something in the way

Motion designer Patrick Clair tells the story of Stuxnet, "a Microsoft Windows computer worm discovered in July 2010 that targets industrial software and equipment." Unlike many viruses and worms, Stuxnet was designed with a specific target — Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems — and left any other systems unharmed. Stuxnet could then increase pressure in nuclear reactors and turn off oil pipelines, all the while showing monitors everything was fine.

Get the full skinny in Clair's well done motion graphic video below.

[Video link | Thanks, Nigel]

Photography can transform scale, whether in time, space, or a combination of the two. scntfc, the hyper-talented audiovisual artist, sends some eye-explodingly good work our way, prompted by yesterday’s coverage of a two-minute condensation of a trip from San Francisco to Paris.

Before returning to the theme of timelapse time travel and aerospace, let’s look first at what happens when you collapse scale in the spatial dimension via macro photography. Undone is a series of close-up shots, a balletic glimpse of the world viewed closer through a lens. Artist Andy Rohrmann aka scntfc shares it with us.

At top:

An excerpt from the forthcoming film series “Undone”.
Video: scntfc
Music: Burn A Pale Fire (scntfc + Morgan Kuhli) – Pale Fire 5
Canon 5d mkii, 100mm macro, 65mm macro

On the theme of airplane-window timelapse, “Minneapolis to Seattle” from three years ago pieces the airborne-viewed landscape into a patchwork collage. As the creator describes it:

a different take on time lapse photography and photo collage. all photos are taken on a flight from minneapolis to sea-tac, i had completed the basic layout and timelapse a few years ago, and finally polished it up with music, time shifting, and misc effects to give it more character. time shifting is still pretty rough and will be revised, time permitting…maybe in another four years. i have several more in this style, just have to find the time to update those as well.

Here’s another macro video for good measure:

First trailer for the upcoming film series “Undone”.
Music: Burn A Pale Fire (scntfc + Morgan Kuhli)

Canon 5d Mk2, 100mm f/2.8 Macro

Check out more of scntfc’s work – musical and visual – at:
http://strongforthefuture.com/

If you are curious about the slides, you can download them here.

Here are some of the features we are working on :

- Faster GC : GC hint API and more.
- New numeric types : float and float4 (very useful for Molehill in the future).
- Concurrency : Worker threads (shared nothing model) to leverage multicore CPU's. No more UI 's blocked when doing expensive operations.
- Stage3D : The API used for Molehill (that you know through the Incubator builds).
- StageVideo : Allowing full GPU acceleration (decoding + blitting) when used with H.264. Part of Flash Player 10.2 and coming to AIR soon.
- Threaded video pipeline : Will decode non H.264 streams on another thread (H.264 being decoded by the GPU), Net I/O will also be moved to another thread, all this bringing smoother playback.

I will be covering some of those in more details later on, stay tuned!

Because you can never get enough videos to remind you how tiny you are compared to the rest of the world. Catch the video below. And a good MLK day to you.

[Video link via Chart Porn]

• The Universe as We Know It
• Many Eyes on The Times U.S. Open Blog
• 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe

Last Monday at "Flash on the Beach" keynote, I showcased new improvements we have been doing lately with video playback in the Flash Player.

So what happened ?

As you guys may know, we introduced earlier this year Flash Player 10.1 with H.264 GPU decoding on MacOS, Windows and Linux, which already highly improved the CPU usage when viewing H.264 video. But we are going further with dramatic CPU usage reduction in an upcoming version of the Flash Player.

Below is a snapshot of the Activity Monitor using Flash Player 10.1, playing a 1080p video with H.264 GPU decoding enabled :

You see that for such a video, CPU is still being used for about 50%, cause the CPU is not totally offloaded, still displaying and scaling the video frames.
Now in the following picture I am using the new feature we will be introducing soon, as you can see the CPU is highly offloaded and playing a 1080p video with around 8% CPU usage.

Note how the memory usage drops down too :

It gets even better when you start overlaying content on top of the video. Most of Flash websites use a lot of overlayed content on top of the video. In the snapshot below, the CPU usage goes pretty high, cause complex content is on top of my video, the CPU is working on compositing the video frames and the vector content in the display list which is an intensive task :

By leveraging the upcoming feature, take a look at my CPU usage and memory now, the exact same content with a few lines of code changed :

Again, this will dramatically improve the video performance in the Flash Player. Note that this feature will be available on Windows, MacOS and Linux, and this new improvement is not restricted to H.264 video or specific video cards vendors, any video frame whatever the codec used will benefit from this.

If you are interested into learning more about this, do not hesitate to meet us at Max.
If you want to try this as soon as possible, just drop me an email.

Hope you guys like it!

From SitePoint comes a nice series of videos on CSS3, called CSS Live. Here's one on Progressive Enhancement when using CSS3 features:

I am very happy that the community is getting more and more involved in P2P. I told you, it has endless possibilities!

AS3-P2P-LIB
AS3-P2P-LIB is a pure ActionScript 3.0 Library by Dominic Graefen that helps Flash developers get started with P2P easily.

All Classes | Example | Project page at GitHub

P2P Video Calls on Android

My fellow evangelist Mark Doherty built a great demo app using P2P and AIR 2.5 for Android. Watch this video, where he shows how it works. And btw: I should really teach him how to pronounce my name

Check Mark’s blog post for further information.

Very cool, and almost as good a paintball-waster as the Mythbusters’ “Mona Lisa in 275 milliseconds” demonstration. This one’s a little more controlled, though: you can see more videos here, including one where they’re using multiple colors in layers to create a more nuanced look.

I wonder if they put their “paintings” together in a pixel editor, or just something like Paint. The resolution looks… well, not high. But the dripping effect ends up giving it a unique look for sure. Not that I support graffiti (or can even tell what’s being painted in half the videos). Cool though.

[via Make and Gearfuse]