Windows XP runs better in VIrtualBox virtualization on Ubuntu Jaunty

I have blogged about this before but, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. This weekend I have been doing some processor hungry development on Windows - no choice in the matter really. I started first on a desktop which is an extremely fast machine with WIndows XP installed. It had more memory and resources allocated than my virtualised XP set up. To my irritation compiling got slower as I worked. The compiled swf started to flicker and  changes between Flash Develop and Flash CS3 got harder with each iteration. Every so often to get back to useful work rates I had to restart the machine.

After the first night of this i decided to migrate my work to my virtualized environment in Ubuntu. It has 1.5 G of ram allocated to XP there. To my amazement it seems this performs much better. No flickering images and a fast compile. Weird and definitely wonderful.

Getting address variables into an Actionscript 3.0 flash file

In order to get your html address variables into Flash these are the steps you need to take. This solution assumes that you are embeding your flash file with SWFObject 1.5. Please note this is for SWFObject 1.5. SWFObject 2.0 uses and entirely different set of methods to embed and pass variables to the swf.
Step 1:
Embed your swf in the HTML doc
< script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject/swfobject.js" ></ script >

< script type="text/javascript" >
// <![CDATA[
var so = new SWFObject('testload.swf', 's-moderate', '100%', '100%', '10', '#222222');
so.addVariable('shirt', getQueryParamValue("shirt"));
so.useExpressInstall('swfobject/expressinstall.swf');
so.addParam('menu', 'false');
so.write('content');
// ]]>
< /script >

Step 2
Inside your AS3 document retrieve your variables like so

var myshirt:String = this.loaderInfo.parameters.shirt

That's it

Update Notification Icon does not show in Jaunty

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope doesn't show the update icon in the system tray when there are updates available. This is because the update system was changed in Ubuntu Jaunty:

Ubuntu 9.04 introduces a change to the handling of package updates, launching update-manager directly instead of displaying a notification icon in the GNOME panel. Users will still be notified of security updates on a daily basis, but for updates that are not security-related, users will only be prompted once a week.

If you want to use the old update manager behaviour, open a terminal and paste this:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

Updating the Version of Adobe AIR for Linux Used by Flex Builder Linux

This was culled from the Adobe labs site. Purely selfish reasons as a personal reminder for moi.

Follow these simple steps to upgrade the SDK used by Flex Builder Linux on your machine:

    * Download the Adobe AIR SDK from www.adobe.com/go/airlinux.
    * Go to the sdks/3.0.0/ folder (in the Flex Builder installation directory).
    * Delete the "runtimes" folder.
    * Extract the latest Adobe AIR SDK and copy its contents into sdks/3.0.0/, overwriting existing files.
    * Go to sdks/3.0.0/bin/ and rename adl and adt as adl_lin and adt_lin (if adl_lin and adt_lin already exist there, remove them).
    * Go to sdks/3.0.0/runtimes/air/ and create a symlink "Linux" pointing to the "linux" folder in the same directory.


N.B A symlink: In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a special type of file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution. (Wikipedia)

Acrobat Reader 9+ crashes seconds after opening a PDF in Ubuntu

For some strange reason, Acrobat 9 + seems to crash seconds after opening a PDF document in Ubuntu Jaunty. Doubtless other Linux users may experience this in their different distros. It happens both as a standalone PDF and in the Firefox plug in. There does not seem to be a workaround or fix for the moment. My solution was to uninstall Acrobat reader 9 and install Acrobat Reader 8. That works fine. I'll put AR9 back on when Adobe sorts out the problem

Bing - finally a real option to Google

Microsoft have just released the beta of their new search engine Bing. Its very pretty to look at - and its user experience is really spot on. It does not seem to have the deep penetration Google has with regards to search data but I believe it will get there over time as it gathers momentum. I like the video search feature a lot. Searched videos are displayed as thumbnails that play the first few seconds of the video when you mouse over them. When you clickon the video it plays at the top of the page with an option to go to thesource site of the video. A really neat search feature is the persistence of the playing video when you move from page to page. It just keeps playing until you select another video thumbnail- it's really cool - there is also a nice fade in as the page changes - nice small touches that make it a really pleasant tool to use. I did not like the fact that in true Microsoft style, I could not find any blogspot (google hosted) blogs even when I typed in the blog urls directly. Its a search engine please let it search without bias (anti competition filters are silly). Having said that its definitely worth using and a decent alternative to Google.

Brasero Normalisation plugin is buggy

Brasero's normalisation plugin is buggy. If you have more than one audio track in a burn list it loops endlessly at the beginning of the burn process, preventing the burn process from completing. The workaround is to go to Edit>Plugins and disable the Normalisation plugin. The downside of this of course is No-Normalisation of your audio tracks. Other than this I do like Brasero - the Audio split tool is really useful.