Yesterday afternoon I saw the 16:50 showing of Avatar. Although I’d already watched a ton of official videos and clips, I was still deeply blown away. The beauty of Avatar is that it made an internet-addicted otaku freelancer like me suddenly loathe modern technology and Earth, and long endlessly for Pandora.
Recently I was working on Flash and needed a calendar control, but Flash’s built-in component library doesn’t include a DateChooser for AS3, and searching around turned up nothing ready-made either, so I wrote one myself for AS3. (The rendered UI is based on com.thomas.DatePicker.DatePicker.) Sharing it with anyone else who needs one for Flash development.
China Network Television (CNTV) made its debut today — go download CBOX and start watching free, fully licensed official TV. CBOX client download link: http://cbox.cntv.cn/ CBox is the most authoritative video client for watching CCTV and dozens of local TV stations from across the country over the internet. Its programming comes from China Network Television, the country’s largest online TV network — a massive library to browse at will, with both live streams and on-demand viewing.
This year there are two big movies: one is 2012, the other is Avatar. 2012 has already sounded a warning bell for everyone on Earth, and the film I’m most looking forward to next is Avatar — a movie that will get people thinking, too. Avatar, that super 3D blockbuster, opens worldwide in both 2D and 3D on the 18th of this month, and mainland China has tentatively set its release for January 2nd next year.
A puzzle game made by Tomorrow Angel Studio together with Little Sky for Ciwong Technology (www.ciwong.com). The UI and animations were done by Little Sky of Tomorrow Angel Studio; I wrote the program and the website integration. 1. Counting Blocks The shape in the Flash movie is built from several small blocks. Use your spatial imagination — count how many small blocks the shape is made of in total. Left-click the number buttons “1~9” to enter your answer; if you get it right, you earn the corresponding score. Demo link http://www.mousebomb.org/portfolio_demo/jiyi_mofang/mofang.html Screenshots
Spotted this article translated by auzn over on Tiandihui — Eaze, the newest member of the easing family. Reportedly more efficient than TweenLite and packed with features. Bookmarked. Eaze was designed to: Make tweening in Flash lightweight, eye-catching, and easy to use, Introduce the smartest syntax and event system, Deliver the best performance balance, Use as few classes as possible, with no dependencies. The result is a maximally optimized, compact little library (~4Kb for the raw engine + ~9Kb with all plugins included) with jQuery-like syntax.
EA is fast in that crowd-pleasing sort of way. It announced that Command & Conquer 4 would arrive in 2010, and less than a year after we first heard the news, we can already play the demo. The LA studio seems to have a real soft spot for Japanese flavor — after Red Alert 3 they only got more hooked, and even Kane in the C&C4 pre-order promo art is done up as an Imperial warrior. 《命令与征服4》multiplayer demo Note: This demo requires a genuine Red Alert 3 Special Edition serial number (CD-key) to activate before you can get into the game.
Yesterday I ran into a memory leak. After digging all the way down, I found it was caused by the bitmap captured for the reflection in an external .swf that had been loaded not being cleared. My guess is that although loader.unloadAndStop() closes the stream, it doesn’t release the BitmapData created inside the loaded program. Keep this in mind: aside from purely media-playback objects, if the external program you load has listeners, callbacks, or has created BitmapData, then that external program needs to clean up after itself before it’s unloaded. Otherwise, no matter how much you gc, it’ll still be eating memory.
This morning, by sheer chance, a portal dropped me into “Adoogen - Connecting Game Lovers Everywhere“. A few minutes of scanning the whole site told me what I needed to know — this is exactly the kind of game community site I’d been hoping for.
The day before yesterday I installed win7 on the N80vn. The machine got restored N times, then I formatted the recovery partition too, and after it finally installed, the problems never stopped. Yesterday: N blue screens plus N crashes, and my RP (luck) hit rock bottom. Today it crashed once, and after a reboot it wouldn’t start at all — the hardware self-test failed. Frozen forever at checking nvram… The one bit of luck in all this misfortune: before reinstalling I’d backed up the few projects I had on hand to the desktop, so I switched over to the desktop for the time being — at least its win7 is perfectly stable. I heard about Allods, which is all the rage lately. They say it’s the next WoW, so I’ve got to play it when I have time. But the laptop has to go in for repairs first…
U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum on the 16th. In answering a question about Internet openness, Obama said that the freer the flow of information, the stronger society becomes, because that way citizens around the world can hold their governments accountable. [Obama] Well, I’d now like to call on my ambassador, Huntsman. A netizen has submitted a question through our embassy website. [Jon Huntsman] First, in a country with so many Internet users, with 60 million bloggers, do you know about the firewall? Second, should we be free to use TWITTER?
After a long run of delays and slipped release dates, the fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks — the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, and the D&D Starter Set — which shipped on the 13th of this month, landed in my hands this morning. Here are three photos:
Just saw a friend share this — it’s episode one. A high-def version will be available for download soon, and the author keeps updating it. These cute characters look familiar… heh, now I remember — the official site once ran a series of “When We Were Young” comics. I really like all of them, and the 3D treatment looks great. This animation takes us right back to when WOW was young~
This afternoon halley summoned me over for a few rounds of Red Alert 3, and my craving for StarCraft 2 shot straight through the roof… Finally there’s some solid word: Q2 next year. Well, sooner than I can mentally handle, hehe.
On the 4th of this month, gskinner.com released version 2 of GTween. This version is more compact (3.5k) than the previous one, runs more efficiently, and introduces a new plugin model for greater ...
