Metal Gear Solid 4 - Sunny's camera

I bought my limited edition Metal Gear Solid 4 game but did not have the time to play it til yesterday. About half an hour into the game and I was simply blew away by now detailed the game is! It is not as open ended as Grand Theft Auto 4 but its universe is simply huge and very realistic! There's even items like IPod, Macbook, Sony Ericsson mobile phones, Triumph Motobikes and a PS3 in it! I particularly like the IPod feature where I can listen to the MGS4 integral podcast while sneaking behind enemy lines =P Anyway I decided to pay the official website a visit and the site features Sunny's (a whiz kid in the game) camera which can be access from the Start Menu in the game! neat! definately a very seamless experience from the game to the web :)

Let's see what Sunny is doing now :

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Initial D Playlist powered by Apture

Decided to put together a playlist of Initial D Fourth Stage episodes which I was watching during my "Rhythm in Coding". Only managed to find episode 18 - 24 on YouTube for the time being.

Initial D fans! Enjoy!

Apture enabled!

Check my gmail today and Wala! I've got an Apture beta invite code! A few seconds later I was linking some of the hyperlinks on my posts using Apture. Apture really brings a whole new dimension of linking external content to your blog. Anyway proceed to their Apture.com to register for beta! :)

BlogIT works great!

Woot! read more about BlogIT

update:

BlogIT actually uses tinyurl to append a link to your blog post when it updates your twitter status! Cool!

Rhythm in Coding

I have been experimenting with a couple of methods to find my rhythm in coding and finally I found one that sort of works. Having good rhythm in coding makes getting into the flow state easier and faster.

Here's one I did:

1. Setup a dual monitor environment.
2. Opened my development IDE in one monitor.
3. Opened up YouTube /Google reader in the other monitor.

My rhythm would be:

write a test, fails, make it pass, pop over to YouTube to watch an interesting video clip or read an interesting blogpost for 5 minutes, come back and write a test again.

Works pretty well so far. I manage to prevent myself for dozing off after lunch and my concentration span is longer! Actually it's shorter since I only concentrate when I am writing a test. Definately staying true to one of the core ideas behind TDD; take short, small and simple steps towards your goal :P

I guess I will stuck with this rhythm for awhile and see how it goes :)

update: As I proceed further, I started to realize that when I am watching a YouTube video, I can't wait to get back to my tests again, I guess once you are bitten by the TDD bug, its hard to stop =P

Visual Unit Testing for Flex

Check out this really cool extension of the FlexUnit framework that allows you to do visual assertions! Get the source here and check out this blog post while you are at it :)

Have fun playing "spot the difference"!

End of days (Papervision 3D 2.0 and Flash Media Server)

I was playing around with Papervision 3D 2.0 and Flash Media Server when suddenly I've got this lame idea of creating an application that allows people to record their last words before earth is destroyed by a meteor.

Basically the idea is to model the scenario in Papervision 3D and allow users to record their videos on FMS.

Take a look!

Pretty lame right! haha =P It was fun though. Definitely amazed by what Papervision 3D can do on the Flash Player, bump mapping and all. Check out the texture of the earth model after having a bump map applied to it! Neat! The new Effects API adds to the coolness as well! :) Anyway, earth didn't explore when the meteor hits it, it merely just shake a little, hey! Gaia is one strong lady ok! =D