wonderland » Development

After running our bike shop website R107BIKES for a couple of months, we exerienced a strange behaviour of Magento, rendering the shop disfunctional: You could never complete a shop transaction because you weren’t able to put items into the cart, doh.

The only hint given was the error message:

Please specify the product required option(s)

I was close to freak out and even evaluated a “downgrade” to much simpler Joomla shop solution VirtueMart.

Luckily i found just by random this post, where one guy reported a similiar problem caused by the integration of a SSL certificate on his server.

The resolution took a few seconds, just enter https as the base url for secure and insecure connections in your magento configuration.

something i am really looking forward to is to finish our cuda cluster :)

Kind of a concept for our upcoming event on new years eve @ the new office. Maybe we should use it for a portfolio, too.

[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.zero.io/wp-content/uploads/unity3d//cubic.unity3d" logoimage="http://www.zero.io/wp-content/uploads/unity3d/zeroioloader.jpg" width="575" height="300" backgroundcolor="#000000" textcolor="#ffffff" /]

Als Entwickler von Flash Anwendungen mit WiiFlash und vor allem mit unserer heiß geliebten Unity3D Plattform – mit der man auch für die Wii und das iPhone deployen – kann freuen wir uns natürlich über jeden neuen Controller, der uns neue Anwendungen ermöglicht. Natürlich bringt Nintendo auf der E3 neuen Stuff, nämlcih MotionPlus für die WiiMote:
Nintendo Wii MotionPlus und Mehr Details und Fokus auf Community building

An dieser Stelle natürlich ein Verweis auf WiiSpray, denn davon sollte es noch viel mehr geben!

Wow, some interesting work for a Multiplayer Engine in Flash here… Even with dynamic lighting! Good work, guys!

Found an interesting application here done by these guys. Though in japanese, pretty interesting (to me at least).

~~Another, actually quite nice, approach for multi-touch sensing, here shown on a laptop…~~
Sadly the youtube video has been removed. So I will try to explain the principle instead:

Read the whole story at I STARTED SOMETHING

Last but not least this guy shows how to achieve the same (multi touch sensing) with a bag of dyed water and an isight, hehe : $2 Multi-touch. Yeah, ok, some C-coding involved as well…

To get you started with this topic (maybe for your own experiments), here some rough ideas:
Basicly you will need some acrylic glass, a hand full of white leds, reflective tape, black tape, a cam and some decent software which is not too hard to code:

The effect providing us the ability to actually “see” the points where you are touching the surface is called FTIR or “frustrated total internal refraction”. More information can be found at the wikipedia entry

To sense the coordinates where the object interacts with the surface the process would be to project from the rear onto the surface. The cam will capture the resulting projection on the surface. If you start to subtract the projected and captured images the result will be null.

But if you touch the surface the resulting image will be the areas as shown in the images:

If you normalize the image you will have a rougher image (vary the resolution according to your CPU capacity) which you can easily analyze.

Wow, this stuff was really needed. As stated in his article, there is no proper UML tool for the actionscript world. Maybe, this will make a developers dream come true:
Saffron UML Modeler.

It was just a question of time, until one of the big players will jump on multitouch in this way…
surface. I am really curious, how the dev kit for this might look like and about pricing too. Anyway, let’s get it on!

For all of you Flash / Flex and Papervision3D lovers. Since Apollo is available from today on, there are already really amazing demos for its application. For example at the Flexblog is a not only nice but performant demo as well made with Apollo and PV3D. Jipiee!

Well it seems to be a wonderful combination: Create content in WordPress and reuse the content inside a nice Flash-Frontend with swfobject detection. Obviously we will have a couple of advantages resulting out of this:
1. Full XHTML Support as a fallback.
2. Full featured Flash page with content management
3. Rights management for the content management
4. Maybe even WYSIWYG content editing through a flash Rich Text Editor.
Sadly, before we can profit from all of this, there are a couple of changes to be made inside the wordpress core. XML-RPC works pretty well to read posts in categories and post into categories. What if we want to have a structure made of pages and subpages?

My approach to combine all of this and get over the little problems, i have set up the following structure:
1. Installed WordPress 2.1
2. Installed a really minimalistic Theme (we can change that later).
3. Inside the theme we have swfobjects implemented to exchange the whole content and navigation section with a swf object.
4. The Flash frontend for the content and the Flash frontend for editing content ( both based on mattismes xml-rpc classes).
The actual state of development can be checked here.

Based on Phidgets RFID Interface, the Phidget Server and some Frontend made in Flash I have built a nice Car Configurator Interface.

The main idea was, to improve the users experience concerning haptics and recognition of materials and colors involved in the configuration process of a car by giving them the opportunity to change e.g. the color by dragging a RFID tagged and painted item over a hotspot to change the cars color. Due to the fact that the user actually saw the real paint before, makes it easier to experience the same color on the rotateable 3D-model of the car.