http://www.erikhallander.com/blog Technical rants from a performance possessed Swede Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:49:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I am not naive enough to believe I originally created this effect. As with anything, there always seems to be someone somewhere that did it sometime before :). Either way, I made a version of it for my previous site in AS2 and it came with me when I updated ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/pixelator-yet-another-transition-effect-for-as3.html Just got word from Jack / Greensock (Creator of TweenMax/TweenLite) that his most recent creation, TransformManager, is out on the market. Unlike the tween packages, it's not open source, but has a small price tag on it. Personally, I would encourage everyone to either buy this, or support Jack via ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/greensock-releases-transformmanager-a-spectacular-as3-class.html Quick and short post. Due to a suggestion from Ryan Ragona I checked out how much resources the circle loader took up and it was pretty unacceptable. I re-wrote the class so that it snapshots the vectors to a bitmap object and rotates that instead of the vectors (vectors are ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/update-alert-circle-loader.html That's quite a topic. "A customizable gradient circle loader / animation for AS3". I wrote it then looked at it and couldn't help giggling. Aaaanyway. You know the one, we've all seen it. From the worst sites to the best sites, every now and then you see that circle that ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/a-customizable-gradient-circle-loader-animation-for-as3.html   var so = new SWFObject("http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/flash/perlin_transition.swf", "perlinflash", "400", "400", "9", "#22180E"); so.addParam("scale", "noscale"); so.addParam("salign", "tl"); so.write("perlinflash"); 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 ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/transition-effect-for-as3-with-perlin-noise-and-displacementmap.html 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 ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/get-a-unique-random-value-or-position-from-an-array-in-as3.html 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 ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/bitmapvector-into-firefly-particles-as30.html 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 ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/free-stuff-automatic-mysql-table-optimizer.html 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 ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/lightweight-sha1-encryption-class-for-actionscript-3.html 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 ... http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/web-server-performance-guide-part-23-mysql.html