I have moved to a new University – Edinburgh Napier Uni and I am doing an Engineering Bachelor (BEng) in “Web Technologies”, which is a brand new course combining the courses “Web Based Systems”, “Data-driven Web Systems”, “Interactive Multimedia Systems” and “Web Design”.

As you know, I am not a big fan of flash, but I had it as an assesment for my Interactive Product Development unit. The task was to create a keepy uppy game. For those of you who are not familiar with Flash, basically you can put different object in there (for example the ball), which will not do anything, unless you program them to. The programing language in Flash is called Actionscript. When you click on the ball it will not do anything unless it’s programmed to.

To play the game, click on the picture below:

In my case, I had to program flash to calculate, where the ball has been clicked and then move the ball depending on the point where the ball was clicked. We are using trigonometry (yes, the things with cosines, sines, tangents..) to calculate where the ball has to fly, how hi does it have to fly and how heavy should it feel (when should it start falling down).

One of the main purposes of the next generation of web technologies such as HTML5 is to get all those multimedia and interactive elements, which today can be achieved only by using plugins and make them part of the standard HTML DOM (also accessible by the JavaScript/CSS/etc).

For example, to embed a video today, most of the web sites use Flash, which requires a plugin and the embeded flash movie is not controllable. In HTML5, a video is inserted, similar to the way images are inserted in the previous versions: today, we insert an image, using something like <img src=”file.jpg”>, video will be inserted in HTML5, using the markup similar to <video src=”video.ogg”>. We will be able to manipulate the video with JavaScript/CSS/etc just like every other element of the DOM. More about the html5’s <video> tag here.

But the technology, which I am personally most excited about is WebGL. As you can tell, it will be a web standard for 3d graphics. It is currently in early development stage but the idea is to get full 3D games and graphics, over the web, without having to install anything.

Today, if you want to play a high-quality 3D game, you have to install it on your computer and run it from there. The idea of WebGL is to get everything you need to play the game with one click, over the web, as part of a website. Technically speaking, WebGL itself will be a JavaScript API. It will be working together with the new features of HTML5, such as the new client-side storage API, the <canvas> element and the new websockets interface.

Here is a demonstration of the popular Quake game, running in a web browser with no plugins: http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2010/04/look-ma-no-plugin.html

As you can see the technology world is moving slowly to the cloud computing concept which means that web applicaitons will be becomming better and better untill, one day the desktop software is gone…

Please note that this website will be totally redesigned and Wordpress won’t be used for it anymore. I am doing a new graphical design, which will be more into the current trends.

I am also writing my own Content Managment System specially for what I need. The CMS will basically be a collection of all the best elements I have seen and liked around thousands of websites on the web. It will be based on the LAMP technologies (of course). And for markup, I’ll use HTML5 (only some elements, which are currently supported by most browsers (or planned to be supported)). Once, the CMS is ready, I will make it available open source under the GNU/GPL license.

Unfortunately, I am so busy that I don’t have any time to work on it, so I can’t really tell you when it’s gonna be ready…

Google reminds us again, why they are number one in the web world and
yesterday, they announced on the YouTube blog that full hd support (both 1080p and 780p) will be added. So now the ‘High Quality’ button can go really high! This is a step forward in the history of the World Wide Web and the modern technology (although there are other websites that already offer HD videos since long time ago).
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A new web browser was launched yesterday by my friends at the joejoe.org community.

The first version of Fusion Browser was released on 15 Oct:

http://www.joejoe.org/forum/index.php?s=8776efc7517d3a21a1474ebfb291b6f5&showtopic=20164

I don’t know a lot about this browser and its history, but it seems to be the beggining of something cool.

However, there are still a lot of issues to be fixed, such as ajax problems (things like google suggest don’t work right), browser speed (there are serval delays when doing different things) and the browser doesn’t seem to be web standards compatible (doesn’t pass the acid 2 test).

However, I feel that this browser is what I have always wanted to see: smething simple, good looking and easy to use.

1and1 was probably the worst mistake in my life. I just don’t know where to start from..

In February 2009, I got a windows VPS from them. I needed this VPS to host my personal web site but i needed windows programs running on it as well. I was fulled by the cheap price..

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I have moved the website to my new server. This time, the server is IN MY ROOM! It is a Quad-Core Xeon HP ProLiant Business Server.

The only problem we might have is with the internet connection, so please let me know how you find the website now (Is it fast, slow, normal? Let me know what you think and you could get a free web hosting account! Send me an email on

Update: I got fed up with this server buzzing in my room, so I turned it off..
The website is now hosted by Server Web Space

These days, I’ve been working with data, by that I mean A LOT. In a few different circumstances : at the Uni/at work/as a favour. The result is that I have to deal with so much data in so much different formats, in different storages, in different organisations and different structures. I have never had problems with that but not until this week. In the past, one of my colleagues was surprised when I showed him that I can do database normalisation in my head for a few seconds (no need to write everything down and think about it for hours).

In a perfect world, you should be able to get all the data where you want it and when you want it. Unfortunately, the world isn’t perfect as you know… Here, it’s all about compatibility, currently nothing isn’t compatible with nothing. If you’re lucky, you might be able to get what you need with just a simple convert, but that’s very rear.

And here is where the Semantic Web comes. The whole idea is to make the web and all the information readable for computers, not just for people. This is what, all of us, the web experts and web scientists are working on now. But it’s still just a dream.

The way to get to that point is by strict standardisation. The first step was in 1996, when XML was born. After this XML was implemented into HTML and XHTML was born, but as you know XHTML doesn’t tell us anything about the data that the XHTML document contains. Computers can’t understand it, only human can read it.

One day, in the future, we will see this dream come true. Computers will be able to understand all that data on the web and this will help us, the people a lot.

Happy one web day!

http://onewebday.org/

Wish you all the best and let’s really have one web not just for a day but forever..

Today, I have been designing a dynamic web system for dogs (based on PHP/MySQL of course all day long so now I am going to the gym.

One of my dreams is that every browser in the world renders CSS and XHTML the same way as Firefox does.
But this is just a dream, all the elements ususally have different parameters in different browsers (worst ones are the IEs), as a result it’s a hell for us.

As a result, even a totally valid CSS/mark-up website will look different under different browsers.

So what could we do? Simply, look every bit of your website under all the browsers, and see what’s different. After you see what’s different, redefine the CSS rules, so that they all match.

How browsers SHOULD render CSS: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2-style.html

During the week 14th-21st September, the Mozilla Foundation is organising their service week. During that time everyone, who has internet skills could help people, who don’t have.

This would help us change the world and the way the people use the web.

If you would like to help others or you need help, visit the project website:

mozillaservice.org

I am one of the volunteers in there and will be glad to help you. One web for all!

Alex

Tonight (Fri, 28 Aug 09), 9PM at my Place. Everyone’s invited. Please bring some boose. For more info 07903042169

Alex

Well, it’s been a crazy weekend. Here in Edinbugrh is full of people from all over the world and all the clubs are packed (they are full usually, but now its even more). This weekend I’ve spent around £100 for night life

It’s crazy!

Next week, we are starting studies again (ready for the sedond year

I am just comming back from work and I have to go to a few places now..

BTW when you got an Ajax web application which is sending requests every 10 seconds and at the same time you are streaming radio online from LA, USA while the webserver is based in London.. the radio starts spliting (the broadband in the UK is very SLOW!

Web Activations has just finished working on the Weddings design company Designed Occasions website:

Have a look at designedoccasions.com