wildwinter

…from Joa Ebert.

How in [insert deity of choice]‘s name are you supposed to cut 150,000 words down to a side of A4, capture the major plot points and still make it in any way interesting? And what’s more – in Courier 12pt, double-spaced!

Go see In Bruges.

Absolutely – and unexpectedly – fantastic film with a brilliant script. Laugh-out-loud funny – many times – but also touching, dark, and violent.

This definitely means you, carnaaki – you’ll love it.

Sadly, it means I now like a film with Colin Farrell in it. He actually acts in this, and rather well at that.

The sequel to The Sword and The Sorcerer is called Tales of an Ancient Empire, and stars (amongst others) Christopher Lambert and Kevin Sorbo.

How could it be bad^*?

*Pretty easily, I reckon.

As I said in a post a while back, it is possible to use FCSH (outside of Eclipse) with Ant. Our in-house solution involves piping a bunch of mxmlc commands to a text file and then batching them up through FCSH.

However, Mihai Vasilache has created a much neater solution – he’s integrated FCSH with Ant so that the first time you call his fcsh Ant task, FCSH starts up, listening on a port for input. Then any future fcsh commands – even in different Ant sessions – use that instance of FCSH.

You can find it here: FCSHWrapper.

Unfortunately it doesn’t solve my own current issue – which is running out of heap space using FCSH. In fact, it makes it slightly worse. Oh well! It’s undoubtedly a good tool for those who aren’t abusing the mxmlc compiler, which I seem to be doing at present. (I get the impression there must be memory leaks within the compile process. Bah.)

…and collecting a few links I want to take a look at later on:

KitchenSync is an AS3 tweening/action triggering framework that looks very like our own internal ActionManager. We’ll probably stick with ActionManager, but it’s probably worth a delve into it at some point to see what it offers.

A Runtime Expression Evaluator from Sephiroth/Alessandro Crugnola. Includes a simple exptression lexer, parser and then runner. Worth a look.

Aral Balkan’s new project, GAE SWF Framework, wrapping together a whole bunch of Flash libraries and utilities to get Flex/Flash apps running on the Google App Engine. Deep-linking, PyAMF etc.

And a link found via GAE SWF, rounded corners in CSS is worth taking a look at.

…series 2 starts on BBC 2 next Thurday evening.

We were surprised. We expected it to be on SciFi like before.

No snippet this week. We have mostly spent the weekend building an underground lair… uh… a new library in what was our basement, and a desk to work at. Finally all our (fiction) books are in one room and in a sensible order.

There are some truly awesome demos coming out of the Alternativa Flash 3D project.