From time to time I spend a few weeks abroad. From time to time I’d like to watch swiss tv while I’m there. There are services like Zattoo or Wilmaa out there, that allow you to watch tv via internet, but they only allow IPs from within your home country, in my case Switzerland.

So we want them to believe that we’re home, not 4000 miles away on some sunny island (dream on). The solution is kind of simple actually, once you know how to do it, but it took me far too long to find it out anyway – so I thought it might be worth sharing (which also prevents me forgetting it).

We just need to route all relevant internet traffice through a home computer. You need to have SSH access to this computer, and you need to have a decent internet upload speed for video stuff. Lucky me I have a loyal and faithful Mac Mini at home, acting as Media Center, SVN server and .. well, as a decent TV proxy :-) Here’s how you do:

1. Open Terminal, enter:
   ssh -2 -C -D 2001 username@yourserver.com
   (username is your account on the remote machine – and yourserver.com could be an ip or whatever address your server has. I use Dynamic DNS for mine.)
2. Enter the password for username
3. Open «System Preferences» and go to «Network» (You can close the Terminal). Click the Button «Advanced…»
   
4. Go to «Proxies» and activate SOCKS Proxy and enter
   Socks Proxy Server: 127.0.0.1 : 2001 (see picture)
5. Go to What Is My IP Address? or this IP Tracer to check if everything works. If the map shows you’re at home, you’re good to go!

Now for TV I recommand Wilmaa: worked perfectly for me. Surprisingly good quality, and it’s for free! Great for football matches or Heidi in swiss german ;-)

• Hunt. | Multi-disciplinary design studio | Melbourne
  Some nice simplistic branding stuff.
  (tags: inspiration design identity branding print web portfolio)

I went down a few algorithmic roads recently, digging into path finding and – for some obscure reasons – bit manipulations. Or byte. Whatever.

Along this way some utility methods (or functions) were born, and I thought: May be some day some of them may be in use to any of you ;)

For my dear non-geeky readers: A bit is the smallest part in software. It’s either this or that, either 0 or 1, either false or true. With a group of 2 bits you already have 4 states: 00, 01, 10 and 11. With 8 it’s 256 and so on (2^n).

As it would be too boring to just type 0 or 1, and because we have more than 2 fingers, man invented numbers to accumulate these bits: so 9 stands for 1001, and because 9 is shorter than 1001, we prefer 9. Some even write AB for 10101011, but that’s where we come back to geeky world.

So after this highly informative introduction, let’s get to some code. First, let’s count bits:

static public function countBits( value : uint ) : uint {
	var count:uint = 0;
	while (value) {
		if ( value & 1 ) {
			count++;
		}
		value >>>= 1;
	}
	return count;
}

Example:
countBits( 0xAB ) -> 5

Now sometimes you might wanna know: Does this data contain no more than 1 bit? We could just ask countBits( value ) == 1. But that’s not as speedy as it should be, right? So here we go:

static public function is_1_bit( value : uint ) : Boolean {
	var count:uint = 0;
	while (value) {
		if ( value & 1 ) {
			if (count == 1) return false;
			count++;
		}
		value >>>= 1;
	}
	return count == 1;
}

Examples:
is_1_bit( 0xAB ) -> false
is_1_bit( 0×400 ) -> true

uint are by the way 32bit data, so a maximum of 32 of these bits we’re talking about can be turned on or off. That’s a lot of data. 4′294′967′296 combinations (though not that high compared to the numbers we read every day in the newspapers recently). Anyway, sometimes we might wanna access and set only a group of bits (usually 4 or 8) within this quite large row of bits:

static public function getBitGroup( value : uint , group : uint , len : uint = 4 ) : uint {
	return ( value >> (group*len) ) % (1 << len);
}
 
static public function setBitGroup( value : uint , groupValue :uint , group : uint , len : uint = 4 ) : uint {
	var pos:uint = group * len;
	var mask:uint = n_bits(pos);
	var right_bits:uint = value & mask;
	value >>>= pos + len;
	value <<= len;
	value |= groupValue;
	value <<= pos;
	value |= right_bits;
	return value;
}

Don’t they look just groovy?! Yeah baby!

Anyway, that’s all for now. Stay tuned for some crazy path finding. If I find time (sometimes I wonder how all those bloggers find their time to write so much..) Not to mention Twitter. Boohaa.

As we all know Flash’s garbage collector is a hell of a beast. It tries to free memory from “unused” objects (aka objects not somehow cross-referenced by the root). So from time to time our garbage collector checks for those objects and kicks them out of memory.. at least some of them.

There are lots of articles written about the garbage collector and I’m not going into it any deeper. Let’s just summarize that no developer likes that kind of behaviour — it’s totally unpredictable. System.gc() would help a little, but it’s only available to debug players.

You may say: what do you care about memory handling! And I’d answer: not that much actually! :-) But what I really care about is false behaviour that can result.

Within Flash we have two ways to keep weak references to objects: Dictionary and weak listeners (weak method closures). We use weak references so that objects will be collected by the garbage collector. Now when it comes to Dictionaries, they behave as I’d expect. A “dead” object won’t be listed in a for each loop. But events events events…. they’ll be dispatched to each and every “dead” object residing in memory!! Which is such a pain in the ass really!

After a lot of testing I can give only the advice you’ve probably heard many times before:

Always remove listeners! Even the weak ones!

Otherwise you have to potentially deal with unexpected behaviour. I may gonna create some utility class for that that deals with this problem.

(more…)

You may have seen this. If not, it’s worth a watch:

Sometimes you need to test your Flash stuff with different plugin versions. Even if you just want to run some performance tests, it is very useful to switch to the release player (see below for another example).

For windows there is a neat Firefox Plugin that makes switching quite a snap. On Mac there is one too – I haven’t tested it, but it’s supposed to work (though I’m not too sure about that when I read these comments here). Still I prefer to work with Safari and I kind of dislike the thought of starting Firefox to just switch Plugins.

Fortunately I’ve found another solution: WSPluginSwitcher. This one comes as a Cocoa app and once configured (you really should read this wiki page), it works real well for me. Also they have prepared plugin versions for you to download (though the most recents are missing, but no big deal really).

As for the speed tests, let me just give you another example (impressing enough for me to wanna switch players for real world testing).

In Debug Player:

method...................................................ttl ms...avg ms
tare [2]                                                      0     0.00
CSSFastParser                                               603   120.60
CSSRegExpParserFast                                         987   197.40
CSSRegExpParserFastAdvanced                                1457   291.40
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

In Release Player:

method...................................................ttl ms...avg ms
tare [2]                                                      0     0.00
CSSFastParser                                               354    70.80
CSSRegExpParserFast                                         972   194.40
CSSRegExpParserFastAdvanced                                1469   293.80
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Both 10.0.22.87, and exported as release swf. Oh, and by the way tested with another useful tool from Grant Skinner: AS3 Performance Testing Harness.

Yesterday I had a presentation at the SFUG meeting covering some bits of my rewritten BBML framework (originated from the project laax.com). I’ve tried to share some insights into the technical concept and strategies for CSS parsing, CSS selectors and layout validation.

Picture by Marc Liyanage

It’s been surprisingly fun (I give credits to the beer sponsored by Nemos). People even managed to pretend they’d be interested in what I was prosing, so credit to them too!

I’d also like to mention that there’ll be the swiss flash event soon: Flash at the Lake will not only pamper you with appearances of great national and international Flash enthustiacs, it will also give anybody attending the pleasure to enjoy one of Zurich’s greatest locations with people who don’t think of you as a storm lightning adorer when you sit in the sun twittering Flash into the clear lake. And all that to a fantastic price. Check it out at fatl.ch

So here we go with the presentation (Quicktime so you can enjoy the marvelous effects):

• Atelier David Smith
  A simple but beautifully executed idea. You can resize, navigate by keyboard .. many details I like. Only thing: no mouse wheel support and not too nice aliased font in content section.
  (tags: flash inspiration portfolio typography agency)
• David Arias – Portfolio
  It's refreshing to see something so clean and simple, yet pretty. No effects, no animation. Clean and slick.
  (tags: inspiration portfolio html)

This is a follow-up of this.

Yeah well, I was more than optimistic to show those JS guys how fast Flash can be with the help of some brand new Adobe magic – but Pixel Bender was, unfortunately, quite disappointing:
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I did a quick port of a «graphic demo» called «metatunnel» (created by FRequency).

Paulo Falcão ported this to Javascript using canvas.

To make the set complete I ported Paulos JS version to Actionscript, just quick’n'dirty.

Click on it to start the animation:

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