plasticular inscriptor » work

Safari and the Slim VM

plains — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 06:45:09 +0000

Having just acquired the phone, and having finally upgraded to Leopard last weekend, I started using Safari a little to get some bookmarks I wanted on the iPhone. It seemed pretty snappy, although I wasn’t really putting it through any grueling paces. Since I was going through the trouble of upgrading my computer, I decided to go ahead and do some early spring cleaning as well, cutting files and unused applications, and applying a draconian filter to my process of eliminating music from my machine. (down to about 22gb of music on an 80gb drive – I promise I am trying) One BIG target for trimming on my machine was my Windows XP virtual machine that I run through Fusion. Fusion has come a long way since I started at VmWare, and I have to say, its a pretty great product (no I can’t claim any credit, wrong group). I use this VM everyday at work developing and testing WebAccess (beta 2 just released last Friday), but I swear, for a fairly basic installation, it was taking up nearly 10gb of space on my drive. I was running some tests with a slim XP vm that ran at about 3gb or so (see the article on LifeHacker: http://lifehacker.com/374376/trim-down-windows-to-the-bare-essentials). This slim vm also happened to have Safari 3 (and every other browser you might want to run tests with) installed on it, and since we recently got WebAccess running well on Safari I thought I would give it a spin. I was pretty amazed at what I found.

I ran some comparisons of Safari 3 running WebAccess *in a VM* on my MacBook against Firefox 2 running in OSX. I had heard Safari was fast, but I didn’t really believe the hype, and I figured that Safari on Windows would probably be relegated to the land of second class software, like IE always was on the Mac. In all the operations managing a Server 2.0 instance, Safari was by far faster, and in most cases was nearly 3 times faster than Firefox 2. I know that Firefox 3 is supposed to be fast also, but from what I’ve seen so far its still fairly buggy.

This got me re-evaluating what to use for my daily browsing. I’ve been using Camino, which I switched to because it used the Gecko rendering engine, but was an OSX native application, so it played (more) nicely in the Mac environment. I had originally switched to Firefox a few years ago because it was the better alternative on the Mac, and well, out of principal, because it wasn’t Safari. However, the speed of 3.0 and integration with my new mobile device has got me using it again. Now if only delicious played better with iPhone…

SteelePlus.com Site Launch

plains — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:09:28 +0000

Phase 1 of the www.SteelePlus.com site launched today. SteelePlus is a local advertising firm that wanted an experimental/exploratory site that allowed for information about the company as well as an interactive portfolio that features the ability to spotlight pieces of work specifically, as well as group them with a particular case study. The emphasis was on exploration with a more conventional navigation system included. I have created a few custom classes of note, including the menu, an AS 2.0 sound manager, window manager, an animation class, and a TextField.ASFunction delegate (which enables the assigning of functions to textField’s to handle imported html data that contains “ASFunction:function,params” style href syntax for driving internal actionscript functions — which incidentally is similar to a class that will be built-in for AS3 from what I read). On the back-end, Phase 1 incorporates XML and CSS files for content and layout description in the flash application, as well as custom WordPress PHP scripts for handling the “news” section of the site, and a PHP mailer for handling the ability to send “favorites” from the site to a friend (which are also stored as flash “prefs” on the users computer.

Phase 2 will be launching later this month, which will introduce a flash-based “community” that is built on top of a customized phpBB bulletin board system.

MCE Redskins Application

plains — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 06:59:05 +0000

This little blog was down during the end of the fray, so I forgot to mention this on the site. I haven’t yet updated my portfolio site, so I’ll just have to mention the application that I worked on that occupied most of my summer. I worked with a local company to produce a Windows Media Center Edition application for the Washington Redskins, that uses a flash application (which I built) as the client interface. Due to shipping configuration constraints, the application was built using actionscript 1.0, but still pulls data from the Redskins servers, featuring streaming video, game recording capability, and lots of in depth player, coach, and cheerleader bio information. The application serves also as a portal for exclusive on-demand Redskins programming. Alienware is now shipping special machines that are branded for the Washington Redskins and come preloaded with the Ultimate Redskins Fan XPerience. Go to the Alienware website for more information (and also to see the demo). On a note related to the first sentence in this post, I just took the time to update to MovableType 3(.2) and will hopefully have time soon to begin overhauling the _root site proper as well (just been too busy). Phase 1 of my most current project should be launching tomorrow or the next day…