It’s a neat tool. This is a movie of how it works:

(After re-watching the movie, my tones are kind of bad on n词酷. It should be cíkù. Also I say the c sounds more like “s” instead of “ts” a few times -sorry about that.)

Ustream.tv is an interesting service. Using Flash it lets you broadcast (stream) live from your DV camera or web cam. So, you can have your own live “TV show”.

One of the bonuses of setting up your own channel is you get your own IRC room with an embed-able Flash client. Very useful for people to ask quick questions about your applications or services without giving out your personal information.

Here is what the client side of the service looks like.

This service does have potentially many uses (aside from any narcissistic tendencies):

* Free meeting broadcasting
* Teaching / Online classes
* Interviews
* Get yourself used to being monitored all the time

It’s a free service, and I think it has the potential to be a a “youtube killer” (you can record the streams as well for later broadcast).

Depending on how you go about learning Chinese (Mandarin), you’ll probably start with how to pronounce pīnyīn (the romanization of Mandarin. For example, 谢谢 == xièxie). However, the pronunciation of letters in pīnyīn do not match English, and it’s easy to forget how the components sound.

To try to solve both of these, we put together a version one site called ChineseFirstStep.com.

Right now it is a basic social networking site for people studying Chinese (we have many many more ideas for the site). The site’s current focus is around his lessons and cultural teachings, but is open to anyone who wants to learn, or has an interest in Chinese.

One of the icing parts of the site is a simple Flex application I threw together that shows how to pronounce pīnyīn. I think it’d be very helpful for anyone learning pīnyīn. Here is the initials and finals tables.

It’s a simple extendable app that gets used within the lessons. Anyone who knows Flex can tell that it was pretty easy to throw together - thumbs up for Flex.

The site is / will be designed for English learners learning Chinese, and Chinese learners learning English. If you fall into either of these categories, I am curious to hear your feedback on the site, and what you think might help you with your studies.

Please drop me a comment if you have time.

If you find the character online, it’s not that hard. You just copy and paste it into a dictionary like dict.cn, and you have your answer.

If you come across a new character in printed form, however, it’s not quite as easy. You have to know (or be able to deuced) the main radical, stroke, and count and then look it up in a paper dictionary (which is often a three step process). It is very time consuming for a noob such as myself.

I found a really neat web application / dictionary that lets you search the dictionary by drawing the character.

While you still have to know the stroke order, it’s far easier then doing it the paper way (and it seems to be pretty good at guessing what you’re doing as long as you draw it mostly correct).

It’s called Nciku.

I just upgraded my Ubuntu box to Edgy and the beta Flash 9 plugin no longer works.

I am not sure if it's the new core, or the addition of Firefox 2.0, but when ever I hit something that has Flash on it the browser crashes. It could just be the way I have it setup, but it was working quite well before the upgrade.

If you're digging having Flash on your Ubuntu box, I'd hold off on upgrading to Edgy.

Update: I tried to roll back to 7 and it still crashes. If it's not my setup then this might be bad for Ubuntu full timers. Google analytics tries to use a small bit of flash and that seems to cause the browser to crash too - and there are tons of sites using analytics. With Flash completely removed the browser works fine. Just Something to consider before an Edgy upgrade.

Update 2006-10-29:Sergio points out in the comments below that this may fix the problem if you run into this (this fixed it for me): add “export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1″ to your /etc/firefox/firefoxrc.

Blogged with Flock

Example someone showing off Google’s MS Windows side bar thing.

Simeon, who develops on Mac as well, set out to find a way to get Flex 2 to compile on the Mac with Ant, and as you may have seen on his post we got it to work. Simeon also pointed out there is a shell script that calls the compiler in the distribution.

The shell script, actually, comes with the Linux Server distribution.

When you run the script from the shell you get:

: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Hum… I’ve seen that before. Opening the shell script, sure enough seems the shell file was written on windows so it has 0×0d 0×0a line ending which are a no-no in Mac shell scripts. If you fix the line endings so they are proper Unix line endings, the shell script works and you can use it. Kudos for writing the Unix shell script.

You can download all you need to get it setup at Adobe labs.

I finished signing up for the courses, and there looks like there is going to be some great information to partake in - Flex, Zorn, and Flash stuff, integration with Flex and CF, enterprise best practices, and the list goes on.

I don’t even know if you can still sign up, but if you can come on down it’ll be a hoot.

To find me, look for the fat, 30 something, balding geek… hum… if that fails look for the name tag I guess.

The original java engine could read Doom Wad files, but wad files are heavy binary and I don’t think I could make a reader in Flash - at least the port would be rather complicated. So I needed a new model / level making format.

In the last post I talked about Blender, how full featured it was, the price ;), and the fact that it exports to many file types. So I spent the last couple nights learning Blender enough to make simple models. I also decided to go with the x3d format for models in Ruin, and just finished a basic loader.

I chose x3d because it’s an open standard, Blender exports to it, and it’s XML based. Flash does XML pretty well right off.

So now the engine can load simple x3d models (ignoring color and textures, and a few other things at present). Here is the engine loading the 3 models shown above - a cone, a cube, and a
sphere.

Sadly, the engine is having a hard time rendering, and getting a lot slower, with complicated models. The polygon count vs. speed is not holding up, and I don’t think it’s going to work for a full on game
engine without some heavy cheats.

I am also concerned that texture mapping wont be possible, but I hear in Flash 8 you have pixel level control… anyone know if texture mapping is feasible in Flash 8, or should I scrap the game idea and just make some kind of model viewer?