So I got this awesome little book about cooking with just a few ingredients and I thought I would share a few things from it along the way. The first one is an obvious favourite dish of mine considering I have a thing for Thai basil in general.
So it's filled with recipes consisting of three or less main ingredients and this makes planning for anything in it a real breeze. On the downside, the ingredients really need to be the best of breed as the entire dish is basically dependent on them - so no cheap varieties!
On the way home, I picked up two refrigerated chicken breast fillets, the nicest-looking red bell pepper I could find and a pot of relatively fresh Thai basil. The rest is pretty obvious. Slice them, fry them in olive oil, spread the basil over the lot and gently toss it all around the pan for a while. Serve with salt and peppar. Here's the ten minute result which includes the time it took to manually wash the tools used.
It looks quite nice, it tastes quite nice, and it's quite the GI spec as well. Add rice if you're not into that kind of thing. Until next time, happy cooking! Oh, and prepare a few bottles of high-quality olive oil for the upcoming encounters: one regular, one infused with garlic and one infused with herbs. They will be used a lot.
Welcome to Breakpoint 2010, world's
biggest pure demoscene event. For the
8th time, up to 1000 creative
participants from more than 30 nations
are expected to gather one final time
in the beautiful town of Bingen am
Rhein, Germany, from the 2nd to the
5th of April 2010 (Easter weekend),
enjoying 4 days of round-the-clock
activities in arts, technology and
international socializing.
Considering this will be the last Breakpoint - missing it is not an option! Yes I know, I should whine about how sad it is being the final Breakpoint and all, but we all knew this was coming anyway. So let's join the final party and treasure the memories because this marks another change in the aging demo scene - and change is as always a necessary step for progress.
Breakpoint crew recently posted a notice saying the world's most awesome demo scene event will most likely become a reality again this year!
As usual it's scheduled for Easter starting April 2nd ending April 5th and we should anticipate the new web site to launch later this month. As of writing all of the needed contracts haven't been signed yet so there's still a slight chance for screw-ups, but the crew is certain enough to recommend would-be-visitors to book their flights now.
Me and Tim are pondering over our trip to (the hopefully sunny) Bingen am Rhein for this event and we urge everyone interested in the trip to contact us so we can size and seize a decent vehicle and book some rooms at our favorite hotel.
Perhaps we'll get to finish a silly fast compo entry in time this year? Last years Wolverintro had some eight hours or so of extra unwanted production time so sadly it didn't make it.
We were writing the render and animation engine from scratch too though (or as much scratch as you can get with Managed DirectX 1.1 ;) and we used no tools but the crudely done engine editor to actually create the animations. We need to directly handle Lightwave scene and object formats next.
Anyway, here's part of the opening ceremony from 2009 for your inspiration (yeah I cut out some parts and cropped it for widescreen, sorry about that but it was over 20 minutes). Credits go to the Breakpoint organizers. And yes, that big screen is huge, high res and brighter than the sun.
A demo party is not only about bits
and bytes running on your favorite
hardware, it is also about art. Open
up to new forms of creative
expression.
As usual we look forward to this year's Breakpoint! Amiga!
It was early December and neither winter nor the upcoming holidays had yet hit us in Stockholm. So, Tim and I decided to go for a five day trip to Tokyo to see what it was all about, and visit Sofia who was staying there for a while.
We decided to fly with Swiss Air as the cheaper flights with Airoflot and Air China had excruciatingly long transfer times in Moscow or Beijing. Particularily the Moscow airport didn't seem like a fun place to spend 12+ hours in without being able to leave the transfer zone.
With Swiss however, all we had to survive was a 45 minute transfer in Zürich. Too bad we didn't count on the first flight being a bit late, ending with us rushing through the entire terminal dead certain we'd miss the important departure for Tokyo. What a great start.
As the departing flight to Tokyo was technically in the same terminal we didn't think much of this dilemma at first and started our walk through the 60 or so gates in area A towards the so called area E that we had to get to. After five minutes of walking we realise there's another 60 or so gates in area E and, well, how the hell do they fit all that in the same building? Getting to some kind of dead end-looking area I spot a large countdown timer, just hitting under 2 minutes and I still didn't quite get it.
Rushing down a long excalater however - we finally got it. It was the countdown for the intra-terminal transfer train of great noises from the Alps, headed for area E.
Recalling a few minutes earlier, we spotted the other part of the terminal outside a window, several kilometers away. At that time we thought it was another, unrelated terminal. Yeah, right.
Here's a video of the train ride and some of the sounds you get to listen to while trying to catch your flight in Zürich.
Arriving with the train in the mysterious area E we had to patiently queue for yet another security control which took all the ten minutes or so we had before our flight would leave us behind.
Mind you, with us we had a gentleman visiting his daughter in Tokyo, who told us of her tales trying to transfer like this in
Zürich and being just a few minutes late completely missing the flight to Tokyo, having to live through hell to get there by other means. We didn't really have time nor the wish to do that ourselves but security is security these days at the airports so we had to calmly get ourselves through it.
At last, getting through the security control unscathed, we started rushing past the gates. The numbering started at 1 and our gate was number 67. The area had a grand total of 67 gates. In other words, we had to get to the very end of the rather long building which we managed to just in time and got waved through by the gate personnel. Thinking back, we arrived at gate 60-something in the A area and had to pass all the gates down to 1 before getting to the train station. Somehow we still believe we got set up.
Inside the Airbus A340-300 the insane heat and humidity struck hard and only by repeating "it will get better once in the air" did we get to our seats alive without collapsing. We found our place in the last row on one side with noone behind or beside us except some qute japanese girls across the aisle. The 12 hour flight ended up being rather relaxing. The entertainment system worked and the economy seats were quite ok to doze off in - much better than Air France, comparable to American Airlines but of course nowhere near KLM standard.
Flying against the sun we got ourselves a 16 hour day that day - leaving Sweden early in the morning arriving 16 hours later the same time next day in Tokyo. It was pouring down and after taking some time getting downtown we had to spend most of the day on foot until three PM when we could check into Hotel Villa Fontaine Hakozaki and collapse. Luckily this was the only day it rained and the rest of our stay featured a clear blue sky and a nice warm sun.
Around two oclock in the night Sofia called us asking us where we were. It was time to get to Shibuja and Club Atom to kick-start our stay and celebrate our safe arrival.
A long time ago we used to run this site on Community Server before it went too enterprisy. It wasn't very active and we mostly published still renders for projects in progress for internal screening.
After re-structuring the server into a mass of virtual servers on the new Windows 2008 platform - the now very old version of Community Server wasn't migrated and this site became a static placeholder for many years until today.
Today I felt daring enough to try running this site on my very early pre-release CMS called Wiredoll. Why yet another CMS you may ask? Well, I agree, it doesn't make much sense.
I've started to deliver client sites using Joomla and Drupal these days and before that I was extremely fond of TikiWiki. But I still think they all in some ways suck harder than an entire army of Roombas. None of them are intuitive to my end-users (non-technical editors) and many of them are slow. A quarter of a second in page load time is not acceptable - no matter how cool a feature-set there supposedly is. Also, most of them require a ton of customization to get rid of all superfluous clutter - especially in the administrative areas.
So, this project aims at correcting these two flaws by being:
Intuitive to use
Fast
And to make matters even worse, I admit to being mostly a Microsoft nerd these days even though my previous life composed of being an Amiga fan-boy running Redhat networks with Samba acting as old-school NT4 domain controllers.
Luckily for me the recent success of Jeff Atwood and friend's StackOverflow using the modern-day Microsoft web platform makes my project goals look more realistic to the outside world. All of a sudden. Isn't life a bitch.
This CMS was started many years ago and was put to rest for various personal reasons. When I stumbled upon StackOverflow in the beginning of its lifetime - I realised many of the little details were stuff I had already done before but put to rest. Here were people proving various concepts I wanted being actually successful:
Real-time client-side content preview
Using a markup syntax and not a WYSIWYG editor
Using IIS, MSSQL and ASP.NET MVC
And be blazingly fast
Adding to the mix, a few details of my own:
One single content container format
No matter if it's a blog post, long article, image gallery or a forum post - the data is the same
An entire forum can be displayed as articles with reader comments if wanted
Image, movies and other media as part of the basic content
Media retreival using in-line lookup while typing
Viewing should be unintrusive and fast like with basic HighslideJS
Wiki-style editing, no separate administrator area or backend
Wiki-style revision history, nothing is ever lost
So, will this work, will I get it done? I have no idea. But here's the absolute first draft ever being put officially online. It's insanely lacking but hey, it's better than nothing and - well, it might even run for a few minutes!
Wiredoll is now officially on the MVC 2 RC release - the solution and project upgrade was completely painless and hence committed to the repository.
I also added some rudimentary theming support using a custom ViewEngine courtesy of Dimebrain which can handle custom stylesheets, images, javascripts and also HTML views as well - and will of course pull files from the default theme if they don't exist in the specified theme.
It's better than nothing and seems to work fine though I haven't tried the view replacements yet as I don't need them right now. I replaced the querystring theme selector with a simple web.config AppSettings value. This makes it theoretically possible to launch the FlowersFX web site using the current Wiredoll code-base. Woho.
As the people behind StackOverflow just released and open-sourced their fixed C# version of Markdown (for server-side parsing) I decided to integrate it with Wiredoll instead of the old library. Hopefully this means all serious bugs and differences between the server-side parser and the JavaScript version used for previews are gone.
Also they claim the parser is now 3x - 5x faster after some simple refactoring - speed is always nice ^^
List the bugs found here, in order of importance if possible. Fogbugz hosted is on the way ^^
There's no logical sort order in the generated menu - alphabetical on template and instance name would be nice ^^
The editor dropdowns have different styles
The editor create title preview is not updated
Collection and instance names need to be enforced unique and also contain letters that are not stripped by the ToUrl-method - ie the generated unique url must be unique and also not an empty string (example: åäö would generate an empty string today).
Makeup
Fix the ToUrl method to not strip accented letters completely but just de-accent them
Hide links and buttons that lead to unauthorized actions
Capitalize first letter in titles, collection, instance, user and template names when rendering them on a page?
Compress the CollectionSummary to limit the amount of text displayed (if any?) in a collection listing (like /blog/wiredoll)?
Make edit and delete links easier to find
The forum listing template isn't pretty or informative enough
Currently using site local membership database - we should go with openid instead (or possibly facebook connect as an alternative).
The challenge here is making openid intuitive and quick for non-technical visitors wanting to submit a simple comment. Perhaps by calling it "your google account" and tying it by default to google openid - leaving alternative openid providers open as an advancedoption for people who know what openid is.
Editor pages and Gravatars
Use Gravatars for avatars, especially for editors. Implement editor pages with personal information about editors so we can for instance link Tim to his editor page (profile).
Publishing options
Show on front page option (I don't want to publish my wish list to the front page)
Only show to author option (useful when still working on an article)
Better movie player
SW Player in all its glory, we should either customize it or add our own player more akin to the one used at the Breakpoint site where you get a rich context menu with simple options like saving the video file to disk!
It would also be nice to have a solution that will cater to silly stuff like Iphones (yes in body text that's how you type it) which do not support flash, and of course oldschool geeks who won't support any temporary solutions to the rather huge holes in HTML that Flash and its brethren of third party plugins is ^^
Automatic grouping of related articles
Some kind of logic, manual or automatic, to group many collections together - like a multi-part article. The related articles should be listed somewhere easily spotted so first-time visitors to "Trip to Tokyo - Day 2" can easily flip back to the first article in the series instead.
Intuitive "New content" page
Using auto-completing textbox and/or browse template and instance buttons - right now it's just empty (though working) textboxes.
Templates are hard-coded into Wiredoll
Instances can be created on-the-fly with the Create content editor
Uploading images, videos and files should be as easy and seamless as possible - but to begin with just make it possible to upload files to a media folder for manual url insertion in the editor. Maybe divide this folder into types like images, videos, files and so on or between different templates, instances or even collections?
Enhance image rendering
Have images that are too wide to fit the content area be rendered smaller. Allow clicking on images to blow them up right over the page like Highslide JS without any stupid dimming or other disturbing changes to the background elements.
Latest changes box
List the last ten or so changes in a box to the left. Basically the last timestamps in distinct content rows - ie updated articles or added posts/comments and so fourth.
Group and user permission per instance and collection
This should be possible to set per instance and per collection. Say my blog called Oskar is an entire instance where only user Oskar should have write permissions to. Other users should have create permissions for new content in an existing collection in it though (for commenting).
Everyone should get write to their own created content even if they don't have write in the specific instance or collection (like editing your own comment).
Revision viewer
Right now we're saving all changes as new revisions but there's no way to actually view and revert to older revisions.
Categories/tags and enhanced navigation
I think we quickly are going to find the dynamically generated menu based on templates and instances insufficient for site navigation. Something more flexible will be needed including direct links to specific collections right in the menu (like a web site about link)
RSS feeds
Should be rather easy to implement for each level (site, template and instance).
Gallery template
For images and possibly videos a better listing format is needing, displaying thumbnails and not a list of titles. Clicking a thumbnail should display its content as normal and clicking the image in the content should blow it up HighslideJS style.
FlowersFX is a creative collective of artists in various computer-related fields. We do anything from web design, event footage and video editing to enterprise infrastructure planning, server virtualization and 3D animation.
