Cristian Rotundu

Having worked with Flex for almost two years uninterruptedly I developed this mental dependency for its packages and classes. I don't see it as something unnatural, but a little while back I had to work on a Flash project and to be honest I had a lot of moments of "man I wish I had *this* Flex class around".

One of those moments was related to parsing XML files and I just couldn't stop thinking about sweet SimpleXMLDecoder I had, just waiting for me to give it something to decode. I was really lazy then (and maybe for all the good reasons) and decided not to build an XML parser myself nor search for one but simply to change the SimpleXMLDecoder I was so used to in order to work for my Flash project.

All I had to do was to strip the Flex dependencies which were related to the ArrayCollection class (Flash doesn't have it) and I was all set.

The class worked exactly as I wanted it to and it did help my Flex centered ego

Feel free to downlod the source if you think you need it.

• Leave a comment...

Really?

OK, so I didn't really plan on coming out of my hiatus with this, but hehe...

I had a short chat with Adrian a few hours ago, something related to the ideal solution for online document editing and collaboration, but for some still unknown reason we ended up in the same kind of topics we always do: Mac OS vs. Windows, Windows vs. The-World, Mac OS vs. Everyone-Who-Stands-in-its-Way and so on. This time it was Windows Vista vs. The "Mojave Experiment".

• Continue reading or Leave a comment...

Yeah, I did it...after many "dare-you-to", I finally cracked and divorced my installation of Windows Server 2008 after exactly a month of marriage. It wasn't a bad marriage, not at all, in fact we've had our share of good times, we've had a nice, stable and very responsive relation, with clear improvements compared to the sister, Vista, but our thing was really not working out...

I mean no Bluetooth, sleep and hibernation problems, some video driver incompatibilities, these things can sometimes take a man down, you know...especially if you need to be mobile all the time.
Maybe it was never meant to be. Probably because all I could offer was a laptop, quite a reasonable workstation, but I guess I should have provided something more...server-ish, there's got to be a reason for that "Server" in the name.

I decided we should not see each other at least for a while, right now all I need is to run free, Open Source free.

/peace

• Leave a comment...

I finally came up with a name for the project:

...[heavy drums]... suspense...

the name is...JAROBE (pronounced like Jay-Robbie) which stands for JAde ROBot Explorers.

In just about three or four days the bluetooth modules will arrive (thank you Christoph) and I will be able to test the explorers' communication abilities.

I don't have much time, I have to get back to work, but here are the shots with the Stage setup I promised you some days ago. You can see the Vision System skeleton (two photo tripods joint by a brass pipe), you can see the stage border and of course, the two little stars.

Cheers!

• Leave a comment...

There it is! A sneak preview of my thesis project. So far I have the stage set up, but the Vision System is used to only record the action and nothing more. The robots only blindly surf around the wooden wave patterns (no bluetooth yet), bump into the border walls and why not...into each other. They don't discover anything (except robot-pain maybe ) and have nothing to share...YET!

I will describe the stage set up and post the pictures soon.

P.S. don't they look like little alien-ghost-robot-monsters when you turn off the light?

• Leave a comment...