Category: Director

I spent a good portion of the afternoon ripping up old Director manuals for recycling. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I just don’t need to keep them in boxes in my garage any more. Director MX manuals…gone. Director 8.5 manuals…gone. Director 8 manuals…gone. Same for version 7, 6 (I never bought the 6.5 upgrade), 5 and 4. Plus a bunch of Flash manuals, old books on Perl, UNIX, VBScript, and ActionScript.

What was kind of surprising to me was how thin some of those Lingo Dictionary volumes were. Director 7’s LD was about 300 pages. And the dates in them! It’s hard to remember, but there was a period in the late 1990s when it seems like versions of Director virtually flew by!

Anyway, one of the boxes held this little treasure, my badge from my very first Macromedia User Conference, in September 1994, held at the San Francisco Marriott.

Bob Harris has written a book on his experiences as a Jeopardy! champion called Prisoner of Trebekistan, which I — only having made it through the screening process up to the point of getting called to go to LA a couple of times now — enjoyed.

Currently, he’s down in Antigua for the Cricket World Cup, and he posted a photo that should bring a chuckle — and some terror — into the heart of many a multimedia developer.

For the record, more correspondence from someone I shall not name, just in case I disappear under mysterious circumstances (I wonder how knowing about this letter — and any that follow it — would influence my decision to work for the author if I was a freelance Web developer, Flash designer, or Director programmer working in the Portland metro area):

Dear Mr. Plant:

It has been brought to my attention that like your friend Peter Sylwester, you seem to feel you have been ordained with a universal license to take liberties with other folks copyrighted/trademarked stuff. That is a real bad concept.

You are instructed to immediately remove the link to my Poetry website and all references to it and myself from your pathetic, commie, Loser website forthwith (that means now idiot). If I see it there Monday (January 15, 2007), you WILL find yourself in the receiving end of a Federal lawsuit in the Multnomah Federal court, and having the distinct displeasure of meeting my attorney, Mr. James Buchal, who is a trial attorney.

If you “guys” actually had anything on-the-ball, you would have more to do than play with Barbie dolls and whine like little babies to each other about your sad pathetic tales…. boo hoo. If Peter doesn’t comply per the Letter I sent him, we will tango. And this applies to you now.

There’s no “alleging” anything dimwit;

The U.S.C. is very clear on the statutory penalties for trademark/copyright and patent infringement and about what happens to the imbeciles like you who use ®-™-© materials without expressed consent, which neither you and/or Pete have ever had. The fun starts with a fine for “each use” of $1,000.00 (Federal fine). If either one of you wood-heads had even as much as a brainstem inside the space you think is your head, you could look it up; it is after all, online now.

Further, prior to sending Peter the Letter, we collected dated videos of the unauthorized Greets® materials that were seen/found on Peter’s site (again with your complicity and help), which have been preserved with the ones from 2002, for use as needed in Federal Court. The U.S.C. provides statutory fines (Federal) and attorney’s fees to the holder of the abused tradmark/patent/copyright. My friend Mr. James Buchal (also admitted to the Washington State Bar) will quite happily purse this matter if there is any timely failure to comply with my instructions. Costs me nadda, since the government (that you apparently hate) provides that; YOU will pay ALL my attorney fees and all the costs to kick your sorry asses in a court of law. We need only to show the court proof of the unauthorized usage (which we have in Spades), and unless you have a get-out-of-jail-free card, or a letter of consent signed by me (which you don’t have), YOU PAY.

And my warning now extends to you Mr. Darrell Plant (dba: Moshofsky/Plant – 3635 SE Alder St. – Portland, OR 97214); Mr. Buchal will effectively drain some chlorophyll from your wallet as well, if needed. You are hereby given notice that you must not link ANY of your web sites to ANY of my trademarked/copyrighted materials and/or any of my web sites (all inclusive). This applies to any and all sites that you host and or control. YOU DON’T HAVE ANY CONSENT WHATSOEVER FOR ANY SUCH USAGE.

You two Stinking Commies give honest programmers a real Bad name…. When you Work For Hire, you don’t get to Steal stuff away under any circumstances. It’s just NOT YOURS, AND IT NEVER BECOMES YOURS, EVER. Furthermore MORONS, things that are copyrighted, trademarked or patented ARE NOT YOUR THINGS TO USE FOR ANY REASON, or at ANYTIME; unless you have PRIOR written permission. What part of this don’t you mental-midgets understand??

And, if Pete had any honor (honesty), he would have asked for permission before his first unauthorized use in 2002, which was with your assistance, making you complicit in that crime….. yep, it’s a crime, look it up dummy!

IF he had the common sense of a house-cat, he would have done as most normal people and asked for consent to use MY STUFF at his site back then, and I would have most likely granted the consent. But NOT NOW. You want to play games and you’ll loose.

IMHO, your so-called “Blog” reads to me like a mutual admiration club for socially dysfunctional and impotent Commie losers like you and Pete. And you are clearly identified by Dr. Roseman’s article cited herein below. Here’s a link that YOU should use at your site and label it “All About Us”. (of course you’ll need permission from Mr. Roseman)

http://www.larta.org/lavox/articlelinks/2004/041122_bq.asp

Here’s the Key paragraph for you and Peter:

Most often I see this in terms of software programmers or engineers who go off with an idea for a business. They are blinded by their brilliance at programming, or mechanical problem-solving because that comes easy to them. But try as they might, they can’t relate to people. They keep failing and don’t know why. And they will keep failing until they see that they have a blind spot with people and get somebody in there who is talented in that area.
——————————————————————————–
© (Jack Roseman, who taught entrepreneurship for 13 years at Carnegie Mellon University, is director of The Roseman Institute, a subsidiary of Buchanan Ingersoll, and president of computer firm On-Line Systems. Contact him via e-mail at rosemanj@rosemaninstitute.com.)

Have a Nice Day {:-)

William Simpson

“They keep failing and don’t know why. And they will keep failing until they see that they have a blind spot with people and get somebody in there who is talented in that area.” Wow. I guess I should check in and see how successful the rich-media greeting card on a disk concept was. Or the idea of putting grocery store coupons on disks.

I’ve heard of Multnomah County court. I’ve heard of US District court, which is a federal court. But I’ve never heard of “Multnomah Federal court.”

Trademark infringement occurs when someone utilizes the mark of another party to deceive a third party. Copyright infringement takes place when you duplicate or make widely available content belonging to another party in part or in whole. Posting examples of your work at a private web site address for the purpose of showing it to potential employers? I think that would be stretching the concept.

Linking to someone’s site on the World Wide Web? Well, if the site’s out there, there’s nothing legally stopping anyone from linking to it (as opposed to framing it within other content) for any reason. If you put it out on the Web where search engines and anything else can find it, you really can’t complain when someone links to it.

You’d think that if he was going to file papers he could at least spell my name correctly. It must have been difficult to find my address, what with it being on my web site and all. And I really don’t understand his obsession with Barbie dolls.

Just for fun, I passed along a Director job for a full-time position in Europe to the other developer in the office I work at, Nathan Pryor, and he responded:

I don’t think anyone should be allowed to use the word “permanent” in regards to a Director position. Who do they think they’re kidding? 🙂

My friend Peter Sylwester has bad luck. Specifically, he has the bad luck to know me, because I bear full responsibility for hooking him up with a couple of people who went beyond the average bad-client/employer mark while he was working as a free-lance Flash developer.

In one case, a woman I’d done some Shockwave games for hired Peter to create Flash casino-style games. He wasn’t in charge of the backend programming, though, and when the various people who were supposedly doing that work fell through time after time, Peter was the one getting harassing calls and emails.

Then there was the time I referred Peter to an honest-to-God job. I hadn’t taken it, because the concept looked a little shaky to me. I told Peter up front about that, but he needed something to pay the bills, interviewed, and took the job, developing interactive animations and content for a heavy-media CD-based greeting card company (I told you it was a little shaky). Pete poured his heart and talent into it, though, and they got more than they could have hoped for in terms of quality work under the kind of personally abusive conditions that would have sent me out the door. In fact, they got more than they paid for, because when they eventually closed the doors (in the spring of 2000), they stiffed Peter for about several thousand dollars in pay.

Peter put some of the files up on his site as an example of his work after the original site (which hadn’t been shut down) went through enough changes that it didn’t represent anything he’d done. Then, in late 2001, he and I got a series of wack letters from his old boss demanding that the files be taken down, alleging “very significant fines and jail terms, which may be levied against you and Mr. Plant.” That was, mind you, over five years ago.

So here we are, nearly seven years after the company shut down. In the meantime, Peter’s moved (physically) his site’s moved a couple of times, and yes, he put some of the screens up to show to students and prospective employers, without a link to them. The original site is like one of those parked domains, giving “information” about various vendors on a particular subject. And at the address Peter had the files stored is the letter he got.

Supplemental reading: poetry by the same author.

With friends like me, who needs that guy?

Despite conversations I heard from the old days, Xtra development was never a route to riches and wealth. The market was never that large, and with a few exceptions, Xtra developers and distributors tended to be individual programmers trying to stay on top of poorly-documented Xtra SDKs, multiple development platforms, and bug reports that didn’t always have a lot of context. As Director’s developer community has dried up, I’ve been concerned what that would do to the Xtra community, which requires a certain critical mass to make it worthwhile just to keep Xtras up-to-date with Director and new operating systems.

And so, I heard today through the grapevine that updatestage.com, which picked up the pieces after a certain Xtra distributor imploded, has closed its doors. I would just like to take this opportunity to say that Gretchen Macdowell, who was updatestage, who wrote code, distributed and supported the Xtras of other developers, maintained one of the most complete lists of Director quirks and another of Xtras and associated tools, and helped out in many forums over the years, is one of the nicest, most pleasant people I’ve ever met and corresponded with. I have extremely fond memories of a dinner with her after a day at a UCON long ago, many emails, and a few phone conversations. I, for one, will miss her presence in the Directorsphere.

Alex Uhlmann of Adobe Consulting has a blog post about his MAX 2006 presentation (including PDF notes and source code) on a Flex-based 3D distortion engine.

The sample application shows a dummy multiple-screen user data system mapped onto a virtual cube. The distortion engine parameters can be modified by settings above the entry area (type of distortion, speed, etc.) and the buttons on each side control how many sides side rotations are performed in each transition. (You can enter any information into the system that you want, the buttons on the interface don’t actually do anything.)

It’s a proof of concept and somewhat crude — if you hit a button twice in succession you get overlapping images — but as the person who wrote the original versions of the Sprite Transition behaviors in Director’s Behavior Library, it’s interesting to see the types of effects the newer versions of Flash allows users to build. Certainly, it looks as if the Sandy open source 3D engine Alex mentions deserves a look.

When I first started going to Macromedia conferences in 1994, they were all still held in San Francisco. The first couple I attended were small enough that they hadn’t yet started booking the Moscone Center — they were held in the conference facilities of the Marriott on Market Street. I was still working in the prepress business at the time, so I not only had to pay my own way but take time off from real work to go to a conference that didn’t have any bearing on what I was actually making money doing.

My second UCON (1995) was when Shockwave was publicly demonstrated. The prep shop I was working for had been on the Web bandwagon early on, I’d actually set up my own Web server in my home office on a dedicated phone line and a 14.4k modem connection that spring. I’d somehow picked up a gig teaching Director at Portland State University and was just starting full-time freelancing. The knowledge about Shockwave that I gained from the conference that year — combined with several months of creating text and graphics for online delivery and the knowledge of server technology — led directly to a contract for my first book by the middle of the next January. That book was essentially the hook for my entire multimedia career.

Those early years of conferences, Director was all over the place. There was so much information you needed more than one person to cover the various avenues. The expo floor was full of Director-related vendors. It’s almost hard to remember how prevalent it was back then.

By the 1997 UCON I’d written my second book, The Lingo Programmers Reference, and people recognized my name. Not because of any actual projects I’d done, mind you. It was my first and only UCON speaking engagement — covering time-based animation and Bezier curves — and it was intoxicating, because people actually came up to me and thanked me for writing about stuff, which was amazing to me because it’s something I can barely stop myself from doing. Left to my own devices, I’d spend all day writing articles and emails and not making any money.

Everyone switched coasts to New York in the spring of 2001 for what was to be the last UCON. In the four years since I’d spoken at UCON, I’d spoken at a number of other conferences, written a Flash book and some other Director stuff plus lots of articles, co-edited Macromedia User Journal, become the editor at Director Online, written parts of the the Director 7 and 8 behavior libraries, and made a pest of myself generally. I was really looking forward to the possibilities of Shockwave 3D, but as I’d warned a focus group I’d attended during a Flash Forward conference, they needed to make sure that there were easy ways to make content for the new technology or it wouldn’t take.

I fell off a ladder and broke my leg a few weeks before the Orlando conference in October 2002. I’d put off buying tickets, because business hadn’t exactly been great. As it was, being laid up with the leg and subsequent pulmonary embolism made the last quarter of the year even worse, but that is — as they say — the breaks.

In terms of Director content, the past couple of MAX conferences have been disappointing. I’ve gone largely to keep in personal touch with the other Director users I’ve known over the years and the members of the development team. I had fun in Anaheim last year riding “California Screamin'” over and over. And I must say that I’m forever grateful to whoever scheduled the 2004 conference into New Orleans because Barbara and I got a chance to see that city before it was devastated by the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina. But did I get any knowledge about Director out of the couple grand I spent on my conference ticket, airfare, and hotel room? Nah.

I was in Las Vegas a week and a half ago as a jumping-off point for a trip to southern Utah and northern Arizona with my parents and wife, and this was the view from our 10th-floor room at the Stratosphere. That’s the whole view, not just one portion of the window.

I’m not going back. I’d like to meet the new team, but I can’t justify it. The company I’m working for these days can’t justify it. I can meet up with nearly as many Director users at the Game Developers Conference in March as I can at MAX. And that’s a sad thing.

Those of you who know me know that I was an English Literature major. Way back when I graduated from the college that Steve Jobs dropped out of, I had to do an undergraduate thesis. Thwarted by the creative writing committee who disliked my proposal for a book that was along exactly the same theme as the new movie Man of the Year starring Robin Williams (thanks for thwarting my screenwriting career, assholes!) I ended up instead reading a lot about Shakespeare, in particular Henry V (then Kenneth Branagh’s movie version came out about two months after I gave my defense and its take on the play pretty much agreed with my thesis).

Before the big battle with the French at Agincourt, Henry inspires his followers with a little “courage” speech, which I feel absolutely no problem appropriating for my own uses here. Wednesday (25 October) is St. Crispin’s Day.

MP3 audio of “We Band of Director Programmers”
(865K)

MAX. O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those Flash programmers
That do our work to-day!

PLANT. What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin MAX? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our Director loss; and if to live,
The fewer programmers, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one programmer more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if programmers my code appropriate;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a programmer from Flash.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one programmer more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, MAX, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for training put into his purse;
We would not die in that programmer’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he publish his code and show his DIRs,
And say ‘These movies I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Darrel the Plant, Holgate and Rosenzweig,
McCrystal and Pardi, Newton and Meijer-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good programmer teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that programs in Director with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And programmers in Flash now-ActionScripted
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That coded with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

So I’m checking in on Hash Animation:Master, as I’m wont to do from time to time because apart from being a very neat and inexpensive 3D modeling and animation tool (that doesn’t have Shockwave 3D export, regrettably) they’re based here in the Portland metro area (across the river in Vancouver). I did a review of A:M for MacUser magazine a few years back, but I’ve never really buckled down and become an expert with any of the various 3D packages I’ve bought or used over the years. Just enough to get by has been my motto.

Anyway, I happened into the online tutorial page, and there at the top is a “Get Macromedia Shockwave Player” bug, which was interesting to me because Tom McCrystal had asked on a discussion list the other day who among us had a Shockwave bug on their blog.

My own response was that I think it’s Adobe’s job to promote Shockwave, not mine; that it’s Adobe’s job to promote shockwave.com, not mine; and that I couldn’t think of any helper application that had enticed me to download it because of a bug, rather than some content I wanted to see or hear.

Chalk up one more reason. Nobody knows what the hell Shockwave is. I was pretty surprised to see a Shockwave bug on the tutorial page, and was expecting some sort of Director-based video player when I clicked on the links. But even the computer-savvy guys at Hash have been confused by the decade-long crappy marketing campaign Macromedia ran for Shockwave. All of their training video material actually uses the Flash Player.

Today’s Oregonian has an interesting little article on the world of game programming centered around Orego, a computer program in development at the Math Department of Lewis & Clark College that plays Go.

I remember Go-playing being cited as one of the challenges in pattern recognition and AI development back when I was first getting into programming, it’s interesting to see how people have approached the problem over the past thirty years.

The article mentions that professor Peter Drake and his team had “tried nearly every novel approach out there: neural networks, cellular automata, and genetic algorithms” over the past few years. What they’re experimenting with now is known as a Monte Carlo method. Instead of using a specific strategy or algorithm to solve the problem, it iterates a series of random moves until a solution is reached, then does it again and again, then chooses which combination gives it the best results.

Sort of reminds me of the brute force approach to the proof of the four color theorem. For a guy who’s used the motto “Multimedia Design by Brute Force” for more than fifteen years, you know that has some appeal.

BONUS: The accompanying “Factbox” on Go notes that “The game reportedly has been played by such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Bill Gates and Rod Stewart.” Some company, that.