March 17, 2005
warriors and hacking flash [updated]
This Monday we went to see the Warriors-Rockets game. I wanted to put a link on this blog to the pictures we took during the game but I couldn't. A while ago I switched the photo gallery on this site to use the excellent SlideShowPro flash component. The feature lacking in this release of the component is album addressability. The author, Todd Dominey, assured me that the feature is coming. But what do I do in the meantime ?
Well, the cool thing about Actionscript (and Javascript) is that it is infinitely bendable. With a little "guessing" and some appropriate prototype setting on the right movie clip I hacked this feature to work with the current release of the component (without having access to the source of the component).
[Update] SlideshowPro now has permalinks implemented in a very cool way (based on Kevin Lynch's 'stateful linking' scheme). I removed my hack.
So now I can point you to the game pictures.
Speaking of flash, this website is getting more and more of it. The Home Page features an adapted animation from the Levitated Daily Source. Go check out Levitated, it gives you hours of tinkering fun, all with the fla sources included.
I always wondered how to embed math formulas in the blog. There aren't that many alternatives. One solution I will try with this post is using pdf2swf from the collection of swf tools to convert the pdf generated with LaTeX to a swf file.
[Update] I'm back to generating jpgs out of the LaTeX pdf. The swf file doesn't render too well.
[Update] The sum above is the number of all k-permutations, with k=0, ...,n. This gives for example the size of the problem space for the ballons in a box problem, which shows that a brute-force approach has an exponential penalty.
