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    26 augustus

    AirPort Extreme

    Well, I've just purchased the new Airport Extreme. First off I'd like to say what a nice piece of hardware. I know that it is sligtly overpriced, but hey.... I love apple products. Although, there are 3 things that could have been better about this little devil.
     
    • Forwarding of port 53 to allow me to stealth my network, this is not a big deal since I run a webserver anyways but would be nice in the future when I don't.
    • USB Disk sharing - when you turn off wan but have local access, I would hope that it would it would allow you stealth those ports as well.
    • USB transfer rates are a little slow.
    Over all I love it. It's super easy to configure and the log graphs are cute too! I hope apple will release a firmware update to allow for some of these shortcomings.
    23 augustus

    Game Development with Flex3 and FlashCS3

    Pre-FlexBuilder3 Woes
     
    Before Flex3 beta, I'd been developing and exploring ways for concurrent game development to be more efficent. For most this is not an issue as the scope of the projects are small or the team is a single person. But for those that have worked with more than 2 or more people on a project with tight timelines, know all too well that Flash really sucks for this. 
     
    3 reasons why I dislike pre-Flex Builder 3 concurrent game development.
     
    • Fla's   - I simply detest seeing large amounts of code in them. Doing binary diff's isn't really what I call an option when someone destroys your code or hasn't been faithfully working with source control.
    • Fonts  - You have to make sure that everyone working on the project has them installed ( the PC or MAC equivialant).
    • Audio - Any time you complile your app these are re-exported, depending on the project the waiting can turn you insane.

    So you may say to yourself that those don't sound so bad and you know what, they aren't for the most part. I loath waiting for things over and over again, especially when there is a better way. There are workarounds for those issues, but are either convoluted, unreliable or require some 3rd party tool. Where I work I am primarily coding the game and for about 80% of the project I don't give a crap about the audio or if a particular font is showing up right or having to chase someone down to submit files to the depot. I just want to be able to test my code quickly and get back to rest of features that need implementing, so finding that PC/Mac Equivalent font or waiting and 10-30 seconds everytime I compile just sucks.

    Well enough ranting.. that never does anybody any good and I'm sure for anyone reading this would prefer I get to the point of all of this.

    Enter Flex Builder3 and Flash CS3:

     
    Right when you thought that the actionscript 3 overhaul was blessing from cosmic overlords, Adobe was so kind as to take it a step further. Now being a noob to Flex Builder these may have exisited before in some fashion, but being able to export your Fla contents to SWC and access them as "First Class Citizens" in flex is truly awsome!
     
    All those nasty little things I mentioned before are now gone! Game development with Flex Builder3 and FlashCS3 is truly awesome. You now have a good debugger, profiling, great source control support, and finally excellent code and content seperation.
     
    Now if Adobe were to add OpenGL, this would give XNA a run for it's money( even though it's free :P ) with AIR applications on the PC/MAC homebrew scene. Don't get me wrong I love XNA as well, but it lacks good artist tools like the Flex & Flash combo. Perhaps Microsoft will add native support in XNA to interperete Silverlight files? Oh man.. I could go on about that for a while but let's save that for another day.
     
     
    19 augustus

    Sunday

    Is it the end or the beginning of the week? Anyways..
     
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