the header of a file when you import it through importFileInto or setting the fileName property of a member in Shockwave. This means that it is not possible to load eg an image through a php script; Shockwave/Director only sees the .php extension it requested, and does not recognise that as an image format. As a result the image will not import. Since php is often used to 'glue' Shockwave movies to a database, this inability can be quite a problem. Personally, I am using PHP scripts to digest complex files into chunks that Shockwave can handle (ie: load embedded jpg frames from quicktime vr files).

While waiting from a fix from either 'formerly Macromedia' or the Firefox team, here's what I use to work around the float() deficiency on European systems with Firefox 1.5:

Instead of using float() to convert a string to a float, I am now using myFloat(). myFloat() first checks if the current system is affected (seeing if a float is actually a float), and if so changes periods to commas.

With all my complaining about Safari and Shockwave, you'ld almost forget there are other browsers with issues regarding Shockwave. Firefox 1.5 has been released recently, and many people are complaining about the new browser having issues with plugins in general; they just won't 'play'.