Animator

I am yet another dialup user. Someone was asking about whether bittorrent was the same as flashget. No. Flashget is a download accelerator (there are others like netants, getright etc) which speeds up downloads by splitting the file into separate sections, and then arranging multiple connections to the download at the same time, once fir each "piece". While there is a max speed per download stream (not necessarily at your computer), it is still possible to have a number of simultaneous streams going at the same time! Thus, you get the file quicker in multiple pieces. Bittorrent is, as someone else said, peer-to-peer networking. Instead of downloading just from an internet site, you are actually downloading files from computers of other people who have what you are after (piracy is rife, and viruses tend to get passed around very quickly). It also utilises piece-by-piece downloads, pulling parts from a number of different uers who may have what you are after. Bittorrent can also detect whose connection (to you) is the fastest (as can some of the download accelerators mentioned above) so you generally get good performance times. Bittorrent does not require you to have to be uploading at the same time as you are trying to download. When I used to use Windows (Linux now, for years) there were some programs available which really helped speed up modem performance. Some look impressive in that they appear to speed up webpages, but this is just a trick. While you are reading one page, they are thinking ahead about what you might click next and downloading all links ahead of time. Actual speed can be gained by programs that allow you to configure MTU settings and the like... those ones can indeed improve your performance greatly! Experiment by all means, but be aware that setting your modem to think it's faster than it reall is will more likely slow you down, as various packets will end up getting missed. Now that I use Linux I don't have a common download accelerator like I used to for windows. I use the wget command where I have discovered a great way to speed up painful downloads through command line... Whereas I would normally type... wget -c theirsite.com/myfile/ (the -c tells wget to pick up the file from half way if it was already partially downloaded... the default would otherwise be to start from the beginning all over again) I now use... wget -c -t 0 -T 10 theirsite.com/myfile/ The -t is the number of retries to allow for if a file times out, Setting to zero means "keep going" (unlimited) The -T is the number of seconds to allow a download to be held up before issuing wget's own timeout and starting a new stream. On dialup, I often find that the download kind of pauses lots and then just dies. It is as if they are tired of sending me the file at my slow speed. With the extra -T set to 10, my connection keeps reinstating any time there is a ten second lag and I end up at least getting my large files in the morning instead of waking up to find them on hold. If only it worked with rapidshare.

I'm pretty certain they got Photoshop working in WINE not too long ago. They were calling it a "holy grail" as many professional designers justified not using Linux solely on whether or not would run the Photoshop application. Kind of a bizarre twist is that when I was a student in Media Design (3D animation) the tutors encouraged students to commercial pirate software on the grounds that we could not afford it now, and our work would more than pay for it one day etc... I resented this. I used Linux etc because I didn't have my conscience bothering me every time I ran my programs. Then, in another lecture, a certain tutor started talking against Linux saying that "Adobe have said they will never make a Linux version of Linux... you might wanna consider that when you think about which Operating System you'd be installing". I did a quick search on the internet and found there was more to it than that. He missed their reason. Adobe didn't want to spend up on making a Linux version due to their perceived likelihood that it would only get pirated. ...then of course they cautioned me for using Open Source Blender instead of [pirated] Maya for my 3D animations. Odd irony that I knew I'd never make them see. So, yeah: another reason. I like Linux because it is legal.

Learning HTML back in 1997 abouts, I was personally annoyed when CSS hit the scene. It looked like a cheapened down version of what I was already doing in java script: I could make JS functions to take over much of my formatting, mainly with TABLEs where I could write script to colour each row alternating colours, or document.write all those <TR><TD>blah blah blah</TD></TR> bits. I would write a JavaScript function called "newrow(xx,yy,zz)" which would write the HTML <TR><TD>xx</TD><TD>yy</TD><TD>zz</TD></TR> for me. ...I thought I was clever with my own scripts custom-writing big pages and I begrudged CSS when it appeared on the scene. I didn't have a problem coding in raw <FONT> style tags and I was especially annoyed at the confusion of changing mu prefered tags like <B> and <I> to text wasting versions like <strong> and <em>. Unfortunately for me though, CSS has become the norm. Nowdays if you write JavaScript, the end viewer is likely to see a warning asking if they want to allow the script to run. Usually virus-wary users click "no" and any JavaScript menus etc that I was so proud of before would no longer even show. Time has moved on. So what is the point of CSS then? On one hand it's to make pages work better with dynamic effects like mouseover text etc. It's not as hard core to make a mouseover effect in CSS than I used to do with a JavaScript variation. All you do now is add the attribute to your tag. CSS is supposed to be browser-friendly, in that all browsers should see the same looking page. (Just prior to its introduction, there were big differences in what browsers would do for some of the same tags. Sometimes I used to have to write JavaScript to figure out what browser someone was using and spit out different code just for them!) Perhaps the most commonly used factor in CSS is in the way you can have a separate stylesheet to determine what the base fonts etc are going to look like on your page. If every page of your site refers to the same sheet, then you can change the heading colour (for example) in the stylesheet and every page on your site instantly matches your template style. On a large site this is pure magic! No more wasting days going through every page and manually changing the font styles for each one. But now, CSS has grown much bigger in time and can completely transform things in terms of layout... ...and this is where I would really look silly if I was still trying to code everything in JavaScript... Check out http://www.csszengarden.com/ ...it's an example of a page where you get to see the same page, but given a different CSS stylesheet each time. The page looks entirely different! Another one is http://www.strangebanana.com/generator.aspx ...every time you hit "refresh" on your browser, they load up a different (randomly created) CSS stylesheet. It's the same page but it looks so different! Imagine if they'd hired web developers in each time they wanted to freshen up the theme of their page, say, to customise it for each day of the week? CSS is amazing.

Here's another one I also wrote which was mildly popular in the day... plays a game of "Guess my number 1-100". One thing I don't like about my own code is that when they say they want to play again, it restarts by refreshing the whole webpage. I should have made it just pick a new number. Oh well... You can see a working example at: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/ageguess.shtml Here's the code (Note: in two parts) <script LANGUAGE="JavaScript"><!--;// numberguess is by Lancer - written 4 Jan 1999// lancer@kp.planet.gen.nzvar guessme=Math.round(Math.random()*(99)+1);var speech='Guess my number (from 1 to 100)';function process(mystery) {var guess=document.forms.guessquiz.guess.value;var speech='"'+guess+ '" does not make sense to me.';document.forms.guessquiz.guess.value='';if (guess==mystery){document.forms.guessquiz.prompt.value='Congratulations! '+mystery+' is correct!';alert ('Well done - the mystery number is '+mystery+'! \n\nPress this button to reload the page for another game.');speech='';document.location=document.location;}if (mystery<guess){speech='Less than '+ guess;}if (mystery>guess){speech='Greater than '+ guess;}if (guess==''){speech='You didn\'t guess anything!'}document.forms.guessquiz.prompt.value=speech; document.forms.guessquiz.guess.focus();}// end hide --></SCRIPT> <FORM onSubmit="" NAME="guessquiz"><CENTER><TABLE ALIGN="CENTER" BGCOLOR="#888888" BORDER="3" CELLPADDING="5"><TR><TD BGCOLOR="#004080"><FONT COLOR="#ffffff" FACE="Arial"><B>GUESS MY NUMBER (1 - 100)</B></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><CENTER><INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="prompt" SIZE="31" MAXLENGTH="40" VALUE="Guess my number (from 1 to 100)"><BR><INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="guess" SIZE="3" MAXLENGTH="3" VALUE=""><INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Guess" onClick='process(guessme)'></CENTER></TD></TR></TABLE></CENTER></FORM> I should also point out that my old kp.planet email address, has long since not been working. Old old game. Enjoy,

My name is Lance Flavell. I used to write JavaScript years back when the web was still kind of new. One of my earlier ones (I think it was 1998 ore there abouts!) was in discovering the new way making dynamic roll-over effects for table cells. In the days when everyone used dial up (I still do oddly enough)... it was a way of having cool menu effects without the wait time for on / off graphics. Back then it was known as JavaScript, although technically, these days you'd more likely call the method DHTML. <!--Credit:Lance Flavell--><TABLE onMouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ff0000'" onMouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#0000ff'" BGCOLOR="#0000ff" BORDER="4" WIDTH="200"><TD><CENTER><B>DYNAMIC</B></CENTER></TD></TABLE><BR><TABLE onMouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ff0000'" onMouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#0000ff'" BGCOLOR="#0000ff" BORDER="4" WIDTH="200"><TD><CENTER><B>TABLES</B></CENTER></TD></TABLE><BR><TABLE onMouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ff0000'" onMouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#0000ff'" BGCOLOR="#0000ff" BORDER="4" WIDTH="200"><TD><CENTER><B>in</B></CENTER></TD></TABLE><BR></BODY><TABLE onMouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ff0000'" onMouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#0000ff'" BGCOLOR="#0000ff" BORDER="4" WIDTH="200"><TD><CENTER><B>INTERNET EXPLORER 4</B></CENTER></TD></TABLE> The above code was originally submitted by myself to http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/cut97.shtml... I think they may have called themselves "JavaScript Source" when I originally submitted the code.

I put Linux on my mother's computer. She hasn't used Windows and therefore doesn't complain about the system being different from something else she's used to. She would probably feel a bit lost on Windows if anything... actually, come to think of it, she'd probably adapt fairly well now. She mainly used "Gimp" in Linux to paint pictures (it's a free program similar to Photoshop but not quite as cutting edge) Linux versus Windows:Have you seen the other thread asking what made people change to Linux? There are heaps of reasons for it. I made the switch when my Windows computer needed to be serviced and I installed Linux on a very cheap old machine just to do typing... I accidently left it on a whole week and was surprised that the machine hadn't frozen or even slowed down in that time; it was just as I left it, something I'd learned that Windows (of the day) would never do. Once I found it was Open Source which meant I could make as many copies of it, put it on any machine I wanted, customise it how I liked, give it away or even on-sell it etc etc and all for free and perfectly legal... I was hooked. I am a teacher by the way... I have often been put in charge of computers in my school. I bought twelve computers and put Linux on all of them. In three years or so, the students did not get bored. They learned to make their own games levels in Sauerbraten. They got do do 3D animations in Blender. These are BIG programs. I got someone to help me network the computers so all the student saved work went to one machine. He liked the fact that I was trying out Linux in school and didn't even charge. Once the network was going, I had very few problems. Like I found with the first computer I installed it on, Linux is very very stable. Funny thing though: My students underwent computer exams which rated them against others in my country, New Zealand. Many were in the top 10% of the country. One student was in the top 1%. I found this odd because I had dreaded the test because the questions were based around Windows and Mac questions. I think they did so well partly because they learned adaptive thinking by being exposed to Linux at school whereas many already had other OS at home. Linux versus Mac: Mainly the price. Mac and Linux are more similar than Windows and Linux. Only one true way to find that out Good luck,

Putting in my own two cents on a slightly different slant... If copying, say a plain text document from Linux to Windows, remember that the endline characters are sometimes different. The command line... unix2dos <filename> ...should convert the plain text file into a version that won't have black squares (or variation of) instead of ENTER.

I had a friend that seemed to think I would like Linux many years back. He showed me on his computer, but I didn't see that it had anything over windows, and it looked to me at the time like he;d just installed some new programs. (Gimp - and then he didn't know that well enough to really show it off). Later on I had a hard drive failure with my mission critical machine. As it was off getting serviced I paid $200 for a 486DX2 (very old) computer to at least do text processing. I needed something to help out with a student whom I was helping C++. I saw this as an opportunity to at least try Linux out. I installed Red Hat 5.2... a bear to get going fully and slow and anything would be on that machine. At least it had text processing and I soon learned enough command line to convert unix to dos formats, dump files onto a floppy (mount, cp etc etc) etc for giving the student or printing in my other computer when I got it back. Two things I liked... Linux already had a C++ compiler so I could test the programs we were writing straight away... we had to search for compilers in Windows. I left it on one day... for about a week. When I returned to the machine I was expecting it to be totally frozen (Windows would have been). Instead, moving the mouse resulted in the screen flicking into life, and it was still as fast as if I'd only just left it. That got me hooked. Then Windows XP came out and I got scared by the new EULA which basically gave Microsoft permission to delete stuff from your drive if they crawled around and didn't think something was properly registered. I'm not into piracy, but the thought of "how would they know?" at my risk scared me. After not very long, I found I could do pretty much anything in Linux that I used to do in Windows, only for free (except play my favourite MechWarrior game). Then I found I was getting used to a whole bunch of things that Windows can't do... ...been hooked since. These days I usually shut up about it. People ask me when they see what I'm up to

I'm not sure what you mean by adding to your site, though for making offline games, that gamemaker someone mentioned looks good. I would also recommend another one to try, perhaps similar, which is Games Factory 2. I have tutored at certain holiday courses where we used this with young students (intermediate to secondary school age) and for many of them, this was their favorite program. I was impressed at the speed with which students could make their own games, and it was fun to learn. The program is shareware (try before you buy) although as far as I know there are only two restrictions until you purchase... A nagware "type in your registration number" window at startup. The non paid-for version cannot "compile" games, so you have to run them within the package itself. There is a bug in the software I found commonly hits students in class: After a while, when you run the games, graphics sometimes go missing. The solution is simply to close the editor and reopen it. It has something to do with graphics failing once RAM gets low. This is a very easy program to learn. It has a fantastic tutorial that takes you step by step through making a breakout style game. It will definitely get you started even at the non-paid for level. Enough babble already! You can download Games Factory 2 from http://www.clickteam.com/ P.S. I should probably mention they also have a more advanced "Multimedia Fusion" package which may be capable of creating internet-ready ActiveX games. I don't know this for certain, having only used Games Factory 2.

Blender is a great program in my opinion, but not one that can be mastered overnight. I've used it in conjuntion with Maya2008 when gaining my 3D Diploma in Animation... very compatible when exporting meshes... I actually find Blenders modeling to be more efficient than Maya! Hope it's not spam to point to other forums. I would be glad to help out any beginner problems people have with Blender... alternatively, try the user forums at https://blenderartists.org/forum/

I think Blender would have to be one of the best damned freely available programs on the planet. I would love to see a subsection for Blender in the main area. Now up to version 2.46. If you don't know what this program is capable of, check out the user galleries at https://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?27-Forum-Gallery