The ‘A Message From Earth’ project invites Bebo users to submit messages and pictures that consider the planet from a fresh perspective. A selection of these messages will be broadcast from the National Space Agency in Ukraine on October 9th. The messages will travel on an amazing 120 trillion mile journey from Earth to Gliese 581, the closest planet believed by scientists to be capable of supporting life.

Less Rain is responsible for creating the unique ‘A Message From Earth’ application, which is the first fully integrated rich media Bebo application created entirely in Flash. The application encourages users to compose messages in text, photo or drawing form. Users can vote on their favorite messages, with the top 500 making it into the galactic broadcast on October 9th. This digital time capsule is historically significant, being the first ever space transmission where the content has been democratically formed on the Internet.

“I understand that in the majority of cases these messages may be naïve, but I also hope that we will receive a creative and fresh look at the subject,” says Dr Zaitsev, one of the world’s leading experts in interstellar radio communication and A Message From Earth Team member.

What is your message from earth?

Let the Universe know by submitting your composition by September 30th. You might even receive a reply - in about 20 years!

Visit www.bebo.com/amessagefromearth

And… if you want to vote for me, check my latest submission in this widget:

Tuesday August 5th: Volume 3 of talk about the weather! Four inspiring, colourful and must-see presentations made a great evening!

Learn more about talk about the weather and subscribe to our newsletter. By subscribing, you will get an invitation once a month automatically.

See the photos of Vol.3 here.

We are looking for a senior interactive designer / creative lead with a solid academic background in design and substantial online experience in building rich-media websites.

You will be responsible for coming up with concepts for corporate & consumer websites, designing interaction with the information architecture in mind, as well as producing implementation-ready screens.

Every project we do demands a great concept / idea behind it and pushes the boundaries of what is possible, so you will never find yourself doing the same website over and over again.

You will be the main creative lead for the London office; working with developers, designers and project managers to ensure your creative vision stays intact. You will also be in touch with the Less Rain creative & technical directors in Berlin & Tokyo.

As a person you are always thinking of new ways to use design and interaction to solve problems. You are quick and stress tolerant, with attention to detail and good communication skills. You are comfortable talking about your ideas and can inspire others to follow your lead.

Skills

• Experience in designing rich media large scale websites
• Academic background in design, with excellent Information design & typography skills
• A feel for good usability
• A minimum of 5 years experience
• Excellent knowledge of Flash (as a designer, no coding experience necessary), Photoshop, Illustrator / Freehand
• Moving image & 3D software (After Effects, Maya, 3D Studio Max etc.) is a bonus, but not essential.

Initial salaries are comparable to the market level. Our first and foremost priority is to create quality work, and we do our best to apply this principle for everyone’s benefit.

Send your resume, references and portfolio to jobs@lessrain.com.

No agencies please.

We are currently looking for an intern. Do you have open eyes and an open mind?

Are you interested in travelling through digital culture, experiencing new pixel breezes and swimming in a pool of creative ideas?

If you’re:

• interested in working for a creative web design agency in the center of Berlin
• excited by animation
• a student in communication design or a related field
  (please no first year students)

don’t hesitate to contact us.

Technical skills:
You should be well versed in the Adobe CS programs: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and have a basic knowledge of Flash and After Effects.

Language skills:
As Less Rain is located in London, Berlin and Tokyo and all three offices work closely together, command of the english language is an essential requirement.

Preferably, we would like to find someone for six months. The internship starts in mid of August. Remuneration will be paid.

Please send your application including CV and samples of your work to Anna of Less Rain Berlin: anna@lessrain.com

As a little homage to our most popular and seemingly helpful blog post about the Nasty XML load bug in Internet Explorer I created an app that tests the caching behavior of the browser it’s running in.

To recap - Loading XML files in Flash over an SSL Connection in Internet Explorer fails if the “Pragma: no-cache” or “Cache-Control: no-cache” HTTP headers are set in the server’s response.
In AS2 the loading failed silently, in AS3 we at least get an IO Error #2032, which has been discussed several times (see below)

If you want to keep the browser from caching your dynamic content you’ll have to use other means.
Judging from my tests, the best headers to prevent caching without causing errors in IE are: “Cache-Control: no-store” and/or “Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMT”.

You can access the test suite here:

• Loading over an SSL connection
• Loading over a normal connection

Set the headers that you’d like the server-script to return and find out what happens when the same request is sent twice after each other.
Use the Live HTTP Headers Plugin for Firefox if you’d like to see what the server actually returns.

Other interesting insights

• The problem still exists in Internet Explorer 7! Don’t know about Vista…
• Here it’s suggested that “Cache-Control: must-revalidate” and “Cache-Control: max-age=0″ also work. While that’s true in the sense that they don’t cause an error IE, they don’t seem to prevent caching 100% - there is a timeout.
• “Pragma: no-cache” causes the error in IE, but doesn’t actually prevent it from caching at all when it’s set on a non-ssh connection.
• Firefox internally sets the expiry date of script files to the past - so unless you set the “Expires” header to the future it’ll never cache the content.
• Safari and Firefox change their caching behavior when the “Last Modified” header is set. If it’s in the past they seem to be happy to cache the file for you.

PHP sessions

Note that in PHP, as soon as you use sessions with session_start() the no-cache headers are added automatically. You’ll have to replace those headers or turn the default behavior off in php.ini. To replace the headers (found in the comments of the original post, see also the session-cache-limiter function and comments):

session_cache_limiter(’public’);
session_start();
header (”Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate”);
// or if you still want to prevent caching
header (”Cache-Control: no-store”);
header (”Pragma: public”);

Related links:

• Adobe TechNote
• Related Microsoft bug
• More on Error #2032
• Microsoft article - How to prevent caching in Internet Explorer. Especially “The Pragma: No-Cache Header” section
• Even more trouble with gzip compression
• And the Microsoft bug report for that

As a practical add-on for our loyal Flight Lab users we created a mini hangar widget that users can embed on their blog, social platform profile etc.

We happily used Clearspring as the platform for our widget, just click “Get this and Share” and take it away. If you enter the e-mail address you registered with at Flight Lab, the widget display your own planes to show off your flight machine building skills.

Related Posts:
Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab
Developing Flight Lab

On Tuesday June 10th talk about the weather had its debut. While slurping either the London, Berlin or Tokyo cocktail the audience listened to TINA ROEDER, LARS EBERLE, DAVID KRINGS and PETER BUENNAGEL. Learn more about talk about the weather and subscribe to our newsletter.

Become a member of the facebook group talk about the weather and see the photos of the debut talk.

Disstopia features all new canvases, collages, installations and drawings by long time friend and less rain collaborator Ronzo - also known as Ron Jonzo. The new work is based on an apocalyptic vision set in the wastelands of what was once the City of London.

When:
19th of June - 06 of July

Where:
StolenSpace Gallery, London
www.stolenspace.com

We’ve recently completed the website for the German/Italian property investment firm Stofanel Investment AG.

A subtle use of Flash and Papervision 3D creates an abstract, dreamy and atmospheric paper space to reflect the company’s vision of a harmonious relationship between nature, architecture, community and self.

The corporate identity we developed in collaboration with yippieyeah is based on botanic patterns (Phyllotaxy) as you would find in the growth patterns of sun flowers for example - it underlines the companies dedication to nature and community.

Regular readers will be pleased to find the site equipped with our usual technical treatment: fully dynamic, browser-button- and deeplink enabled (thanks to SWFAddress) and HTML-version for search engine optimization.

Flight Lab just won at Flash in the Can! Nothing on the site yet, but I found it here. Hope it’s true.

We were nominated in the categories “3D” and “Technical Excellence”. While we won the first one, the latter went to preloaded for “Launchball” - congratulations!

Apparently, we also won the “Best in Show” award. Which is amazing. Especially with the ridiculous acceptance speech video we handed in. Thanks everyone at FITC, and thanks to our moms…

Update: FITC posted the results…

Last Friday we launched the first part of The Memory Project, an online 3D image bank (made with PV3D) of the 21st century ‘cyclorama’ created by artist Jason Bruges.

Inspired by Bluebook, the artist Jason Bruges has created The Memory Project - a 21st century ‘cyclorama’. The structure camera-captures panoramic moments in time and stores them within its digital memory bank. Inside, visitors can explore the stored history of the installation and interact with the displayed 360 degree images.

The Memory Project tours in April 2008, collating the mass memory of London, Edinburgh and Liverpool en route. You can delve even deeper into these public memory banks at www.o2memoryproject.com from Friday 18th April 2008.

BBC NEWS: Life in London captured digitally

DESIGN WEEK: O2 to launch Bluebook installation by Bruges.

Flight Lab is a finalist at this year’s FITC Awards, in the categories 3D and in Technical Excellence. Cast your vote at the Peoples Choice Award at http://awards.fitc.ca/pc/