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!

A JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6. I c...

The game project we’re developing, Kingdom War, has now entered its final sprint. I’m heading back to Shenzhen at the end of July, and I hope to have it finished before then. Since I’ve been busy ...

After finishing Angry Birds Rio, I was looking forward to the movie version. Last Monday I suggested to my friends that we go see it on Friday, opening day, and by Friday I’d gradually rounded up a group of 14.

Compiled last month from https://github.com/eidiot/robotlegs-framework/wiki/, PDF file, left-click to open, right-click to save as

Latest Events2011 RIA Tian Di Xing Beijing City Elite Forum Event Time: 2011.3.27 Registration Period: 2011.3.7-2011.3.25 Event Scale: 300+ people Location: No. 33, North 4th Ring West Road, Zhongguancun, Beijing National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Documentation and Information Center, Northwest Gate, 1st Floor Lecture Hall) Presentation TopicsFlash 3D API Related

2011.02.22: Another year has passed in the blink of an eye, and I realize it's been a long time since I left any warm words here. In 2011, I hope to write more personal things here. A word of warning: from now on, if you don't like it, don't read it! As mentioned in the subtitle, let this blog return to its essence and its original intent. Looking back on last year, I feel more and more that this personal blog isn't personal enough. Many truly personal things never got written here; instead, I posted a few articles and videos that won't stand the test of time. I was afraid of this and that. If I wrote something too simple, I feared someone would look down on it; if I wrote something based on my own understanding, I feared someone with a different cultural background would take exception to it; if I wrote something slightly technical, I feared people wouldn't understand it. In the end, I ended up neither daring to write nor thinking it worth writing.

Spent Christmas with code, computer games, and movies. Uploading some The Settlers 7 screenshots to mark the occasion.

This afternoon I ran into an issue where Chinese output from Ant in the console was fine, but the Chinese output from mxmlc was garbled. The cause was that flexTasks was using ${FLEX\_HOME&#12...

To be honest, my recent project has been getting more and more boring. The core stuff is basically done, and almost everything left is grunt work — nothing new or fun. Yesterday I finished The Settlers 7, was just about to drift off to sleep, and then suddenly came across two pages that perked me right up: [http://www.buraks.com/azoth/](http://www.buraks.com/azoth/) and [http://philippe.elsass.me/2010/05/as3-fast-memory-access-without-alchemy/](http://philippe.elsass.me/2010/05/as3-fast-memory-access-without-alchemy/) . Suddenly I was wide awake. When it comes to handling certain crazy requirements, the speed of reading from and writing to a ByteArray in FlashPlayer just can't keep up. These past couple of days [Xu Can](http://www.asblog.org/) got pushed into having to hunt for some heretical, unofficial hack — and he actually found one. I'd heard before that haXe is so efficient because its author found the low-level interface FlashPlayer 10 provides for Alchemy, but for various reasons I never went and used haXe. Seeing these two pages showed me yet another trick — turns out they're all wares from the same circle. All three of them found the “back door” FlashPlayer 10 opened for Alchemy in order to boost performance at a low level.