Added this as a comment on this beeb website article

For those who think dyslexic people are lazy, I have a few stories of my own experiences to help change their mind.

The stories vary from the harmless examples such as the time I got 99% for my computing standard grade, the one mark deduced being for spelling my name wrong.

To worse examples, such as how fared badly on my 3rd year genetic algorithms exam. Having read a question, it seemed hard, build a full genetic algorithm from scratch, I endeavoured to build a fully working genetic algorithm spanning two additional pages in java complete with advanced features such as hierarchical weighing.

Unfortunately I got zero marks as the question only asked me to describe not build a genetic algorithm, with a red comment in the margin adding that next time I should read the questions more thoroughly.

I can reassure readers that building a actual genetic algorithm is far harder than just describing vaguely how one works, this story was repeated through my university time and any time I have a job interview with a written exam.

Apart from exams I often ended up doing the practicals twice, once for myself and once for someone else, with them transcribing my spoken version of the practical write up into something which would receive marks, in real life we are judged on our results not our write up of our results, this makes this a moot point.

I had additional problems with my poor memory also related to dyslexic, I ended up cheating by bringing in a calculator with formulas on it, it was because I objected to having helped many in my class study and through their practicals only to fail the final exams myself, in real life we have these great things called books full of formulas which tend to help us dyslexics make this issue a moot point.

Of the 6 dyslexic people I knew who went to university in my year, I was the only to finish not being good at my course, but by passing my practical coursework by such large margins that they would mask my poor exam results,

Dyslexic people suffer badly at university, as the only survivor of my friend’s group my advice to other dyslexics is not to bother, learn a trade or work your way up an organisation. You will shine anywhere were you talent can show, I can tell you university is not currently one of those places

The Zap

In short, being dyslexic is hard, harder than most people think, especially at the start when you haven’t proved you can do anything, and the only way to prove your ability is through doing something your inherently bad at, for those that manage to pass this stage it can leave a slightly bitter taste in one’s mouth/and a chip on the shoulder so big, it takes years of work to get rid of.

Though I stand by my comment at the end, should of been a plumber

Ant

Hurray ! channel t is away… for 5 of the hardest weeks of my life I think it’s a good result, shame my wee ai bots didn’t quite make the 3d environment but the site had to be launched

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tinthepark/2008/channelt/#/channelt/

Thanks to swfAddress, akamai, away3d, bits of sandy, and alot of as3

As stated in the last post, i’ve finally finished the T in the Park Channel T flash application, which any second should be going live… any second… any second at all

It was a great project working with good friends and collegues, learning the wonders of away3D, flcikr, swfAddress, and all those nice wee quirks of the flash IDE

One fo my afvourate features unfortunately not ready for release was the bot crowd, the idea was these would wander around in a 3d environment, surrounded by the various music stages of T in the Park, when you rolled over the stage the little bots would swarm towards it, a nice cute effect.

I got pretty close but ultimately what works well for animals, fishes, and mircobes is really hard to get realistic for thinking wandering humans, and with the deadline looming that was that

simple as3 bots

slightly more complex as3 bots

even more complex as3 in 3d pretendign to be humans badly

source

link to AS2 bots

Ps

I’ve now made it a promise to myself to give flex a try

Many years ago now I bumped into a then young and vibratant little open source project called Sandy.

One of the many cool classes is called DistortImage, it’s been written about many times, and over the year I’ve used it many times by it’s self without the rest of sandy to give rather impressive 3d transitions.

Basically it allows you to do non-alfine transforms in flash and it’s been about for since flash 7, that’s to distort a bitmap between any 4 points on the screen,

best part is it’s only adds 2k to your swf size, compared to away3d which is closer to 300k, so it’s even usable on preloaders and such.

AS2 examples from sandy

link

Some AS3 Examples I knocked up for this year’s T in the Park website

Bouncing wall example

backwards flip

forward flip

Note the as3 version of the code has a slight issue whether the cpu load jumps if the control points intersect

My AS3 Examples Source

source

ps

yes i will eventunely move away from the timeline… it’s just i’ve spent the last few years being rather attached to it, it’s such a shame it’s become a liability in as3