kelvinluck.com

Last week I received an email Pablo Parrado of actionscripthero.org:

We’re trying to make ActionScriptHero.org a community portal that explores that social aspect of the Flash community and get to know the people behind the names.

He went on to ask me to take part in a series of interviews he is doing. I was honored to be asked and to add my thoughts to those of some leading lights of the flash world (42 in total at the moment). So I completed the interview and yesterday it went live. If you want to read my rambling thoughts about the past and future of flash then please head on over to my interview with actionscript hero. Thanks Pablo!

Comments Off | In: flash, general, off-topic | tags: flash, me. | #

This Christmas I am living in Canada whilst most of my friends and family are back in England or elsewhere. So I decided to make a virtual Christmas card that I could easily and quickly send anywhere. So here’s one for the reader(s?) of my blog:

You can click on the card to flip it over and read the message on the back but remember to flip back and see how the snow stacks up on the figures in the foreground… It’s not exactly realistic but I like it :)

I managed to put the whole thing together in about a day (which didn’t stop me being about a day late sending it out!) thanks to a bunch of open source projects. So massive thanks to the authors of and contributors to:

• Papervision for the 3d (although thinking about it, I could have possibly tried to do something this simple using the new “postcards in space” 3d of the flash player 10).
• Flint particle system for the snow (and I’m hoping to do more with this engine soon – it’s really nicely put together).
• Pure MVC for holding it together.
• Code Igniter for the backend (so I can send different cards to different people).
• GTween for the tweening.
• And also to Icon Drawer for the icons who are standing in the foreground of this card.

And now it’s time to go out and celebrate the approach of another year! I’m looking forward to lots of cool stuff for next year, both work and play. So Happy Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!! And all the best for 2009 :D

4 Comments | In: off-topic | tags: AS3, flash, flintparticles, imadethis, papervision3d. | #

I’ve finally got around to updating my website and it is now running on the latest, greatest version of WordPress. After many years of fighting against Textpattern and never updating the blog because it was such a hassle I’ve come kicking and screaming into the 21st century. And I have to say I’m pretty pleased so far with WordPress… It was pretty easy to import my database from the the old Textpattern install and then it was just a case of going through and making sure all of my content wasn’t relying on any plugins I had installed in Textpattern.

For a theme, I started from Daydreams 2 by J but I found that there were lots of bits and pieces I wanted to change so I forked it into my own theme that I could add what I liked to it (including the random headers and Shadowbox support for displaying embedded flash) and fix a few bugs to make the generated HTML validate.

I also installed a few plugins straight away:

• Textile2 helped by formatting all of my old posts imported from Textpattern (I first tried TextileWrapper but had issues with it adding extra P tags).
• GeshiWrapper did likewise for sourcecode examples.
• WordPress.com Stats should let me know a little more about my visitors.
• Last.Fm Records lets me put my most recent popular album covers in the sidebar.
• Contact Form 7 does my contact page.
• Delicious for wordpress lets me put my latest links from delicious in the sidebar.
• All in One SEO Pack might just help improve my search engine rankings.
• Akismet should hopefully stop the comment spam and maybe I won’t need to moderate all my comments any more.
• 404-notifier should show me any URLs that I broke when I did the move.
• Live Comment Preview is a little bit of javascript niceness for when people are leaving comments.

We’ll see as everthing settles into place if they all behave as expected and if I discover I want or need anything else…

Because everything probably didn’t transfer correctly from the old site I have left it available at this URL (2005 was the year I started that blog):

http://2005.kelvinluck.com/

I’m still fiddling around with the theme (I’m not really happy with the headers at the moment) and the feeds to try and get everything working just so but hopefully the site is all functional and I will now be able to easily create new content so hopefully I’ll start doing it a bit more frequently…

And sorry to anyone who was subscribed to my RSS… I fear I may have spammed you all with my old content as part of this move.

No Comments | In: off-topic | tags: off-topic, wordpress. | #

Earlier today I landed in Santiago, Chille at the start of my 3 month trip around South America. First impressions are really good and after a very hectic time tying up lose ends in Wellington I’m glad to be on “real” holiday…

The fact that I’m travelling may mean that any emails you send me etc may get slower than normal responses. I will be checking fairly frequently though :) In the meantime, keep your eyes on my photos page where I should be uploading the photos I take (via my flickr account).

No Comments | In: off-topic | | #

so i’ve got a blog? i’m thinking that it’s more a place to store thoughts and things i find around the internet and for me to post code samples and files when i’ve got questions or solutions from newsgroups.
maybe i’ll even get round to adding my portfolio to it and any experiments or bits of code i write… i guess time will tell…

1 Comment | In: off-topic | | #