How to cook ramen in 100 complicated steps?
Absolutely incredible!
Spore
Spore has just been released! Actually it is just a demo of the creature creation part for now so the gameplay is really limited. Still I like how the different creatures are handled gracefully, from the classic 2 leg/2 arm creatures to the 8 leg monstrosities.
Tutorial : Thematic mapping with the Google Maps Flash API
Google has recently released a Flash version of the Google Maps API. The goal is to give developers and designers more freedom in the presentation and graphical effects of their maps. Google is certainly not the first provider of a Flash mapping API (see the Yahoo! Maps AS3 API for example) but as one of the original proponents of Ajax web mapping tools, it marks an interesting change of direction (although the original Google Maps API is probably not going away anytime soon). One interesting aspect of using Flash is also a boost in vector graphics rendering speed, which I am going to demonstrate here, with a tutorial showing how to display a chloropleth map with this new API. Here is a link to the final application. It has to be noted that I am definitely not a Flex/ActionScript guru (just a few evenings of experience) so there are probably better ways of doing things than what I am showing here.
Compiling Palo on Mac OS X
I am currently in the process of evaluating Palo for a personal project. The Palo server is an opensource (GPL) in-memory multidimensional database management system, well suited for OLAP. Jedox, the German makers of Palo, market it as a data store for Excel, but it should work well outside this specific usage scenario. They offer pre-compiled binaries for Windows and Linux but not for Mac OS X, so I set out to make one, which was not very hard. I outline the steps here. A downloadable package for Leopard is at the end of the post.
Outrunners
Check out the video of French band The Outrunners. Love the 80’s vibe, very Miami Vice-like.
Ruby Tutorial: Scraping Muxtape for mp3 + iTunes playlist creation
Muxtape is a website that lets users share mixtapes online, which is pretty cool, as is their minimalistic design. This Ruby tutorial will show how to use Mechanize (together with Hpricot) and rb-appscript to scrape the site, download the mp3’s and add them automatically to an iTunes playlist. The last part will only work on Mac OS X (because of rb-appscript).
Chicago
I was in Chicago on Saturday. What a great town! It was just a day trip so I just walked around for a few hours, but I really liked the feel of the city.
Update: More photos of Chicago on my Flickr page.
Slapped in the face by the 90's
Recently I listened to something I haven’t heard in quite a few years, namely the album “Whiskey”, by Swedish crooner Jay-Jay Johanson. I remember I listened to it all the time when it was released some time in the mid 90’s. It was then described as a trip-hop Scott Walker. I was surprised I still enjoyed the music as much. Have I changed that little?
