FITC Part the Second
March 16th, 2010
Jet lag. Who thought that would be a good idea? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me, but apparently I must suffer nonetheless. You see, shortly after my trip to Amsterdam I was lucky enough to continue my cloud-hopping and jet over to Vermont, US of A to strap my feet to a plank and point myself roughly down the nearest black run. This is my overtly roundabout way of explaining the radio silence surrounding the second half of my trip to Amsterdam for those not sure where I’m going with this. For those interested in my holiday- it was awesome.
Excuses aside, lets take a mental trip back to the rainy city of Amsterdam (The BBC informs me that at the time of writing, the weather in Amsterdam is in fact Sunny, but this is a trip back in time, yeah- I can do that) for the Flash In The Can conference. For those in need of a clear picture of our destination check out this video recently posted by the folk at FITC.
The amount of programming talent on display at FITC, left me feeling somewhat overwhelmed if I am honest. There were incredibly talented people pulled in from all over the world to blow our little minds, and Joa Ebert took great pleasure in doing so. One of the things I was most disappointed by at FITC was the lack of source code that was shown in the lectures. There were exceptions obviously, most notable being Shane McCartney, Mike Chambers, and Jared Tarbell who all posted their source code online after their talks. In a way I can see why, if you’ve worked hard on something you don’t necessarily want to show people exactly how you did it. Joa, however was quite confident in showing off a lot of his source code. I’m pretty sure this was because he knew that no one knew what the hell he was showing anyway. The man has written his own programming language in Scala. He has tailored it specifically to the way he thinks, and doesn’t mind that it would make it very hard for anyone else to understand, a fact he freely admitted when asked by a member of the audience. Still, you have to hand it to him, the guy knows what he is talking about and has been responsible for fixing a number of bugs in the Flash Player, not that Adobe have taken them on board.
The Hogwarts of Flash
We were also treated to the technical prowess of Japanese ‘Creators’ (The term used in Japan for anyone who does either design, development or both) Keiichi Yoshikawa and Masakazu Ohtsuka, the latter being the man responsible for Wonderfl, the online Flash builder. Despite their obvious technical prowess however, the presentation itself was a bit of a disaster. An excerpt from my notes reads:
“Poor guys - first project takes ages to load then crashes”
followed by:
“…then the web-cam didn’t load”
Technical difficulties aside, it was clear that they were incredible programmers. It just goes to show that the demons of presentations can screw anyone over.
A particular highlight for me was the talk by Jared Tarbell, which is funny as it wasn’t particularly related to Flash. It was more about the strange things that occur all around us in the natural world and the man-made, and how the two interlink. It also looked at how maths dictates a lot of what happens and how it can lead to some fantastic infinite patterns. One thing in particular stood out in my mind at the end of the presentation, as I’m sure it did for may others, and that was the shortcut circle. It’s basically a circle of LEDs that once lit, toggle the state of the next ones in the sequence. This leads to the lit LED appearing to move around the circle. However, if you put a shortcut in the circle a surprising pattern emerges. Click the image below to give it a try for yourself - once the flash has loaded click on one of the LEDs to begin the sequence and then just watch.
Click to view the flash version
As is the case with most of these things (including holidays to Vermont) they are over before you know it. Indeed, before I knew it I was at the FITC after party downing vast quantities of free booze and having my ankles inspected by a woman dressed as a latex Red-Riding Hood. I really wish I hadn’t worn my thick, thermal socks but dammit it was cold.
Blue, blue, electric blue, is the colour of my room...
The evening ended in the… well, morning with me trekking from central Amsterdam back to roughly where I thought my hotel was. Taking blurry pictures as I went, I was very aware of the taxi that I had book to whisk me to the airport in the next few few hours, but I had more pressing issues at hand. Like all these canals and bridges look the same. They had seemed like such convinient navigation aids on the way over, and now they had turned on me.
My last photo of Amsterdam, location unknown.
Suddenly there was a hotel porter in my room, shouting. Apparently he was trying to inform me that my taxi had been waiting for fifteen minutes. Some hasty dressing and a bit more shouting later and I was in the taxi and off on my journey back to London and a full day of work. The Dutch have an expression you know - Wie boter op zijn hoofd heeft, moet uit de zon blijven, or “He who has butter on his head, should stay out of the sun” - think about it.
