Recently I did some work on the a project that required me to use some Displacement Maps. I have never used them before, but after playing with them for a bit I soon realised something… they are very awesome.
They do take a little bit of getting used to, so to help with the experimentation I created this little app that makes it easy to test out different image and maps combinations.
I’m by no means an expert on Regular Expressions. I mean, I get what they do, and can see their awesomeness, but damn they do my head in sometimes.
To help myself out, I wrote a quick little Flex app that lets you test how a regular expression will work with a particular string. It lets you try out all the Flash Regular Expression methods and see each of the results.
To top it all off, I put together a quick overview of the different Flash Regular Expression methods that are available, as well as a short overview of the Regular Expression syntax.
You can check it all out right here…
A while back I was given my first flash project that required me to use Papervision 3D. If that wasn’t daunting enough, the design of the project required that there be a depth of field effect on the elements – something that papervision cannot do. (If i am wrong about that, please don’t tell me now…)
After learning the basics of papervision – which has plenty of tutorials on the interwebs – I started brainstorming an approach for faking depth of field. Here is what I came up with.
Separating Axis Theorem (SAT) is a technique for calculating collisions between convex polygons.
I’m by no means an expert on it, but after the need arose for me to do some collision detection I did a pile of reading and finally got it working in ActionScript 3.
I thought I would share what I learned in the hope others wouldn’t suffer so much 
I was creating an online gallery for a project at work when came across the need for dynamically created reflections. We had an existing class that we usually used for reflections, but it was a bad port from AS2 to AS3 and I was never happy with it. It tended to be hard to work with and pretty inefficient.
In an attempt to make things better, and make my life easier in the process, I sat down and created my own Reflection class.
Here is what I came up with.
Whilst doing some work on an Mathematics Learning Object I was confronted with the problem of having to be a variety of different graphs.
Due to the way that these projects change over the construction period it soon became apparent that hand drawing these graphs would be too time consuming, so I set out to create some classes that could do most of the heavy lifting.
In a similar fashion to my AS3 Graphing Classes, my MathML parser was created out of necessity. I was working on a project that had to display some equations, but drawing them out manually seemed a bit over the top.
I originally looked to see if anything was already available on the net but had no luck. Considering that the only other option was to create each equation manually, I decided to try and write my own MathML parser.
TextJumbler is pretty useless. It basically just jumbles up test is a particular fashion that allows the text to still be kinda readable.
It was based on a chain email I got a while back which explained that if all but the first and last letters of a word are jumbled up they could still be read.