Well.. everyone loves transitions right? I do anyway. Even if they are utterly useless like the firefly one I posted a few days ago I still enjoy it just for the sake of the ‘ooooo‘ effect it can produce. I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for the pure visual parts of flash, which is probably why I went in the direction of ActionScript instead of C# or something else.

This class will take any content you give to it (A displayobject is required though) and distort it with the help of Perlin Noise, DisplacementMapFilter and a Blurfilter. The end result is something that looks like its ‘rippling out‘. (lack of better words! haha)

It dispatches an event when the content is completely gone, and you can choose what to do before starting the ‘road back’ so to speak. The last event it dispatches triggers a reset of the parameters so you can do it all over again! Click the ducky to try it! Download the class inside…

Admittedly, this is nothing fancy like crazy fireflies! Just a small auxiliary class I wrote just now because I needed it in a project. I call it Shuffler. :)

What it basically does is to generate either a random position in the array, or return the value at that position, but keeps it unique (ie: no value will appear twice). It’s super lightweight and has close to no commenting whatsoever! haha!

Inside you can find a quick experiment + source to a AS3 class that breaks up vectors/bitmaps into particles and then moves them around in a semi-random firefly pattern. It’s a little bit CPU intense so I added a fps meter (fpsbox, courtesy of Schell Scivally). On lesser computers I’m sure it can choke a little bit due to the 2000-ish bitmap particles swarming around with filters but all it all it should be fairly okay.

I guess it’s fairly useless, usability wise, but it looks friggin cool and it can handle any shape or size. The larger, the slower however….

One of the most irritating aspects of the web is that you so often find (almost) exactly what you’re looking for, but seldom just exactly. There’s bits and pieces out there and it can be terribly frustrating to combine information from multiple sources since they don’t always merge well or are compatible. Enough talk. Here’s the free stuff! : mysqlTuner!

I’ve written and compiled a script that will automatically keep your MySQL database in tip-top condition, and tried my best to keep the installation process to a bare minimum…

Don’t send unencrypted data from Flash to PHP. I’ve prepared a class that will take a string and convert it to HEX SHA1. It’s fully compatible to compare with PHP sha1(), puts less than 1Kb filesize penalty to your project and is able to iterate through at least 50 calculations a second…

Following up my previous post regarding server performance, I wanted to try and communicate my experiences with tuning specific applications that might run alongside (and under) Apache. MySQL has become amazingly popular during the last couple of years and its popularity is not undeserved. It performs well already out of the box and the fifth version is incredibly stable.

There are (of course! :D) a number of things you can do to improve your mySQL performance however, and here they are, in all their glory! :p

MySQL tuning:

Figured I might as well start with the pedal to the metal with this whole concept. This is part one of what will (hopefully) be a comprehensive guide to how to maximize performance on your Apache based web server. Not just httpd though, but also general server memory optimization as well as tips and tricks to make mySQL run as smooth as possible. Enjoy!

Apache tuning:

In a sense, I feel pretty guilty making a blog. I am a lousy reader myself and I can count the amount of feeds I follow on one hand (half of a hand if you want to be precise).

Taking the matter further I think I actually kinda dislike the blogging culture in general. There’s too much fluff and not enough substance. I suppose there’s a certain bit of charm in reading about someone’s life if you know them.. but outside of your closest realm I just don’t get it. But I digress. I’m sure there’s something I’m not getting.