Increasing Memory Availability In Eclipse

I often work with large projects in Eclipse so I'm frequently using all of the memory allocated to Eclipse. On MacOS X the configuration file is located here:

/Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini

By default the following memory is allocated:

...
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m
...

I've changed this to:

...
-Xms256m
-Xmx512m
...

Beginner: AS3 XMLList as a Primitive and XML as a Complex Datatypes

Using Flex SDK 3.1.0 build 2710

I'm not sure if this is true across the board after doing a little searching on the web. It seems that people have had different experiences. But as far as I'm concerned right now, XML is being handled as a complex datatype and XMLList is being handled as a primitive datatype.

I'm looking to confirm this though.

Flash has two types of datatypes: primitives and complex. Primitives are datatypes such as Strings or Numbers where each type you associate them a new instance is created.

var abc:String='three wise men';
var copy:String=abc;

abc='two plain dogs';

trace(abc);
trace(copy);

This above example associates copies the variable abc into the variable copy so that changes in abc later will no be reflected in copy.

Complex datatypes, such as Objects, retain references to an original instance stored in memory.

var dog:Object = {chase:true, likes:'cars'};
var cat:Object = {chase:false, likes:'naps'};

dog=cat;

cat.likes='mice';

trace(dog.likes);
trace(cat.likes);

In the above example the variable dog will now reference the same object as the variable cat. Therefore, changing the string 'likes' to mice will change both dog.likes and cat.likes.

XML and XMLList example.

Conway's Game of Life

Here's a neat implementation of Conway's Game of Life using bitmap data filters to run the logic.

"Another way to do the calculations is to use filters which perform all of the calculations that are needed for one step in the Game of Life in a few lines of Actionscript. Filters such as the blur and convolution filters determine the colour of a pixel based on its neighbour’s colours which is exactly the kind of behaviour we need to run the Game of Life calculations. All of the hard work is done behind the scenes, effectively at a lower level which makes the simulation faster.

http://www.stdio.co.uk/blog/?cat=4&paged=2

This makes me want to write my own version of Conway's Game.

Web Performance Optimizations

I appologize for not blogging more, but here's a very helpful posting of web optimization:

http://stevesouders.com/hpws/rules.php

A coworker showed this to me. In this he talks about things such as making fewer HTTP requests, using content delivery networks and gzipping files.

Things You Must Do Before Unloading a SWF File

Wow this is really important. It reads "Danger Will Robinson. Danger!" The following I found from a friend who referenced Colin Moock in which deactivation of a swf requires the following tasks to be disabled.

• Tell any loaded .swf child assets to disable themselves.
• Stop any sounds from playing.
• Stop the main timeline, if it is currently playing.
• Stop any movie clips that are currently playing.
• Close any connected network objects, such as instances of Loader, URLLoader, Socket, XMLSocket, LocalConnection, NetConnections, and NetStream.
• Release all references to cameras and microphones.
• Unregister all event listeners in the .swf (particularly Event.ENTER_FRAME, and mouse and keyboard listeners)
• Stop any currently running intervals (via clearInterval()).
• Stop any Timer objects (via the Timer class’s instance method stop()).

Not doing so apparently allows the swf to consume resources and not get destroyed. Go here to read more:

http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000279.html