work

Acer Aspire One, 6 weeks later

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

Quick summary: I’m loving the little guy.

Work: This week I was at a client’s site in Switzerland. I went to the office in the morning and left the power cable at the hotel. No problem – power lasts for a full day if you use it normally. I was mucking around in Eclipse, installing software, the hard disk was kept busy. When I left the office 8 hours later to get to the Christmas party, I had 24 minutes left on the battery.

Entertainment: In the hotel, I had a flaky wireless connection (thanks, unknown donor) which meant I had Skype, but I also had a bunch of TV shows on the 160 GB harddrive (not regretting that) and that meant independence from Swiss/Italian/German television. In between watching TV I was coding and listening to the Ender’s game audio books.

Gadget Envy: When I bought my first laptop in 97, people would walk up to me on the train and ask “is that a real computer?”. Over time, everyone got a laptop, and that reaction turned into “OMG, your laptop is OLD!”. Now they walk up to me again and the reaction is “is that thing a full PC? Can I lift it?”. The Acer makes people smile, gets them talking. I tell them that it’s great for work, but sucks for games other than AO (curse you all for not supporting Intel Graphics better), but makes a nice “minimum spec” platform for testing, too: my goal is for AO to still run on it after the engine upgrade.

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.

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.