Wednesday we attended Hogtown Homos, one of the events at this years LGBT film festival Inside Out to watch After directed by Mark Pariselli, a film that we had the privilege to compose the score for.  As you can see from the pictures the event was a sold out hit and after the show we headed down to “Buddy’s”, a local LGBT bar.

I have to say I walked out of that bar with a higher self-esteem then when I walked in but I also walked out with a broken heart for the the guitar player of the all girl band [that I wish I could remember the name of] that played the same night at the bar. She really knew how to play the guitar and had such awesome energy and I found myself “in a lovers trance”.  However, she was likely gay (or maybe I am assuming to much?). “Who cares”.

I apologize for the quality of the pictures. All I had was my point-and-shoot and my phone to take photography.

I was getting tired of the old layout for this blog so I decided to spend the afternoon looking for new themes.   I am a big fan of the minimalist themes and from when I first started using Wordpress I couldn’t find  many good ones to start with.  That was two years ago.

Today all I had to do was type in “minimalist wordpress theme” into Google and right away I found,  20 beautiful minimilast themes! I think I downloaded half of them before I decided that the structure theme will be the starting point for AO’s next blog skin. It only took a couple hours in photoshop and dreamweaver to create new logos and modify the php to get the theme looking like what you see now.

I’ve been planning on creating a personal blog for myself (Adrian Maurer) and now, with all these themes at my fingertips, I am even more inspired to do so.  But first I have to get cracking on V.  Maybe I will use the Wordpress framework for V? This is definitely something to consider. I really like the spectrum theme from WooThemes.  What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Great little comic that came up today in my reader.  I thought the open-source community might enjoy this.

http://xkcd.com/743/

Alright, in my previous post I taked about CodeIgniter which is a powerful open source PHP framework and how much it has helped me up to now in making a website for V.  I think now I’ve done as much as I can now with this framework, at least for my needs at the moment.  Later I plan to optimize my PHP and take better advantage of CodeIgniter however, my skill level is not at that level yet and I don’t want to over kill this site right now.

The next step than was to figure out my navigation methods and what language will best help me to do it.  Fernando, who I also mentioned in my previous post suggested that I use Mootools library.  I was all for it until Vladimir Drizhepolov aka Vovko aka “Voldemort” reminded my of the jquery library.  It didn’t take much thought to realize that jquery is more popular and will likely have more references on the internets to aid me in my programming – it also helped that it is open source and so I can blog about it on PlanetCDOT!

Now, rather than learning SQL and something called Rational Rose (bleh!)  I began writing my javascript to load my pages into my content div’s and animating transitions with Vlad’s assistance.

Here is how it turned out:

V – May 21, 2010 (screen cast)

Here is the code that helped me do it:

myscript (javascript that uses the jquery library)

Adrian.

This week I began building a site for V using PHP and MySQL technology. I’ll admit when it comes to PHP I am a complete noob but I was determined to write this site from scratch and by the end of it hopefully be a pro! But here is how it really played out…

I would say I got as far as parsing the header, body and footer dynamically into an index.php file before my brain seized up. I was stuck and so I decided to send out a cry for help on the internets. Lucky for me Fernando Ferraz, who fortunately just added me to FB after disappearing from the face of the earth for years and then comes back a competent programer,  answered the call.  His suggestion was, “Why the f*** are you starting from scratch you noob, use CodeIgniter.” He than began to explain to me that CodeIgniter (CI) is an open source PHP application framework that uses MVC (model view controller) architecture that I can install and use to build my site.

Ok cool but whats that?

In a nutshell it pretty much gives you all the scripts you need to start a secure, flexible, and easy to manage dynamic site and all you have to do is change a bit of text in a few config files. However, as easy as that sounds only after playing with CI and pulling my teeth out for 7 hours is really when I began to grasp the application and start to love it.

So why is CI so great, well its because of the MVC architecture I mentioned earlier.  MVC uses ‘controllers’ which are simply .php files that you can refer to in your code that will parse all your pages for you, as opposed to using the include function to parse different files, noob.  In other words imagine writing different modules of code that will contain different classes and functions that will be combined for you as you need them.  This is likely poor terminology but I’m calling it object oriented scripting!

I recommend to everyone if you ever decide to learn PHP definitely check out CI. And thank you to Hutch[S] and bwoodall at irc.freenode.net/codeigniter for answering all my silly questions!

Now to figure out how to create XML from the tables!…sigh.

Adrian.

Nicholas and I today shot the first interview for project V with local Canadian illustrator, Sabrina Scott of sabrinascott.ca.

In as little words possible not to spoil the interview I would describe the process as, “fun times” and with that said  I would also like to thank Sabrina Scott for being a great host and interviewee.  I’m excited for the next interview where we will be featuring a group of graffiti artist.

Check out the image below for a glimpse of the interview.

Adrian.

“If Michael Angelo were alive today he would be making games.” – Karren Ettouny, MM

Recently a good friend and colleague of mine, Nicholas Collister of Lightshack and Fur approached me to take on a new project with him.

The project has been given the codename “V” and will be in it’s infancy a quarterly video magazine consisting of interviews with local artists of all types. Furthermore, we will be including tutorials, reviews and editorials where we will demonstrate things like the making of and more.

V will be free to the citizens of the ‘internets’ and will be distributed to your browsers first and then one day ported to your phones and tablets.

V has no financiers so we will be hosting fundraisers in the future when things get rolling so I will  keep you posted with updates. First shoot is this monday!

Adrian.

This is the official video that Tak and I at Alpha Organic created during the Christmas holidays to accompany the launch of  the band duo, Betanik Movement’s new album “Happening at Betanik” which can now be found on ITunes and Amazon.

This video was shot hand held on a 7D, at 60fps, 1080p, and was designed to resemble a “chilling” night in the city.  And in this case that city is Toronto.

The bokeh and blur shots give a nice painting feel to the video.

This particular version was rendered down to a file size of 500MB and 720p to meet the requirements of vimeo.

Feel free to check out the bands myspace: myspace.com/betanikmovement

Enjoy.

Betanik Movement – Just Chillin (official) from Alpha Organic on Vimeo.

This winter season we launched Alpha Organic Interactive, a games and application division of our little Toronto based company.

Today I am pleased to announce the release of “Composers Friend”, a flash based strategy shooter.  I hope you will enjoy this first release.  We have plans to launch a new game every month as well we are working with some iphone application concepts for later this year.