By on August 25, 2006
Lisa and I recently adopted a kitty from the Nebraska Humane Society Fanz. Franz is awesome he likes to play with Lisa’s hair all night long while I sleep soundly.. He also loves to run and attack his reflection; which by the way is extremely funny to watch. Franz has been an excellent edition to the home team even though Cosmo gets jealous…
| Tagged Life
By Brendon Smith on August 25, 2006
Xara Xtreme
Has a host of features and it is supported in any operating system environment. It is easy to use and install. I would recommend it for beginner designers and season pros. It also allows for illustrator file imports so that is a plus in my book. You can design anything from graphical user interfaces to a campus news letter. I would recommend it to anyone using Linux who desires a decent illustration / Vector program! Quick Introduction!
Download!
Bryce 5
Well for those of you out there that might not now from now until September 6 you can download Bryce 5 for free. Bryce is a relatively inexpensive 3D terrain generator. You can also use Bryce to create short animations or create a simple abstract illustration.. It is a decent product but lacks the ability to export into any major package like 3ds Max or Maya. It is relatively easy to use so if you want to experiment with some 3d you might want to download it!
Download!
Posted in art
By on August 25, 2006
Lately I seem to be a jack of all trades but luckily I am still master of one the web. We have been busy, busy here at the college. We are finally done with enrollment and I can see a point of normalcy coming in the distance. I am looking forward to playing with our new sharepoint / IQ Web Portal server. I think it will greatly enhance things for faculty and staff here at the college. We have also been busy with the end of construction and wrapping up those loose ends. I had to set threw a presentation on how to use the Niagara Framework. We have a relatively cool maintenance package here at the college. I am now 100% confident I can change the temperature throughout the college if I had to. We have also been preparing to install CS Gold enterprise edition so our Campus Card project is coming along a great deal; especially when you consider this is the same type of Package Iowa State University uses. So even though I am extremely busy I do believe it will slow down in the foreseeable future!
By Brendon Smith on August 16, 2006
Well I recently upgraded one of my Boxes to Vista. I have done this before and I am pleased with the new build! I have also installed interactive designer or sparkle for development and I am in the process of installing Jrun, ColdFusion, and Flex adobe is nice enough to allow developers to run the environment as a developer on a box kudos to Adobe for understanding I have to have a copy to be able to program in the latest and greatest!! I have currently installed the basic tools I need to survive and I have apache 2, mySQL running etc, no problem. I am also very pleased to run remote desktop but have not been able to use VNC because it is not supported 
. Vista is decent operating system SLED is easy to use and is able to do pretty much everything I want it to do off the get go; I can say the same for Ubuntu. Vista is a beautiful operating system and I am pleased they are attempting support for unix software. I will be running suse in virtualization as soon as I can get it configured. I will say that the new permissions with Vista will be a great hurdle for most users to overcome. I do like the fact that M$ is at least attempting to make their operating system idiot proof. I also like Direct X (version 10 does seem to work well) I am also excited to see Microsoft allowing indie developers to use XNA hopefully some of the other gaming consoles will take note and allow indie developers to do the same with their systems. So to say the least I have been very busy.
I have also been playing around different software packages that record screen actions and I do believe Adobe Captivate is the best product but if you are on a shoe string budget and are a fan of open source it will be well worth your time to install wink! Wink is an open source software program that allows you to make screen movies and export them as a flash document which is way cool if you ask me especially for that price free!! You can also run Wink on a Linux box so try it out it won’t let you down!
Wink @ Work?
I have also been playing around with share point at work and I am currently working on the bling bling web site for Faculty / Students using sharepoint with SCT Higher Educations Portal. I am also looking forward to the new build of IQ Web code named Polaris it has a host of features faculty and students have been waiting for awhile now. Share Point in my opinion is much easier than Drupal to set up. You can also expand share point capabilities with web parts which are much like extensions in Drupal.
Posted in Vista, XNA
By Brendon Smith on August 4, 2006
This week site of the week is a tie between IFBIN and MTASC (Motion Twin). The ifBin is an excellent resource for flash developers there is a considerable amount of code to learn from, it also happens to be one of the only areas on the web where you can download source files for Flex projects. If you are a developer I strongly encourage anyone learning Flex or Flash to dig through the ifBin and see what you can find. The ifBin has some pretty neat projects like a FLEX news aggregator that is cool. This site also used to charge a $250 membership fee; now you can receive all the projects for free!! Motion Twin is an action script library open source compiler. This means you can create .swf by simply writing the code and compiling it. This is great if you know exactly what you want to do and can code it. I am also interested to see if anyone tries to create a gui for it and then it would be great but one thing at a time is fine with me! The bottom line is both of these sites are worth your time so check them out. Click Here for ifbin in aciton?
Posted in --Site-of-the-Week--, ActionScript, Apollo, Flex, Open Source | Tagged ActionScript, Flash, Flex
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