Thoughts on SWX, Flash and Hacking Code

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I noticed this afternoon that the space I had alloted on my MacBook Pro for my Windows XP Boot Camp partition my not be large enough as time goes on. As a reslt I began looking at methods for Non Destructive Resizing of the partition, that doesn’t exist. Even in the recently release Boot Camp 1.2 update. So instead i began looking at alternative ways to free up some more space for Windows to do what ever it is Windows does with all that disk space. The following are my top links for information on freeing up disk space on Windows.

1. How-to: Quickly Reduce Windows Installation Size
2. Install ad Use LitePC ’s XPLite

Thats pretty much it.

The result after carefully following the first links instructions followed by some tinkering with XPLite…. And extra 2Gigs of space in my Windows Boot Camp Partition. Result.

For those of you that are developing Flash Lite applications and games you will be well aware of the issues of Memory leaks in the Flash lite player. One area where this can occur is in the creation of “crossed references”. These result in objects that are effectively locked as far as Garbage Collection is concerned, and so result in memory ‘leaking’ over time.

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This morning i was passed this wonderful looking Flash game. Reminiscent of old television programs such as Postman Pat, Canberwick Green, and Trumpton.

The game is played out in the Board game stylee. Brilliant!

Get the glass

Last night I finally got round to updating my word press install to 2.1.1 . The aim was to get the WordPress Embedded Gallery 2 plugin set up and working (which i eventually managed to do here). In the past this operation has always gone smoothly, my options being to use the auto-magic update button from the Dreamhost.com instant install interface. Or if i am feeling a little braver, the manual option. I followed all the usual procedures bar one…….

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Found on the Adobe.com home page is the announcement that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has moved from Labs and beta status to Lightroom 1.0 Release.

I have been using the beta version of Light Room to manage the images from my recent trip (some 3000+ images in various formats) and have really found it an incredibly useful application for organising, sorting and preparing images for print.

The ability to search, filter and sort images via shoot, category and or key words is brilliant. I have also found the simple ‘Develop’ tools great for quick adjustments to Raw images prior to exporting for print.

the full product details are available from the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom product page.

In an attempt to redress the Good Vibe to Bad Vibe balance that my grumpy post created yesterday I have posted an OmniGraffle stencil for creating Mobile Application Wire Frames and have made it available for download Here.

For those of you that don’t know about OmniGraffle, it is a great Diagramming tool for the Apple Mac similar to Visio for Windows.

The main OmniGroup website is here where it details OmniGraffle and the other applications OmniGroup produce.

Buy OmniGraffle from Amazon here

{UPDATE 1}
What I have found use full and Interesting is a post over HERE, related to Flex 3. It provides a useful link if you want to get involved in the Pre-release.

Now on to the rant
{/UPDATE 1}

{UPDATE 2}
After re-reading Ted’s post there is one section that i quite important to point out, that I missed.

The day you download Flex 3.0, you will be able to deploy 100% of the new features to the entire Flash Player 9 installed user base.

Of course we all want to know what those new features will actually be. Also though if the Flash 9 Player is going to be around a little longer than the previous player versions, will it mean we have to put up with its short comings a little longer too? Accessibility, Bi-Directional Support immediately spring to mind.
{/UPDATE 2}

Most of the flash blogosphere will have read the post here . I have to say I was left feeling a little fished in. There appeared to be little information actually about Flex 3.0 although there are an awful lot of mentions of both Flex 3.0 and also Flash player 9. In fact some of the information sounds down right wrong.

This is the first time Adobe or Macromedia has released a development toolset targeting a widely deployed Flash Player

Will this not be the Flash 9/Blaze IDE, which will surely be released well before Flex 3.0. I imagine Flash 9 will be targeting a widely deployed Flash 9 Player and the new ActionScript 3 standard. The clue would be Adobe releasing the AS3 update for flash 8 on Labs. What it would be accurate to say is;

This is the first time Adobe or Macromedia has released a development toolset, that hasn’t been released yet.

Scatter in some simple logical version statements, such.

When Flash Player 10 hits 90%, Flex should target Flash Player 10 in all future releases

Its a wonderful recipe for Google Keyword Candy. But has very little content.

Sorry Ted. Not impressed.

Click here.

The location marked is not a desert or some otherworldly place as you might imagine. Its Ecuador on the edges of the Amazon. Apparently there is a lot of Oil in the Amazon. Ecuador is one of the locations mentioned in the book I am reading at the moment.

I had been meaning to pick up a book I had heard about recently. A few nights ago I finally got round to picking up a copy. I am only a little way in and already I fear it will leave me depressed at the prospect of finishing it. If even 1% of the information is true then the outlook for us all is rather bleak.

The book is Confessions Of An Economic Hitman .

While burning time before seeing “the Last King of Scotland”, a fantastically acted film, even if the subject was rather dark and horrific, I entered the book shop and figured I would ask the assistant to help me track the book down.

Helpfully he quickly went about entering the title into the computer.
“We don’t have that on our inventory, sorry”.
Hmmm.
“Could you try just Hitman”? I offered.
Again.
“nope sorry, we don’t seem to have it, are you sure thats the title”?
I reiterated that I was sure and decided to meander the shelves ‘just to look see’. Sure enough 3 copies sat in the political section. Odd.

As I mentioned at the start, the book is really quite worrying. I imagine in the same way the film An Inconvenient Truth is (I haven’t seen it yet),certainly thought and conversation provoking like Loose Change.

I am not usually prone to believing in conspiracy, fact or theory, however on occasions information is presented that really leaves you only the choice to investigate a little yourself. Hence the map from Google.

In this day and age where we rely so heavily on technology, I was curious and also a little concerned how I would cope on my recent travels without access to all my modern day trappings. High speed internet access, mobile phone, MP3 collection, PSP, digital cameras . Even more importantly how would all this work without a home base where I knew I could charge them all.

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