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nivas.hr blog

From the Nivas crew to the galaxy of unknown

# Skittles seriously crazy commercials

Skittles feet:

Bunny switch:

Piñata man:

Everything you touch turns to Skittles:

Skittles leak:

Damn!

# Not your average Techno dancer

You go granny, you go girl!

# Adobe CS4 presentation

Few days ago there was an official presentation of new Adobe Creative Suite 4 product line held in Zagreb, in one of the most beautiful locations - the Croatian State Archive (check this virtual walkabout) . Y'know, the place that holds all the important documents of the state. Fancy fancy! The girls that handle Adobe's PR in this region really did an awesome job organizing us all, setting up the location, finding delicious catering (yum yum), and the presenters themselves were not too shabby. No, scratch that, they were awesome as well! And modest about themselves, too!

Anyhow, I was featured there as an Adobe presenter for web design tools. In this epic whole day even, we, the Adobe presenters, presented short version to the press & journalists, with just the most important details of the new CS4. Then after small break, we kicked off in high gear in full presentation to all the invited guests. Backed up by Adobe's regional manager Mirko Ledić, we have successfully introduced the public into the Adobe's new killer Suite.

Main presentation room:

People listening carefully:

The Crew:

Overall, an awesome experience, hanging around with nice people from Adobe, with my mates Iva and Ivan, and devouring quantities of food and drinks on Adobe's expense! Ha! Looking forward to CS5 =)

# A trip down memory lane

Encouraged by latest news from Zastava about how they plan to produce low cost models of Fiat cars, as once proud owner of Zastava Skala I took a little trip down memory lane.

I've never seen this commercial before. And I must admit - it's brilliant.

Jeremy Destroying Yugo 45

# Letter Đ mistery - Ð!=Đ and ð != đ

We spent couple of hours trying to figure out this one, so we decided to share it with our fellow readers and hopefully, save some time and unnecessary stress for them. UTF-8 is defacto standard encoding for multilanguage websites. PHP5 doesn't have native support for it, but you can integrate it. MYSQL supports utf8, but not utf8_croatian_collation. But you can also hack your way around that for sorting. If you are not dealing with Croatian letters and UTF-8, you probably won't encounter this problem. However, if you ARE using UTF-8 read on!

We are redesigning one large website and naturally, some content from old website has to be migrated to new site. Since we don't have access to their database, we have to manually copy content from old website's HTML source. Client's old site is in UTF-8. Imagine following entry in old HTML source:

Ðakovo
...

After some digging, we found out that there was nothing wrong with our utf8 php methods nor our mysql database. We found out that the letter Ð (hex d0 00) we pasted from HTML was just not the letter Đ (hex 10 01) we needed. Somebody (or something) very brilliant, used letter Eth instead of standard Croatian letter D with stroke.

Eth (Ð, ð; also spelled edh or eð) is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd). In the Unicode universal character encoding standard, upper and lower case eth are represented by U+00D0 and U+00F0. These code points are inherited from the older ISO 8859-1 standard. In HTML, eth is represented by the Latin character entities Ð and ð.

Đ (lowercase đ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, formed from D with the addition of a bar or stroke through the letter. This is the same modification that was used to create eth (ð), but eth is based on an insular variant of d while đ is based on its usual upright shape. In Unicode the letter is represented as U+0110 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH STROKE and U+0111 LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH STROKE.

So there you have it. No matter the letters look the same, beware what you copy/paste.

# Marry Christmas and happy New Year!

To all the visitors of our humble blog, we wish merry Christmas and happy New Year! Weeeeee, let the party begin!

Wait ... what?

It's October dude, not even close to Christmas. In Croatia it is still sunny outside, people are pretending to be lizards as they soak up the sun sitting outside drinking coffee.

Well, Coca-Cola begs to differ, as they have rolled out some 7 days ago their Christmas packaging:

Every year it is the same consumerist crap. All the big companies are waiting for one of them to break innocence and start marketing their product with holiday spirit. For the last few years I was keeping track who will be the first one to break the moral boundary, and this year the award goes to Coca-Cola. Over two months before Christmas they shipped products reminding us that we need to spend more money during this period of time, because only by spending money you can send true messages of love, peace and friendship.

Coca-Cola popped the cherry of Christmas 2008, soon we can expect all the others to start shipping holiday decorated products.

Funny thing is that most of the companies keep the Christmas spirit alive well after Christmas, redesigning their product in February or March. Basically, Christmas spirit lasts for 5-6 months. Wanna bet that they can stretch it to 7?

# Flash Player 10 released

It’s only been a little more than a year since the release of CS3, but Adobe is at it again. Newest version of Creative Suite is here. Our main man Daemon is going to be speaker tomorrow at CS4 launch party here in Zagreb, but more on that after the event.

Meanwhile, we all can glory on the fact that Flash Player 10 release is finally out. If you somehow managed to miss all those banners Adobe placed around the web, and Flash 9 auto update failed big time (like me) go get it now (official release v10.0.12.36). New features list looks really interesting, but not for such high release number. I would name it v9.5. not v10.

Download debug and standalone players, read release rotes and let's get started.
Ok, new features are always welcomed, but Adobe isn't very good at announcing the changes to old functionality. What you probably found out the hard way is that Sound API (Adobe, MAKE SOME NOISE) and FileReference class are changed. Security changes to FileReference class for example broke every single existing Flash content upload on the web (so popular those days).

Can't wait to test new text engine, font embeding and encoding. Hope it works otherwise, I'll have to skip yet another Flash version. Keep you posted!

# Recently released projects from Nivas laboratory

We have been real busy lately. So busy that we didn't have time to share with the rest of the world what have we been working on this summer. Be hold!

• Donacije.info
• Friendzii Facebook Application
• Magmont
• Središnja agencija za financiranje i ugovaranje programa i projekata EU (SAFU)

More new projects coming soon. Meanwhile, you can read more about recently released projects on our corporate one-pager web site (yes, it is getting too heavy to load, but we are working on that too).

# New Indiana Jones - artificial disaster

It is not my habit to find bugs in movies, hell, I even think Aliens vs. Predator 2 is an awesome movie, but "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is seriously one of the worst movies I have seen in a while. Tons of plot holes, retarded dialogs, no essence whatsoever, but what sets my rage going is the pure artificial method it was created. I have a feeling not a single shot was made on real location, rather in studio with computer generated backgrounds and scenery. Starting from the very beginning of the move, every scene has very bad unnatural feel about it.

Check this fake lights all around the set:

And scenes like that just keep on hitting you, and you can literally feel your brain screaming in pain as it tries to comprehend artificiality of scenes.

# Orientation, Navigation, Geolocation!

I was not so good at geography at school, but I always liked maps. Especially the old vintage antique ones, and sea maps. Also, I like to travel and I think of my self as one of those people who can easily orientate in space (although I could never imagine my self navigating a sea ship at stormy night using nothing but sextant). Going to place you have never been before - be it a new continent, a street in foreign city or a dirt road leading to an gourmet restaurant in Istria is always a challenge.

The challenge which by little help of modern marvel becomes a walk in the park. Originally developed by US Dept. of Defense, GPS and can now be found in cameras, phones even arm watches. My trusty Garmin nüvi 760 packed with maps of Europe and best set of maps for our region - AdriaRoute and SCG ROUTE never let me down so far. Even my last phone Noka E71 is A-GPS enabled device. Nokia Maps (or Yahoo Maps and Google Maps for that matter) have really bad coverage of streets in Croatia so are basically useless for navigation. But Garmin Mobile XT runs on Symbian very well and you can use the same maps as mentioned above. Since my mobile phone is internet enabled too, with the help of GPS device the possibilities for navigation and orientation are practically limitless. Right? Right?

Wrong. Why? Because browser (Opera Mini) and Flash Lite 3 can't communicate with GPS device. Actually Flash Lite can communicate with GPS trough KunerLite S60 RAD, and Opera Mobile (because it supports javascript) can communicate with GPS trough similar expensive middle-ware called GPSGate, but all that is far far away from becoming a standard.

Good news is that couple of days ago Mozilla Labs released experimental geolocating plug-in for Firefox called Geode which would help websites locate you. All that conforming to the W3C Geolocation specification. Beta plugin uses single hard-coded location provider (utilizing proprietary Skyhook’s Loki technology) to map your local Wifi hotspot or cell towers GPS location in your area to your location. If this started to freak you out, fear not - users can decide what level of location information they want to reveal to a website, 'exact location', 'neighborhood', 'city' or 'nothing'. None of this obviously doesn't work in Croatia so it's NOTHING by default for us. If you are reading this from other part of the universe - check the demo here.

Mozilla says that in final version location will be provided by one or more user selectable service providers and methods, e.g. GPS-based, WiFi-based, ip2location, manual entry, etc. What is even more interesting is that this plugin will be in core of the upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1, as well as alpha releases of Fennec (Mobile Firefox).

This is pretty good damn news from Mozilla because proprietary solutions like Skyhook's XPS or Garmin Communicator (plugin which enables your browser to talk to Garmin GPS) don't provide enough user coverage for worldwide usage.

When I touched standards, it have to mention a new standard proposed to IETF this year called HTTP Enabled Location Delivery (HELD) which proposes a standardized way to ask the network (Location Information Server (LIS)) for the location of the device. This is still a proposal, and years away from worldwide implementation, but if nothing, I at least expect Jack Bauer to catch criminals by "hacking the HELD" in new season of 24.

Garmin Mobile XT

Nokia Maps

# Blurry logos 2 - Facebook logo

Continuing post I made about Current logo, where I criticized the execution of their logo (and got awesome feedback from Current crew resulting in them changing logo), today I will be focusing on New.Facebook logo. As you know, Facebook redesigned some time ago, and in that redesign they shrunk their logo.

However, the execution of that shrinking was done so poorly that my eyes cry tears of blood every time I see that logo. The logo as it is now online is blurry in all directions, leaving a very unprofessional and unpolished feeling. Don't get me wrong, the designers of Facebook are my personal idols because I understand all the issues they had to overcome in creating/maintaining such a huge project, and whoever says New.Facebook sucks should be put out of it's misery.

However, the logo, IT IS KILLING ME. So I took some time to try and fix it.

Here are the results:

You can see how the crispy version looks so much better. So, Facebook guys, steal this logo, and slap it up, I will not mind.

Keeping the world sharp since '79.

# Sony DSLR A900 preview

Two days ago Sony presented new 35mm full-frame DSLR camera A900 in Student Center here in Zagreb. It’s first full-frame 24.5 MP DSLR with stabilization in body!

I had a few shots with it and camera is great. View finder with 100% coverage is excellent, big and bright. People complained that camera is heavy but I found it ok with 895 g, it is after all a full-frame camera. Bad points go to position of Auto focus points which are too close to center.

I tested it only a few minutes so a have only a few shots but here they are (right click -> save as):

ISO 400, 1/90 sec, RAW converted to JPEG in post processing (16.2 MB)

ISO 800, 1/125 sec, RAW converted to JPEG in post processing (16.9 MB)

ISO 1600, 1/200 sec, RAW converted to JPEG in post processing (20.2 MB)

ISO 6400, 1/3000 sec, RAW converted to JPEG in post processing (27.7 MB)

All shots are made with Zeiss ZA Planar T* 85mm f/1.4 ( Sony SAL-85F14Z ) at f/1.4.

As you see there is no visible deference between ISO 400 and 800:

At ISO 1600 and 6400 noise is visible:

ISO 6400, lots of grain, but still, it’s 6400 and the need for it is just in very special occasions.

More test and specification can be found on dpreview.com Sony Alpha DSLR-A900 Preview

# Diesel’s SFW Porn viral

The Viral Factory has collated clips of 80s porn in a humorous new viral to celebrate Diesel's 30th anniversary and its worldwide Dirty 30 party.

Do you want some more?

# Nivas closed down in anticipation of Large Hadron Collider experiment

As some of you may or may not know, the Large Hadron Collider will be fired up in 2 days, on the 10. September 2008. CERN is making final preparations in the test that will, i hope, reveal what makes particles have mass. Once they confirm and isolate the mighty Higgs Bozon particle, in theory it should be possible to remove it making things have no mass, yet be solid objects. Neat stuff, eh? Here is something more on the LHC.

The problem is that on 10. September 2008. the Large Hadron Collider could also generate black holes that will suck up our dear Earth. The CERN is saying that the experiment is safe, and that there is no real danger of destroying earth. However, we have seen way too many movies where scientists say something is safe, and 5 minutes later everything goes to hell. Therefore, we decided why bother working for this 2 days, when on Wednesday it could all be over anyways.

If we survive, see you on Thursday.

Until then, see the LHC Rap:

And check out what we hope will not be the outcome: