More for my future reference but if trying to set up the flash player debug version on chrome then you have to know a couple of things. Firstly chrome uses its own integrated flash player which attempts to keep up to date with the latest version. Secondly if this is switched off then it will look on the system for a flash player to use.
So.. you need to disable the chrome application flash player and then grab and install a version of the flash debug player you need from the adobe site. Once done you can check the version in use by going here.

Proper instructions are on the adobe site on this page:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/839/cpsid_83950.html

Drupal baby

I'm probably going to be posting a fair bit about drupal for the forseeable future as I am porting my new company's website over to it.
Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) which allows you to do just that, manage all your website content in an easy way. It is written in PHP and has been designed to be extremely expandable - as outlined by the number of add-on modules that can be plugged into it.
Many years ago I worked on replacing an aging Intranet system with Plone, a Python based CMS which was quite advanced at the time. I can see lots of similarities between the two CMS systems and this will help as time goes by.

First up to note with Drupal is the module Custom Breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs on a website are the little categorised navigation links that you usually see somewhere at the top of the page. They basically form a breadcrumb from your starting location on the website, into where the actual useful content is located.
One of my major requirements in the current project is to have a breadcrumb navigation path that mirrors the actual url used. So for example the address I have is 'mysite.com/category/subcategory/posting'. I want to be able to map the breadcrumb to show 'Home -> Category -> Subcategory -> Posting'. This is entirely possible with Custom Breadcrumbs until you start playing with Views. As per the Views module page description: The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content are presented.

The current development version of Custom Breadcrumbs has some support for working with Views but this does not appear to be very easy to understand or implement in ways that you might expect.

I have been through various ways of mapping the breadcrumb to the url categories but in the end plumped for a little way which invloves rewriting the breadcrumb content when looking at certain types of views. See http://www.danielhanold.com/story/views-breadcrumbs-using-arguments for a better rundown.

Another issue that cropped up when using Views is when you have multiple Views on a page and both are using pagination (showing 'next' and 'back' if there are more items than can be displayed on the page). As a default each view will pick up when 'Next' is clicked and all of the views will move to the next page. Not ideal.
Hidden inside each View that you have created will be the 'Use pager' option in the Basic settings. This turns on and off whether the View will paginate or not but when setting it you need to be aware of an option called 'Pager element'. This defaults to 0 and is picked up by all Views on the current page. To make sure that only individual Views move through their own pagers on one page you need to give them a unique number. Doing this will mean that each paginates as expected.

Si

Not much going on at the minute, I'm back in the world of work doing IT contracting on some cool stuff over at a company in Manchester.
At some point I'm hoping to continue with the bristol blenheim model and maybe move onto a spitfire (with help from the haynes spitfire manual) :)

Si

new 3D work...

Got a distinction for my Masters degree - woohoo!
I'm busy DIY'ing the house at the minute but get time every now and again to work on a technical high resolution model of a bristol blenheim bomber from World War 2.
Its going quite well with a few areas more to model (it takes ages to complete each area as virtually all my reference information is gleaned from photos found on the internet).
Click the little image to the right to view a screengrab of the cockpit and engine area. Once modelled it will be textured and probably used in some animation ideas I have.

Course finished :o)

Woohoo, I've finally finished my Masters Degree!
Its been a fun if extremely busy time working on the degree but definitely worth it. Time for a little relaxation before getting together a showreel and looking for a job.

In the meantime here are the tutorial videos I've created to demo my bTraffic tool. I'm toying with the idea of modifying bFlocking, my other animation tool, to simulate pedestrians and then add that together with bTraffic. Following on from that is another idea that I'm looking into which would encompass both bTraffic and bFlocking. More on that as it develops.

more bTraffic...

Here is another update on the bTraffic tool, showing how easy it is to set up a road with a few different vehicle types.



and another one showing 2 roads that have been generated by bTraffic, a 6 lane motorway on the left and a 3 lane road at the front right (just uploaded so will show soon).

more traffic...

Well I'm coming towards the end of the Uni course at Leeds Met and am putting some final touches to my bTraffic animation tool. Below are two highres samples of traffic flow. The first simply shows a fairly heavily used road with numerous highres vehicles moving along.


The second shows an earlier version using a primitive movement between lanes. That has recently changed and an ease in/ease out movement is now moving vehicles nice and smoothly. An updated video showing the effect will be posted up soon.

traffic congestion...

Here is an update to the congestion element of the tool. You can drag one or many locators onto the road and position them on lanes to restrict traffic flow. For this example I added a couple of boxes as a simulated accident that the traffic tries to get around.

bTraffic opposing roads...

Here's a bTraffic update on a few bits I added just before xmas and just after new year.
This version now has opposing road generation so you can set up a motorway/freeway quickly and easily. You can now also change the lane widths and specify a separation value between the roads. It's using the same particle emitter to fuel each road but it will later let you set the weighting of how busy each is.

bTraffic - multiple vehicle type selector...

I've finally got back to working on bTraffic, my traffic animation tool. The latest update includes the addition of vehicle types. What this means is that you can easily add multiple vehicles to the animation, such as models of trucks, cars, bikes etc just with a simple click of a button. Next up is to allow a weighting to the traffic so that you can have some simulations heavily laden with trucks whereas other simulations might be sparsely populated with traffic and only consist of cars.
Plenty more to do...

Here's an example of the generation of a road and the assignment of 3 different vehicles to the simulation: