Noir Consulting - a review of my experience

Hi,

I've been telephoned by the Managing Director of Noir Consulting/Wigs3 and asked to take this blog post down. With legal action being mentioned, and because I have no firm evidence to back up some of the claims made here, I'm taking the content of the post down for the time being. I'll revisit this decision in the next 6 months, when more information should be available.

In the mean-time, if you have had problems with Noir Consulting, please contact them via the email addresses on their web-site; the Managing Director has said that they will respond to complaints.
(To be removed from their databases, use the email address on their privacy page. For other issues, please use the details on their contact page).

I have also been asked to take down all of the comments posted here, which I have done. I apologise to everyone who taken the time to post them. I still have copies, and can re-post them if appropriate in the future.

This was not an easy decision, but Noir consulting have all of my personal details, including my current employer (who do not use Noir).

Thank you all for your time,

Marv

How long is Varekai (from Cirque du Soleil)?

I'm going to see a Cirque du Soleil production, Varekai, at the Royal Albert Hall next week. I wanted to find out how long it was, but Google was being particularly unhelpful. Searching for Varekai "Cirque du Soleil" length led me to pages which Google informed me (via the Google Cache frame) only contained some of my search terms in pages linking to the page it showed me.
I can see how that can sometimes be useful, but please, Google, allow me to turn the behaviour off! If I ask for a page containing the word "length", show me pages containing that word!

By the way, I eventually found a rough answer in a review from when the show was staged in the United States - it is about 2 and a half hours without intermission.

Edit: OK, I went along and it was about 2-and-a-half hours, but there was a 20 minute interval. We were very glad for the 20 minute break, as we were in standing seats and our feet were killing us!
It was good, but if you've seen similar circus-type-shows, then you might find that the most impressive things are the costumes and special effects.

Luigi's Purple Coins - a map

I've been playing Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii for the last few weeks now, and enjoying it immensely. I now have just over three quarters of the stars and have hit a level called "Luigi's Purple Coins". It seems to be extremely difficult!

The idea is to collect 100 (purple) coins out of a possible 150. This level is all 2D, so it should be easy, right? Wrong. Apart from the big gaps you have to jump to avoid falling into space, and apart from the big sections of sticky goo which swallow you up and kill you, the rest of the platforms either disappear after you've stepped on them, or start rotating (about a horizontal axis).

Partly for my own benefit, I've created a map of this level, so that I can plan my route through it to get enough coins. Here is that map:-

Luigi's Purple Coins Map

You start off on the brown square the bottom left corner. The white bits are empty space (as in fall to your death), the blue bits are sticky goo (you drown). Green are disappearing squares, and yellow are the rotating ones.
It may look familiar! It's designed to be similar to (but not the same as) Luigi's jumping sprite from the original Super Mario Brothers.

I've also submitted this map to GameFAQs, so it may end up appearing there, but I've never submitted anything before, so I haven't a clue if it will.

Here are some tips that I found by searching various forums:-
If you do collect 100 coins, the star will appear back where you first started, so make sure you have a path to get back there.
The main techniques here are the "long jump" (particularly to get over the gaps where coins are hanging in the air or over goo) and the "spin jump", where you can get a boost in height and change in direction at the end of a jump if you mess it up or need to get that bit further, etc.
Have a look on YouTube, etc., for videos of people playing this level. As unbelievable as it may sound, there are people out there who have grabbed all 150 coins, instead of just 100.

Good luck! I haven't beaten it yet ... will try again soon.

Browsing for multiple files in a file upload box

If you've used Flickr, you may well have seen their funky uploading tool that lets you pick multiple files to upload and then shows you the status of each as it uploads.

It's very cool, and you may want to copy it on your site. So, how would you do it?

Well, you can't. At least not with the standard tools of the web - HTML and JavaScript. It's a limitation of the input type="file" HTML control that it only allows you to pick a single file. JavaScript can't help because JavaScript code cannot have access to your file-system. So with any standard web-server language (Java, ASP, ASPX, PHP, etc), the user will always have to pick their files one at a time (even if you can spruce things up slightly by capturing all of the files in a single list once they've been chosen).

Well ... actually you can, but you have to rely on something happening at the user's end.

• You can force the user to zip up all of the files and upload a single archive (which you can then manipulate and unzip using the standard library functionality of your chosen language).
• You can use a Java Applet, since Java can access files on your machine if you allow it to. This means that the user will have to install the Java runtimes if they don't have them already. You may also need to look into security-signing your applet.
• You can use an ActiveX control. This has the severe limitation that it will only work on Windows systems. Also, you'll probably need to security-sign it to stop dire warnings from appearing when users visit your site, and it probably won't work in Firefox.
• You could use a client application. This gives you lots of control, but breaks the web paradigm slightly and you'll have to think about which platforms you want to code for and support.
• Ah, so how do Flickr do it? They use Flash. It's very nifty, and you might not even notice that it's a Flash application. Uploading multiple files was added in Flash 8 and seems to work well.

Flash could be expensive, if you don't already have it. There's a third-party control available which uses Flash, but I'm not going to link to it just yet as we're still evaluating whether it's any good and how good the "Free" version is.

Update: 2nd April 2008. We started to look at how this is possible using Flex, and it looks doable using the free version of the tool (if a little painful).
Oh, and we looked at how YouTube does it - they use Java. Interesting.
Meanwhile, Microsoft are pushing Silverlight harder and harder. You can't view some of their webcasts without installing it, and every time you download something you are told you'll get a better experience with it. Perhaps it will reach the tipping point after all?

New College Logo

(Hurrah! Google is finally picking up my site. Right, time to add some content.)

I'm currently making a t-shirt related to my old college (New College, Oxford, England) and wanted to add the New College logo. Legalities aside, I couldn't find a decent copy anywhere. The best I found was a 100 x 120 pixel version on Wikipedia I (I've since found some more examples at a random Varsity shop, but nothing very clear).

So - I made my own! It took me a little while, but once I figured out how useful layers are in Paint.NET, I ended up with something that works quite well (with the help of a Tudor Rose from Wikipedia again!). Tada:

Opera Ctrl-click behaviour

Here's something that people may find useful!

I'm normally a Firefox fan, but I thought I'd give Opera a try. My first hurdle was that Control+Click in Firefox means "Open Link in New Tab". Ctrl+click in Opera just seems to load pages in the current tab (or current page).

So, I figured there must be a way to customise the behaviour. Initial results said "no", but then I found a page about editing Opera Settings.

In order to set up my custom Control+Left Mouse Click behaviour in Opera, I needed to:-

• Go to Tools -> Preferences
• Click on the Advanced Tab
• Select Shortcuts
• Duplicate the Opera Standard Mouse setup (and rename my duplicate as Marv Setup)
• Edit this Mouse setup
  
• Under Browser Window, hit "New"
• In the Input field, the command to enter is "Button1 ctrl" (without the quotes)
• For the Action, enter "Open link in new page" (without the quotes) - for Opera, "page" is the equivalent of "tab" in Firefox.
• Click OK a few times
• Done!

Actually, strike all that - I could have sworn that it was working, but when I re-opened Opera, it wasn't. Ah well, back to the drawing board.

Edit: Although a few people have said that you can accomplish what I want to do using the keyboard options, I've tried many permutations on Opera 9.50 in Windows XP/2003, and have been unable to get it to work. However, if you check my latest post below, I've found a solution!
Opera Ctrl Click to open in new page / tab updated

Suggestions...

Well, although I originally thought I would update this off my own back, I don't seem to have the time while searching for things to post about the results. And when I have time to write things in this blog, I've forgotten the things I've searched for.

Anyway, so if this site eventually does turn up in Google, and someone finds it and has a suggestion, please put it in the comments section!

Cheers,

Marv