It’s been a while since I posted any of my photographs here, so here’s a few shots from WWT Arundel and Pulborough Brooks RSPB reserve. Both are excellent places for a day out.
Robin
Great Tit
Chaffinch
Jackdaw
Pheasant
Robin
Once again, my dead body surfaces on another site, this time on the Wired blog. It always amuses me when I see it on a site I regularly read.
It also makes me think I could do with visiting the gym a little more frequently, but that’s another story 
Previously I found myself on BoingBoing and Kotaku 
With all the excitement of winning a BAFTA, (which i’m still deliriously happy about) I almost forgot to post about our recent success at the BIMA awards!
Bow Street Runner won the rather strangely titled “Awesome Little Bit of Wickedness Award” in the Games category. Hurrah!
This project has now won a Flashforward award, a BIMA, and a BAFTA. Incredible! All the hard work really did pay off. I can’t wait to make something like this again, it’ll be 10 times better
Well, we did it. We won a BAFTA! I am truely overjoyed.
Winning a Flashforward is brilliant.
Winning a BIMA is fantastic.
But winning a BAFTA.. that’s something special. That’s something people outside of the new media industry can relate to, and that is absolutely awesome.
Well done team Littleloud, and a massive “thank you!” to the team at Channel 4!
HOORAY!!
A quick update to say that we’re up for some more awards!
First of all, Bow Street Runner is up for a BIMA award on the 27th Novemeber.
Secondly, Bow Street Runner is up for a DIMA award on the 27th November, along with the excellent Transformers auditions we made for Paramount.
It’s absolutely fantastic to see BSR up for more awards. It was a lot of hard work, and I’d like to think that it really has paid off.
If you’ve not played BSR, it’s a free online game for Channel 4 that was launched earlier this year. It could easily take over an hour or more to complete all 5 episodes, so if you fancy a little taster video to see what it’s all about, take a look at the video here.
I’ve blogged about Bow Street Runner a few times.
Recently I’ve seen a lot of otherwise sensible people trusting random websites with their twitter username and password. In exchange the user gets an number that somehow ranks them on Twitter.
As seen with the twitterrank.com app, there’s also an option to post your score to twitter, thereby getting your friends to go to the site and post theirs, so it can quickly go viral.
Now, if I was evil, it would be a trivial matter to create my own app that stores users login details and assigns a random number to their score. Hey, why not make it a high number too, to make people feel good about themselves? Wihin a short amount of time, you’ve got a viral phishing scam where users voluntarily give you thier passwords. A bad guy’s dream.
Sure, you might have a different password for every web app, and immediately change your password after using something lke that.. but I bet the majority of people don’t..
Richard Willis gave an excellent talk at FlashBrighton last night about the origin of design patterns. I knew that the Gang of Four’s book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was based to a degree on A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, and it was fascinating to find out more about this.
I love the ideas presented in the book, and Rich did an excellent job of making what could have been a geeky session into one that I feel many people could appreciate.
That book is definitely on my shopping list. Good work Rich.
I should also mention Tom and Chris from Flexible Factory did a good job of clarifying the Event model in AS3
Red5. The promise is: “an Open Source Flash Server written in Java” with support for pretty much everything most people would need. According to Chris Allen’s session I went to at Flash on the Beach, it would be easy enough to get it set up and running.
Well, that’s not quite my experience with Red5 so far. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be a central resource for information. There’s the following - i’m not sure which are official:
- http://code.google.com/p/red5/
- http://osflash.org/red5/
- http://wiki.red5.org
- http://www.red5tutorials.net (spam seems to have crept in)
- http://red5.org/ (appears to be down)
- http://red5world.com/ (last updated July 08)
- Also, I was unable to download the Eclipse plugin from here: http://www.red5.org/projects/red5plugin/
I also couldn’t find any examples using AS3, which was a little suprising. I see that’s planned for version 0.9.
After downlaoding the most recent release (0.8RC1), I spent several hours attempting to get it up and running on my XP box to no avail. I then tried installing 0.7, which I finally managed to get running.
One of the many problems I had was finding out how to log into the admin panel. I read that the username and password was admin/admin - however that wasn’t working. It took a lot of scouring mailing lists to find that you need to register a new user first at this URL:
http://localhost:5080/admin/register.html - you’ll then need to restart the Red5 server. I’ve yet to see that mentioned in any tutorial or documentation… although I may well be wrong
ANT has also been a real pain to set up. The readme for Red5 says to get this installed, and to run “ant server” - after a few hours of battling with this and having a lot of problems with dependencies and environment variables, I finally settled with just running ’start.bat’ from the Start menu. It seems to work, although i’m confused why the instruction to run ant exists.
I won’t even begin to list the problems i’ve had attempting to create a simple ‘hello world’ application. This is no doubt due to my complete lack of experience with Java, but it’s a real shame there’s a lack of well written, up-to-date tutorials on how to get a simple application up and running.
In the end, I’ve managed to create my own Flash app that connects to one of the existing sample Java apps, but it’s far from ideal. At least i’ve got something to show for my efforts though.
It turns out I could have saved a lot of time by reading Robert Silverton’s blog, where he details pretty much exactly what i’ve gone through. Doh!
A short message to the Red5 developers: You’ve created something that is no doubt absolutely wonderful. There needs to be a little more documentation and tutorials. Please try and help more of us get involved with using it. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please let me know.
If you’re an information junkie like me and you’re following the US elections tonight, here’s a few useful URLs:
- 2008 Election Results from Google
- BNO election coverage (I love BNO’s twitter feeds)
- BNO’s vote 08 twitter feed
- BBC News live
- CNN Live
- election.twitter.com
Any more anyone?
I’ve just had some great news. The Bow Street Runner Flash game that I worked on for Channel 4 earlier this year at Littleloud has been nominated for a Children’s BAFTA!
The competition is pretty tough, but, well, fingers crossed eh!
Update: We won!
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