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6/6/2008

Hard Rock Memorabilia site in Silverlight Beta 2

Today (6/6/2008) at 5pm Microsoft released its Beta 2 version of Silverlight. We here at vertigo are pleased to announce that the Hard Rock Memorabilia site at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com has been fully updated to take advantage of Beta 2.

As a little Easter egg we added a new Hi-resolution image taken of Tommy Allsup’s wallet: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/?item=4

“Heads or tails? The 1959 plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper very nearly claimed Buddy's guitarist, Tommy Allsup, as well. Pestered by teenage Richie for his seat on the plane, Tommy agreed to a coin toss. It came up heads – Richie got the seat, and Tommy kept his life. Shortly before the plane took off, Tommy gave his wallet to Buddy and asked him to use his ID to pick up a letter that was awaiting him in the Fargo, ND post office. Buddy agreed. This wallet was recovered from the wreckage. Tommy went on to become a legendary session player with an incredible story about that cold night in 1959. “

Keep watching the Memorabilia site as more items are in the pipeline and will be posted in the near future…..

Cheers,
Liam

Posted at 8:25 PM by Liam Molloy | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (7)

3/24/2008

Free beer!!! - Can you find step 1?

Recently we launched the Hard Rock memorabilia site which contains 257 pieces of music memorabilia. A little unknown fact is this collection contains an Easter egg.

Step 1: That would ruin the surprise, go find it now!

Step 2 : When zoomed closely into a certain piece of Memorabilia we show an image within an image of 16 Hard Rock locations.

sparse 1.jpg

Step 3: From the 16 location sub image zooming in on New York shows the New York Paramount theatre in greater detail. Incidentally, the Paramount theatre is probably Hard Rock’s largest piece of Memorabilia.

sparse 2.jpg

Step 4: Zooming in on a certain part of the New York Paramount image brings up yet another sub image of The Beatles.

sparse 3.jpg

Go ahead and find step 1. I’ll buy a beer to the first visitor who finds it J

This is the first of what we call a Sparse image. We plan on adding more of these sparse images to the Hard Rock Memorabilia site along with many more Memorabilia treasures to the site in the near future so be sure to keep on visiting.

Cheers,
Liam

Posted at 8:30 AM by Liam Molloy | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (2)

3/13/2008

Mix 08 highlights

Last week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity of attending Mix 08. I have listed a few highlights of the show for me.

Hard Rock Keynote demo

I along with several other colleagues had been working feverishly away on this demo for the past month and a bit. I got to work on several of the features which made up the demo including the content management system used to power the site as well as various UI elements. If you are one of the only people who has recently visited vertigo.com who hasn’t heard about the keynote leave this blog post now and go visit http://memo.hardrock.com

Some of my favourite pieces of Memorabilia include:

Bo Diddley - Tom Holmes custom guitar
The keynote demo featured a Video of Bo Diddley, the live site does not as we do not have permission to use it. This image is actually 56 (not 57) separate images stitched into one big image. The zoom in to see the detail on this guitar. You can see thumbprints.

The Clash - Stage-worn "prostitute" t-shirt, white pants
The Clash are my favourite band and out of several pieces this was the only one that made it into the final collection

The Sex Pistols - Handwritten list extolling virtues of Nancy Spungeon
I am a Brit, say no more.

Rock Band Contest

I along with several other Vertigo folks made our own rock band featuring Scott on lead guitar, Alan on Bass, Chris I on Vocals and Myself on drums. We played Dani California by the chilli peppers and came a close 2^nd. If there were points for style we would have definitely won. Getting to play rock stand up on a staged set was awesome.

Dragon's Lair

I have been working on a Silverlight version of Dragon's lair and have not been able to publically show it because we do not have the rights to the game. At mix I entered the Show Off contest and featured a quick video of Dragons lair which you can view here. I didn’t win but it was very rewarding to see this up on the big screen and listening to the audiences reaction.

I will be working on a series of blogs soon to demonstrate how to create a laser disk game in Silverlight so watch this blog.

Moon Patrol

I like classic games and am in the process of building my 2^nd MAME cabinet. One of my favourite games is Moon Patrol and I have demonstrated on our MAME machine at vertigo completing the game on one live. During a quick visit to an arcade in Vegas I found a Moon patrol machine. It was a bit battered looking and one of the horizontal scrolling panels was broke but it was still good to give it a go, it must be 20 years since I last played this in an arcade. After a few drinks and a bit of rust I managed to complete it on 2 credits.

BTW – if I ever get round to it I will make a Silverlight clone of Moon Patrol J

Cheers,
Liam

Posted at 2:05 PM by Liam Molloy | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/7/2007

Silverlight 1.0 Intellisense

Recently I have been trying to move from Silverlight 1.1/2.0 to Silverlight 1.0. One of the things I miss is intellisense. Whilst browsing about for Silverlight debug tips I came across a good blog post by Justin-Josef Angel. It details how to get Silverlight 1.0 intellisense by using a codeplex project. This project includes a compressed and un compressed java script file. You place these files in your project. Then include one on your html page and add a reference on your JavaScript file and bobs your uncle we have a winner.

Full instructions are available at:

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/justinangel/archive/2007/08/01/Silverlight-1.0-full-Javascript-Intellisense.aspx

the java script files are available at:

http://www.codeplex.com/intellisense

Posted at 4:23 PM by Liam Molloy | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/24/2007

FW: Silverlight - default fonts

Whist working on a Silverlight 1.1 application I wanted to use a font called “black castle mf” which is installed on my machine. In my XAML I set the text blocks”FontFamiliy” property to use this font. However when the screen renders the font renders as “lucida grande”. I tried several other fonts, the more common fonts such as “Arial’ work but others do not.

<TextBlock.Foreground>
<SolidColorBrush Color="Red" />
</TextBlock.Foreground>

</TextBlock>

cid:image001.png@01C7FE95.04749580
This lead me to believe that Silverlight uses a list of Standard fonts. A quick search through the documentation confirmed this. By default Silverlight can only use the following 9 fonts:

cid:image003.png@01C7FE95.C6A7DAE0

If you need to use other fonts then you have to make them available for download. I placed the “blackcastle.ttf” font in the root of my web site created a downloader object to go and get the font, wired up it’s downloader.Completed event to determine when the download is completed, then set my text blocks to use the new font.

Note: if you are using Silverlight 1.1 from within Visual Studi0 2008 and want to use downloaders see my previous post Downloader and Visual Studio 2008

this.downloader = new Downloader();
this.downloader.Completed += new EventHandler(HandleFontDownloaded);

//load fonts
LoadFonts();

private void LoadFonts()
{
this.downloader.Open("GET", new Uri(http://localhost/web/blackcastle.ttf));
this.downloader.Send();
}

void HandleFontDownloaded(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    //load the custom font
    this.txtLives.SetFontSource((Downloader)sender);
    this.txtTime.SetFontSource((Downloader)sender);
    this.txtLives.FontFamily = "Black Castle MF";
    this.txtTime.FontFamily = "Black Castle MF";