Thought I would update now I have a basic scene and a controllable player. See for yourself:
Use left and right keys to navigate.
Next step is a gun and destructible terrain, and not forgetting particles!
Well as it appears that every day there is a new “Must Join” social network and I appear to have joined most of them I thought I would write a little rundown post of where you can find my digital presence.
http://www.facebook.com/mikeysee
Yes, im on Facebook after years of trying to stay away. Unforuntely as my job is making games for the platform, its kinda tricky to avoid.
Tumblr is a reccent addition to my collection. Im primarily using it as a dumping ground for stuff that amuses me. Expect photos, videos and madness inside… oh and plenty of cats!
Ahh Twitter, that strange little service that is just sooo addictive! Find me, follow me, expect nothing sensible.
http://soundcloud.com/mike-cann
Not exactly social network, but still find a collection of my mixes 
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/mike.cann
Again, not a social network, just a collection of pictures of me, my friends and my antics.
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mikecann
Oops! I forgot about LinkedIn! Well you can find some (fairly) up to date information about my skills and job experience
Well as my previous post was about how I had moved my personal presence I thought I would mention the move of my virtual presence too.
For a while I have been hosting my sites on Slicehost, and things having been going okay. Slicehost however is a basic VPS that simply gives you root access and then you are expected to know what to do next. I spent a long time setting it up in the beginning following various tutorials. I learnt alot of Linux along the way but unfortunately I dont think im ever going to have the time to learn enough to maintain this box, especially now that I have 7 domains of my own and am hosting two by other people.
So I recently started looking for a better solution. Thats when my partner in crime olip.co.uk recommendation that I checkout Web Fusion, so I did and was mightily impressed. For a very similar price to Slicehost I get a much bigger box with much more features, and ofcourse the awesome Plesk 9.0 admin tool.
So the last few days I have been moving over, its gone pretty smooth but there have been a coupple of growing pains, which others may wish to learn from:
Shared Rather Than Exclusive Hosting
If you wish to be able to create new clients using Plesk then allow those clients to create domains you must remember to set your VPS as “shared” rather than “exclusive” right at the beginning before doing anything. I found out the hard way that if you make domains on an “Exclusive” IP VPS then you can no longer set that IP as “shared” and therefore clients cannot make domains. The solution I was forced to take was to ring support (which was generally helpful, ive seen worse *cough* BT *cough*) and they were able to sort it for me.
Mod_Rewrite and .htaccess
This blog is wordpress and I wanted the pretty perma-links that WordPress is capable of so http://www.mikecann.co.uk/about/ rather than http://www.mikecann.co.uk/?page=about. To achieve this I tried many different things before I hit on the correct solution which was to use FTP to modify the permissions on the httpdocs folder to 777 then go to the perma-links section of the WordPress settings and allow WordPress to setup .htaccess for me! I then just went back and changed the permissions back to 750, simples!
Tags: hosting, News, Personal, plesk, webfusion, Websites, wordpress
Well as I have announced (rather pointlessly) every time I moved in the past, I thought I would continue the tradition by announcing that I have moved again. This time its back again to my old room in one of my previous flats, The Grand Mancehster.
As I have already done a video of this place, Ill just reuse it:
EDIT: It would appear that Youtube have removed the soundtrack to the video, so, while watching this video imagine “Manson – Wide Open Space” playing in the background
Tags: Flat, Manchester, Move, Personal, Video
Just got my new computer at work. First thing I did was chuck out the stock keyboard and replace with my favourite mac aluminium keyboard.
As usual when trying to get Apple hardware to play nice with Microsoft there is a little friction. In this case the keyboard doesn’t come with any mapping drivers resulting in the fact that some of the keys are messed up and in wrong locations. So we get to the point of this post. As I have had to do this several times now I thought I would post my solution so I dont spend ages searching each time.
The solution is to use the Apple Pro Keyboard Layout from parkernet.com.
For convenience I have taken the details on how to use the file directly from the stite: http://parkernet.com/applepro/
Download
Download the installation package Apple_Pro_KBD_v2 (250K)
System requirements
Windows XP or Windows Vista, 32-bit or 64-bit versions. Maybe Windows 7 RC but not tested. Apple Pro Keyboard or new aluminium Apple Keyboard. Untested with wireless keyboards but it should work okay.
Installation
After unZipping the Apple_Pro_KBD_v2.zip file, open the Apple Pro KBD v2 directory and run the Setup.exe installation file.
The installer will run and automatically install the keyboard layout .dll file into the correct location for your operating system.
To remove the keyboard layout simply run the installer again.
Configuration
Use the Windows XP Regional and Language Options control panel to select the new keyboard layout. Full details are included in the read me text file included in the ZIP download.
For those of you who want a step-by-step guide with pictures that you can print out, click here.
Sorry there’s no Vista step by step, but I have skillfully avoided Vista since it’s release.
Keystrokes
All keys now operate as per the legends printed upon them.
Shift-2 = @
Ctrl-Alt-2 = €
Shift-3 = £
Ctrl-Alt-3 = #
Well I guess im a little late to the party but I have recently discovered the joy that is Google Reader.
I never truly understood the purpose of RSS readers until I started to wonder how I could make my daily trawl of flash, flex, tech blogs faster and more efficient. It was then I re-discovered google reader (I had played with it before but didnt understand the purpose too much).
Needless to say it has pretty much transformed how I use the web. Now instead of opening 20+ tabs every day to check my favourite blogs I instead just add a subscription to the blog and then I am updated whenever there are new posts. Old concept I know but im amazed how I did without it until now.
There is one problem however. Im a little bit of a neat freak and I just cant stand seeing that there are unread items. This becomes an issue if you subscribe to a very busy site such as Gizmodo. If I leave it for a day or two without checking im liable to have 100 posts from that one site alone to read. As much as it pains me I have taken to reading about 10-20 from this site a day then clicking the “mark as read” button, just so that its nice and tidy 
Well I had mentioned this in a previous post but I thought I might as well add a separate post for it as its quite a big bit of personal news.
Today was my first day at my new job in Wilmslow (20 mins south of manchester) with a new startup named Playdemic.
I cant say what exactly it is im going to be doing yet but it will be Flash related as usual
I will say however, that I am very excited however about the work and the working environment, im eager to get cracking!
Well, this is just incredible, I dont think in my lifetime I have EVER seen so much snow in the UK letalone the city where it NEVER snows, Manchester.
This picture from a work colleague illustrates just quite how much fell over night:
Also the snow is totally perfect for building snow women!
And its STILL snowing! I just took this one out the office window:
Its incredible, snow just seems to bring out some really primal aspect out in me, so excited 
Well after the thieving of my bike a few weeks ago I was offered a new bike as replacement by the insurance company, a Kona Shred, another dirt bike.
And here it is:
Doesnt it look mean?
I dont really need a dirt bike as im not exactly going off road in the centre of Manchester so I had a half-hearted go of selling it on ebay.
In the end I have decided that ill keep it as it is very shiney and im abit of a magpie 
Well kind of.. We got our very pretty little tree up today:
Im all hot and itchy now, so it better be bloody staying up till June.
Michael is a Professional Flash Developer currently based in Manchester UK. His passion is all things programming, particularly Games and Particle Systems.