Neil on Sandman + movies, also Hero Complex + Watchmen

Great little LA Times article on Neil Gaiman: a kind of brief overview of the place of Sandman in Gaiman’s career and about movie adaptations of his work in general and of Sandman in specific.

Fan girl I am, I have to say Gaiman’s really hip and has this great pseudo-despondent-rock-star look about him but also a genuine humor.  Yeah, total fan girl.

For comic book/graphic novel/sci-fi fans, the article is part of a regular blog by Geoff Boucher called Hero Complex.  Added it to the RSS aggregator.

Boucher also wrote up an interview with Alan Moore mainly about his ire at the film adaptation of the Watchmen.  To avoid a tirade on what I think about that damn thing, I will just say read the article.  Well, read Watchmen first.  Then read the article.  Screw that damn movie.

While Gaiman looks like a rock star, Moore reminds me of a wizard whose benevolence is questionable.  You just do the quest he gives you and hope that the reward isn’t some cursed sword that grafts itself onto your hand.

Deleting workspace from eclipse workspace launcher

Googled this one.  For the anal retentive folks out there, figured it was worth a tubes bump.

Basically:

1. make sure to either delete the old workspace folder or at least delete the .metadata folder in it
2. open [your eclipse folder]/configuration/.settings/org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs
3. edit the RECENT_WORKSPACES variable in the file to remove the old workspace path

answering those nagging questions about efficient syntax…

This flex application runs small timing tests on variations of syntax in AS3.  Curious as to whether there’s a difference between x++, x+=1, and x = x + 1?  How much does the data type of a for loop’s iterator impact runtime?   Yeah, maybe nitpicking about syntax for performance-sake is overkill in many cases, but for anyone working on data-heavy applications with lots of looping/processing of data, a little can go a long way.

AS3: word to the bitwise

Oft-forgotten bitwise operators in AS3.

Generally speaking, division and multiplication operations eat up many cycles.  If you can replace division with multiplication, then go for it.  If you’re doing a lot of integer division or integer multiplication by 2, then go ahead and use the bitwise right shift or left shift, respectively.

Just FYI, in AS3 if you use bitwise operators on Number variables, they are first converted to integers, meaning the decimal portion is truncated.

There’s a lot of other neat tricks you can do with bitwise operators on any platform.  Always worth checking out.

QCM V3.0 (I think)

So yes, another year, and without fail I have re-vamped my blog, though in this case I just used (mt)’s handy 1-click install and got WordPress up and running in no time lickety-split.  I think this is a new personal land record set for Fastest Time to Blog Version.

Yes.  I am still on (mt).  Yes.  My faith in them (what tentative amount I had invested) has been severely shaken.  But they already docked me this month so eh.  Also, still am enamored of their management panel.

I was thinking of doing this for a while.  Was going to take the nice long, roundabout way I generally do: come up with a clever (I wish) design, go all Illustrator/Inkscape for a few days, fiddle endlessly with TXP,  and then unveil it to all three of you (one, two…hm…) who read my blog.  Then absolutely hate it in two weeks.

So I have to actually thank NickyCakes for pushing me to get started again and giving me an abbreviated and palatable way to Being a Better Blogger.

First, FeedBurner.  Next…the World!