my growing respect for Flash

Recently, the quality of the Flash mini-programs in some web pages has improved - dramatically.

The two things that annoyed me immensely about the use of Flash seem to have gone away:

1. Trying to do a website in Flash - guess what? You can't bookmark the pages.
2. Hangs and slowdowns caused by the Flash engine on some platforms.

Google and Blizzard have shown what cool things can be done with flash. Instead of trying to cram a web site into Flash - which it not a good idea, they craft a really nice component that is displayed in web pages.

Google does this with Google Maps, if the web browser does not have a suitable SVG renderer.

Blizzard has created very rich WoW Atlas and other handy things using Flash.

I have a little unease about how much power Flash gives programmers to bypass intentional, well thought-out restrictions of a web browser. This has caused some problems. I hope the creators of Flash are hyper-vigilant about this now.

In terms of what it can accomplish though, today I have seen that a person or team with good artistic and programming skills can produce amazing results. The evidence of this has appeared on the web during the past couple years.

I am won over that it is worth really delving into learning Flash development now.

I already know Javascript - so time to learn ActionScript programming!

knocked over utility posts in the area

My neighborhood has some weird people in it. So weird things happen here that I have not encountered anywhere else that I have lived in my life.

I will not bother to list them all but the list is now considerable.

The latest problem is that my Internet connection for my computer has been dropping frequently this week. As many as around 8 times yesterday.

Perhaps not coincidentally we have not one but two downed short, little utility posts along the main street through our neighborhood.

One of the posts is smashed off at ground level and completely missing. A conduit sticks right up out of the ground about 8 to 10 inches up in the air. No pieces of the post housing on the ground, so it must have been broken quite a while.

The other post is lying on its side. A bunch of insulated cables snake up from a hole in the ground to the post which is lying more than several inches away from where it had been installed.

A neighbor told me the latter one had been lying down like that for a couple of months.

I am pretty munch an indoor person. I like to read, study, listen to music - sometimes watch a show or DVD. You do not do those things outdoors.

I have experienced a growing number of nuisance problems ourdooors in recent years. I finally started getting vigilant after finding a mob of a dozen people I had never seen before sitting in my yard after dark two months ago.

After I caught these trespassers by surprise, I started looking around the neighborhood. I noticed more weird problems, like these downed/missing posts.

After a couple of failed attempts to report the problem with the posts, I finally got through to the right person at the phone company today. They are sending someone out to look at the problem and make necessary repairs.

I guess the lesson here is you have to be very alert to what is going on outside in your neighborhood. There are people around doing thing you can never imagine a person doing.

Some people do not respect your property or communal property.

If you never go outside at night and you do not take a close look at things by day then you can never get anything done about the damage they do.

I never saw going outside and checking my yard and my neighborhood as one of my chores before but now I do.

Hopefully, by getting all of these problems addressed - eventually the people responsible will stop, move away, or have a long overdue encounter with the law and be removed.

Intel announced 16 new processors

Intel has come out with a wave of new x86 processors - 16, in fact. Fifteen of them are optimized for use in servers. Features like larger cache help server performance out.

The second computer I ever bought was one of the very early x86 computer systems: the Zenith Z-100. Zenith/Heath introduced it in the early 1980s, just after the IBM PC came out.

I spent part of 1983 or 1984 at home on weekends/evenings doing a little x86 programming project for a coworker. It was a library of low-level graphics routines, written in x86 assembly language.

I spent a lot of time from 1986-2001 writing x86 assembly language, as well as debugging x86 written by myself and others that was written in C.

Back then, we did not have source-level, symbolic debuggers like we got in the mid-1990s. It was pretty primative in the 1980s.

I spent the last half of the 1980s doing embedded systems programming. Back then, you were happy if your C compiler generated correct code and did not crash. I had both things happen to me more than once - though it was rare then and rarer now.

I wrote all kinds of graphics and communications software in x86 assembly language. Even in the mid-1990s, I had to use my knowledge of the instruction set to debug faulty C++ code generation once or twice.

So even after I switched from coding in assembly language to writing code in C and C++, that earlier knowledge was still paying off.

Lucky for me, x86 architecture has wound up totally dominating the desktop computer marketplace. Windows, Macintosh, and Linux - they are all based on x86 now. No indication that will change for the rest of this decade.

Thanks to continual performance enhancements from Intel, they all run faster every year!