When it came time to upgrade to a gigabit home router, I agonized for a long time between Cisco’s e4200 and Apple’s AirPort Extreme. In the end, Apple’s big January 6 sale made the decision for me, and I bought the big AE (MD031) on the spot. The big AE paired with a MyBookLive is great value for the money compared with a Time Capsule. The gigabit Ethernet port has genuinely been a huge win — I get up to 100MB/s transferring files from the MBL, though wireless still feels a bit slow. And the one-click network extension you get from pairing the big AE and the little AE is genuinely handy.

Time: Sunday, October 16, 2011 Location: Meeting Room 1, Jingyi Hotel, No. 9 Dazhongsi East Road, Haidian District, Beijing Online registration:http://wefdc8.51qiangzuo.com/ Conference page:http://www.wefdc.com/index.html Flash Developer Conference Weibo:http://weibo.com/wefdc

As previously announced, Unity projects will be publishable to Flash via Stage3D (FP11). Before long, Unity projects will run in browsers with FlashPlayer11 installed. The Unity team says it is bringing as many Unity features into Flash as possible, with the goal of making Unity the best tool for building 3D functionality for Flash Player. On the 27th of this month, Unity will hold a Flash Tech Day, which will get Flash developers up to speed on moving to Unity development, show and introduce the features Unity supports in the Flash environment, and provide a beginner-level overview. For some of the latest news, check out this introductory article: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/01/unity-and-flash-a-sneak-peek/. I’m not all that interested in Unity’s own features, but one item — that programs running inside FP can talk to AS code both inside and outside a Unity project — is great news as far as I’m concerned.

1. Even though the power cable is labeled 125V, it plugs straight into a Chinese outlet just fine. If your TV is an older model with no HDMI port — only AV composite, S-Video or VGA — you can pic...

Went out for a walk this morning and ran into a kitten on the road that meowed at us. At that moment I wanted to say, let’s take it home — listen to how pitiful it sounds. We kept walking, got to ...

When compiling a project that uses robotleges in the Flash IDE, it always throws a null error at runtime (cannot access a null object…). Previously I had only ever compiled in FDT and never had thi...

Half asleep, I heard a fly buzzing against the window glass, thumping into it again and again, trying to find a way out. It kept at it, failing and trying again across the wide pane, droning the w...

The life of Snape. In his childhood, he was a scrawny boy with black hair that was too long and dirty, clothes that fit him poorly — jeans that were too short, a shirt that was some oddly styled s...

Back in Shenzhen Alright, this is an addendum. Actually I got back to Shenzhen on July 13th. After I returned I met up with some people, and then started work on the 18th. But as I suspected, I’m not cut out for a long-term office job — after one week I switched back to developing from home, going into the office only when necessary and dropping in on clients now and then. Since coming back to Shenzhen my rhythm of life has become regular: three meals on time, in bed before 23:00 every night, up a little after 7 in the morning. These things matter. Yeah, not bad at all.

All of my personal Flash sites have been shut down. The three versions I released back in the day are all available here as source file downloads. Help yourself if you’re interested. - Click here t...

Known Issues with Adobe products on Mac OS 10.7 Lion : http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/905/cpsid_90508.html I’m on CS5.5, so it’s not that big a deal for me. The main problem is Flash Player, which is a b...

I’ll be heading back to Shenzhen at the end of July 2011.

The two short videos below are a battle demo of Kingdom Wars, a game built by three people. Technically there's no problem, and the core features are done, but the art assets aren't ready, so the buildings, unit types, and hit animations are all pretty sparse, and the map was drawn on the fly too. Being a front-end dev with no artist is just brutal, you know!