September 16, 2005
Happy 80th Birthday, B.B. King!
The great blues man B. B. King turns 80 years old today. I hope I can live to be 80 and still play my guitar.
September 14, 2005
I hate my Epson printer
Do a Google search on "Epson clogged".
105,000 results. Apparently, every Epson inkjet printer ever made clogs up with its own ink. It seems to be worse if you switch between high-resolution and low-resolution printing a lot.
In Mechanical Engineering, this is referred to as a "design flaw." If Epson made cars, there would be millions of people stranded on the road every day.
Sure, they're cheap printers. That doesn't justify them being completely unreliable.
September 13, 2005
flash 8 goodie: Show Redraw Regions
After installing Flash8 today, I noticed something new in the right-click menu of the Flash player: Show Redraw Regions.
Cool! It seems to show you which rectangular areas of the stage are being redrawn every frame. This totally rocks when testing games, since you want to minimize the amount of redraw area per update.
It also proves that the new Flash 8 player has more intelligence in updating the stage, since it is now updating many small rectangles. Before, it would find the largest rectangle that would enclose all changing elements, and redraw all of it.
Bravo!