Month: July 2008

I need to backup my notebook

~ Enno ~ 1 Comment

I lost one of my little Moleskine notebooks today. On the way to the airport today I was summarizing my notes from two days of discussions and I must have left it in the back of the limo. I hope the driver finds it. It did make me painfully aware that these things are not part of my backup strategy.

I don’t like taking notes in a laptop during meetings, I find them distracting and I often make a little drawing, whether it’s class diagrams or geometrical sketches. But most of all, I like the tactile feel of a notebook and tightly written notes on gridded pages – leafing through one of those years later is a lot more fun than going through an old word document.

But in the future, I’m going to add them to my backup. Mozy and digital cameras FTW.

Boycotting the Olympics

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment


Dear marketing people,

for various reasons that I don’t feel I need to go into here (because face it, you all know what they are) I’ve decided to boycott this year’s Olympic games. Not only will I not be participating (yeah, right) but I’m extending my personal boycott to the following:

  • I will not watch the Olympics on television. Your marketing dollars spent on the games will not reach me
  • I will try not to read about the sports events. This is probably not going to hurt anyone much, and there are still articles about the politics of the Olympics that I might read, but I’ll give the sports event the same amount of attention that I give to professional soap box racing in Tasmania.
  • I won’t buy any products that advertise with the Olympics.

That last item is most likely going to be the hardest. I already stopped buying Coca Cola (though I’ll extend it to restaurants) and eating at McDonalds, so those are going to be a major issue. But today I noticed that Tine is sponsoring the Norwegian Olympics team – so many of their products are off limits.

I’m lazy in my extremism, so I will limit my boycott to such items that actually carry the 5 rings on them. If you’re supporting the warolympic effort, but it’s not obvious to me while I’m in the shop, you might get away with that.

ActionScript 3 Learnings

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I’m learning a lot about AS3 these days. It’s not a bad language, and it’s basically Javascript for Flash. Among the learnings:

  • Actionscript is still really, really slow. About 50-100 times slower than C s my guesstimate, based on what I know about Javascript benchmarks.
  • getters and setter are very slow. It’s 20 times faster to access a variable directly than it is to access it through a getter.
  • I really, really miss arrays of atomic types. Array is an array of object-references (and smart pointers, even), and it’s memory-hungry and not fast.
  • ByteArrays are faster than Arrays and use a lot less memory. I’ll try to use them more.
  • I think in C. Even after two months, I’m still writing int i every time I should write var i : int.
  • I miss block scoping of variables. Especially in for loops.
  • The Visual Studio debugger blows the socks off the Flex debugger

Despite all this I’m starting to really enjoy coding in Flash and getting noticeably faster every day.