public var blog:Object = {name:"chad's musings"};

have a Netbook?… want solid Linux support?…

I currently have an Asus Eee PC (1002ha) and to say the least am not an avid Windows fan.  Since the day I unpackaged this puppy I have been on a quest to find the best OS I could for the lil guy.  So far I’ve ran EasyPeasy and OS X (needs drivers sadly otherwise this would have never been written) and looked into running Moblin (although I must admit I never installed it).  Long story short EasyPeasy was my distro of choice.

Recently 9.04 went stable and I had heard good things but after looking over the EasyPeasy forums decided not to upgrade.  Apparently it was breaking a lot of stuff and 8.10 was running solid enough to keep me content.

Over memorial day weekend I upgraded my desktop (8.10) to 9.04 and bricked the box so I ventured over the Ubuntu.com to get a fresh 9.04 install disk.  After doing a clean install the system was unstable and Firefox was a mess.  So I decided to check out Ubuntu.com again to see if any others were reporting issues or if I just had a botched install.  That’s when I noticed it… 9.04 Netbook Remix Edition!  I’m not sure how I missed this memo but seriously wtf!?  After looking over the wiki and confirming that the 1000h models were running fairly solid I was sold.

I downloaded their .img file threw it on my thumb drive using my Windows machine (9.04 wasn’t working yet) and plugged that puppy in.  The install was painless and fast and I was up and running in no time.  On the Ubuntu forums I had seen some issues of people reporting failures coming out of “sleep mode/stand by” and another user mentioned on their non-netbook that enabling “Effects” (and inturn upping the vid drivers) fixed the problem.  Now this is what shocked me… even on my 1002ha I was able to enable “Extra” (wobbly windowns, drop shadows, fading menus… the whole 9 baby!) under the effects panel (System->Preferences->Appearance->Visual Effects) and not only did it work… it worked well… damn well.

I had never expected the Compiz stuff to be so snappy on such low end video hardware (Intel Integrated 1.6Ghz Atom & 2 gigs of RAM) but it is!  One of my biggest pet peeves with my old EasyPeasy install were the hoops you’d have to jump through to disable “Tap to Click”.  I’d read over tutorials… borked some xorg configs and still because of the “special” touchpad they used on the 1002ha (multitouch … some random vendor) I wasn’t able to get it to work properly.  With 9.04 Netbook Edition it was as simple as unchecking a box in mouse preferences!

If you’re running EasyPeasy (love you guys, but sorry) I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go ahead and grab the new official Ubuntu netbook build (link at the end of the article) and get it on your Eee PC A.S.A.P.  I’m one very happy camper now that my lil guy has all the bells and whistles.  From my testing so far multitouch works, web cam works, sound works, function keys (brighness, volume, etc) all work (the mute button didn’t work under EasyPeasy)!

Now these next parts are mere speculation (as when you’re happy with a piece of software you tend to be a touch biased) and I haven’t tested these claims thoroughly but the machine feels faster, battery life seems to have improved, Flash (a known resource hog on all Linux boxes) seems to even perform better (sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree).

Hope this helps push a couple of other curious netbook owners over the edge and helps them take the plunge!

Ubuntu Netbook Edition : http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook

SharedObject.flush() the silent killer.

We launched our Video Chat Application to mostly good reviews from the user community.  One of our biggest complaints/bugs was “The app doesn’t load… it just displays a blank white page after the “loading” screen goes away”.  We’d tried old Flash player versions, older browsers, multiple OS’s and STILL couldn’t reliably duplicate the error.  After a couple weeks of the app being live someone started a thread on the community forums titled “Think I know why people are having problems getting into chat..”.  Sure enough the user pointed out a development over sight.  It seems that if a user has set their “Local Storage” settings in Flash to 0 the app would fail to load, the forum thread gave a quick description on how to set this to a higher number.

We weren’t exactly sure as to why this happened on some systems nor why your average user would have changed this (testing locally wouldn’t duplicate the bug, but the fix was indeed working for people left and right).  So we let people in customer service know about this fix… but that still didn’t answer why it was breaking.  We knew it had to do with local storage (obviously) and more than likely it was related to saving Local Shared Objects to the clients system to keep their settings preferences between app sessions.  What I found out just really pissed me off more than anything.

So turns out if you’re using Local Shared Objects and a user has disabled local storage your app will run fine.   You can freely write and read to the Shared Object without any issues the problem arose when you’d issues a SharedObject.flush().  But that wouldn’t fail UNLESS a user has checked “never ask again”.  See if a user had set the number to 0 when you issued a flush() the app would ask them for permission but if they had checked “never ask again” the SharedObject would throw a fatal error (that doesn’t even register in the Debug Flash Player mind you).

In short… if using Local Shared Objects in your app your code should look something like this.

public var my_so:SharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal('your_so');

public function save_so():Boolean
{
    var so_status:String;
    try
    {
        so_status = my_so.flush();
    }
    catch(e)
    {
        Alert.show("you'll need to enable local storage to save settings.");
        return false;
    }

    if(so_status == "pending")
    {
        // set to 0 ... prompted user for allow or deny... might have saved it.
        return false;
    }
    else if(so_status == "flushed")
    {
        // successfully wrote SO to disk.
    }

    return true;
}

AS3/Flex 3 ArrayCollection Copy/Duplication

In Flex recently I was trying to use the dataProvider of a List component in another component.  It was for a Video Chat Application and it would make whispering another user easier by facilitating auto-completion on a name.  Long story short the dataProvider for said list had various sorts and filters applied to it so saying list.dataProvider wasn’t an option because we needed to see the entire list not just a filtered subset.

ANNNNYWAY… I needed to duplicate and keep a copy for comparisions and such in the other component.  After looking around and getting very frustrated I started messing around with a mish-mash of semi-complete ideas gathered from various sites.  This was my solution and I hope it helps someone out there.

function copy_ac(in_array:ArrayCollection):ArrayCollection
{
    return new ArrayCollection( in_array.source.concat() );
}

BRB - cross country road trip :D

Long story short I’m in Austin Texas right now on my way to San Francisco. Once i get there Sarah (<3) and I will be treking cross country!

I’m super excited and brought my ole’ Canon 30D with me so I’ll be posting pics to http://chadillac.smugmug.com.

I’ll probably also post updates here… so check back soon ;)