Viral launched from ECI in Aberdeen

So at the end of last week we launched the viral we'd been working on for our client out in L.A. We have had a superb time building this one, from concept through to animation, programming and server side setup by means of a blank vps which we tailored PHP and Flash Media Server to run on specifically for this high traffic application we really got to flex our flash muscles on this one and we are all more than happy with the results.

Go "expose yourself" here: http://www.uncoverthecure.net

...or to see the one that we at East Coast Interactive put together first, check it out here: http://www.uncoverthecure.net/view.php?id=ad2e3de164668114ad184684d120

 

2 comments - Posted by mark at 9:08 AM - Categories: Launches

Recoded Exhibition Launch

Took a little wander down to peacock visual arts last night for the launch of "recoded", a new media exhibition running from last night until the 31st May 2008. Definately worth a look I thought.

I was a bit challenged by the "Monument" installation, Pecock digital media geezer and all round good guy Jack Keenan explained that the artist had written a program to scan over 4000 news feeds looking for murders reported and each time the program found one, a ball bearing is dropped from a ceiling mounted device onto the floor of the gallery...didn't quite know what to make of this, whether the ball bearings under my feet made me uneasy, kind of like walking on graves uneasy? or if it was my own curiosity staring at the device almost willing one to drop so I could see it in action and then realising thats pretty much wishing someone to get killed....shudder....definately a thought provoker!

Another highlight, and by that I mean complete surprise was the parkour film shot entirely on a shopping centers cctv cameras and I believe, released to the artists by means of the data protection act. The most surprising thing about this film is the quality of the video, when you think cctv you think crackly, noisy, blocky video but you should see the quality of this stuff, it looks like HD! it could almost have been professionaly filmed, quite unsettling to know thats the quality of video a shopping center gets of you, I'd imagine the increasing number of cameras on our streets would probably be the same if not better...but I'm touching on a whole different discussion here.

My opinion is that Peacock have done well with this exhibition but this IS my kind of thing, although going on the numbers of people in attendance, this would appear to be a lot of peoples kind of thing as well. Looking forward to the rest of it.

0 comments - Posted by mark at 8:31 AM - Categories: Out 'n' About

Branded Whisky Launches

Is there anything left that can't be branded online and delivered? nope! so here it is, branded whisky has launched using one of our specialist flash based online designers and fully outfitted in new graphics and presentation elements.

Check it out: www.brandedwhisky.com

East Coast Interactive specialise in designing and developing online design applications, get in touch through our website if you would like to know more.

0 comments - Posted by mark at 9:05 AM - Categories: Launches

fix eclipse errors

My eclipse installation was throwing some odd errors when doing basic things, like closing files...most irritating, so I tried the only two things I knew how to without conducting some google based investigations! the first is really the common sense first step which was to check for updates to my build and the various plugins I have installed, this gave no joy...I was still getting the silly errors. Next up was to run the -clean statement, I've not been unlucky enough to find anything that this can't fix yet and am happy to say it fixed these errors too.

So, how to use this comand? (it should be noted that I run Ubuntu Linux, these steps will be slightly different for windows/mac i'd imagine) Basically if eclipse is on your path,you can simply call eclipse -clean in the terminal and off you go, the startup takes a little longer than normal but it clears out your whole workspace of all the data thats built up installing stuff, updating stuff and also just the general mess that gets caused with heavy use. In my case, I didn't have eclipse available in that manner so I opted for my preferred method as below:

1. Open the terminal and type locate eclipse.ini, this returns the location of the file you want.
2. Type nano eclipse.ini to edit the file with nano(funnily enough!) and add the -clean statement to the first line, save and close the file then start up eclipse again, the startup time will be a bit longer but thats just eclipse doing it's thing.
3. Remember to edit eclipse.ini and remove -clean , you dont need to do this that often and it's not much to remember!

Hope this helps someone, like I said, I've not found anything (yet!) that the -clean statement doesn't fix and it's a good first or second step to try before getting into the guts of the matter and starting to think about a re-install.

1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:39 PM - Categories: Eclipse

serve .html then .php

Firstly, why?...well, there could be any number of reasons really, I was just developing an application on a server and didn't want its index to be the default public facing file until I'd configured it a bit, I knew that the code I was working on required an index.php file to be uploaded and I also knew (by way of a little test) that apache would serve that first so I got to digging about for the correct apache config option to serve index.html until I was ready for index.php to be default. (incidently, this of course, applies to any file extension you happen to be using, like .cfm for example)

Firstly I headed directly into httpd.conf to locate the DirectoryIndex option and discovered that the order was correct for what i required...ie index.html was to be served before index.php....but I knew that it wasn't so what was going on?...well, in short I don't know...maybe someone can explain it here? The workaround I discovered was to create a .htaccess file for the domain in question and simply add the following:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

job done...

2 comments - Posted by mark at 1:48 PM - Categories: Apache

navigating directories in the linux terminal

This is posted mainly for my own reference although I doubt I'm the only one constantly forgetting these most basic of linux terminal commands, so for you and me...here they are.

cd - change directory command, typing only this puts you into the root directory

cd ~ - gets you into your home directory

cd /route/to/directory - standard method of navigating directories

cd .. - takes you back up a directory (i ALWAYS forget this for some reason)

ls - list the contents of a directory

right...now i've got no excuse!

here is a good tutorial relating to all of this

0 comments - Posted by mark at 9:39 PM - Categories: Linux

slicehost vps is lovely

After a couple of months looking for a VPS that was relatively cheap, reliable and gave me all the access I needed. I settled on slicehost, I couldn't find the normal trail of horror stories that goes hand in hand with many cheap hosting solutions and after narrowing my choices down to a few, I decided that slicehost just had the edge, I am pleased with my decision so far. The most important thing for me was to have full root access, some kind of "get out of jail free card" if it all went horribly wrong and a selection of distro's so I can swap things around if I need to...after all, this is to be my self learning area for setting up several things I've wanted to do for a while and I wasn't exactly sure which was the best way forward...so...bull by the horns time and over to the slicehost site to make my purchase. This happened one week ago today and i'm pleased to say that all has gone well. I bought my "slice" last Friday evening and got to work, unfortunately I was also drinking beer so at about 3am I required to use my afore mentioned "get out of jail free card", re-built the slice and went to bed all the wiser! To be continued...

Read more...

0 comments - Posted by mark at 8:52 AM - Categories: Linux