Last week, I was exhausted and bored and thought I’d try out a new MMORPG. Many people, such as Brad, would decry such a pastime — but I can find it enjoyable at times.
Long ago I would play a relatively simple Asian MMORPG known only as Pristontale. I found, in my search, that by now they had made a Pristontale II. Cool. I downloaded it.
It was big. I ran out of time to play it in by the time it had finished downloading and installing, so I decided I’d try it out later.
The title of this blog is a lie, but I am feeling somewhat ill all of a sudden tonight. I am unsure as to the cause, but I imagine the effect is amplified by my recent poor care for my own well-being, with regard to things like sleep and relaxation.
However, something cool happened to me recently. I was attending my solid state electronics lecture, and trying to listen to the professor talk. Then, the lecture ended. Last lecture he had assigned reading — this lecture, he assigned only problems. Good student that I am, I asked the professor what reading he would recommend be done for the next lecture, as I had numerous bus rides ahead of me. He told me. And I did the reading he told me of.
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I haven’t blogged for a while.
But, you know — today it snowed. It was, they say, a “snow day”.
Resultingly, classes were canceled. It happens sometimes. All the schedules enter disarray; syllabi are crumpled and rewritten.
I had a dilemma, however. I had a lab due today. A lab I had forgotten about until this morning. A lab, that is expected handed in by the start of the next class session — the next class session scheduled today, at 11:45 AM. And a professor that accepts submission by e-mail.
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Shaun is totally beating me at posting. I guess I’d better get on the ball. By the way, if you consider yourself a part of the GC community and want to be able to post, you should contact Brad on google talk.
So, I’ve been working on this thing, project name ‘Choreography’. It’s really just a utility — an interface into a part of a personal library I’m developing: ‘kdance’. The intent of kdance is to do for me everything I would ever need to do with skeletal animation. The problem is that it is a set of functions instead of a set of buttons. Choreography resolves this.
Unfortunately, in order to perform the function -> button transition effectively, one needs the arcane concept of a ‘gooey’ — a common device for interfacing with functions in a visual way. This device is the largest blocker between me and creating useful programs.
Hello, World. I’m Karl. Brad gave me an account on his blog, so I decided to use it, to “rant” about Adobe.
Half a decade or so ago, Adobe decided that they would look much more hip if Macromedia happened to be hanging from their belt. Suddenly, Macromedia disappeared, and Flash became Adobe Flash. This was surprising and unexpected for people like me that do not pay attention to current events.
Soon I realised that Adobe was the best thing ever to happen to Flash. Adobe looked at what people wanted for Flash, and they did almost every single thing people had been asking for years for. They open-sourced nearly everything. They added hardware acceleration, linux & 64-bit support, runtime generation of resources, local file access, and recently even 3D transforms.
Brad said something to me recently, however, that has gotten me thinking about Adobe. He said he “read some funny / scary things about actionscript 3.” At first the words meant little to me. But as time passed, I began to think about Adobe, and my recent frustrations with them.
Over the past two days, I’ve spent significant time working on one of my large projects. In that short time I encountered four or five bugs with Flash and Flex, two of which were entirely new to the bugbase. Each bug crippled my ability to continue for hours, while I tried to isolate the problem and then somehow work around it.
I really have no desire to run into bugs in my tools this frequently. It reminds me of something I’d forgotten about Adobe: Adobe created ColdFusion. I had to use ColdFusion extensively while working for .NU Domain, and it gave me the same kinds of issues. I tend to use features of a language to their fullest when I code, and when coding in proprietary languages made with regard for features over stability, this results in me running into issues relatively often. It really gives an icky sense of the product being totally hacked together — and if I am making my product using this hacked-together product, how can I even trust my own creation?
ColdFusion has come a long way since I used it last. By now, I imagine Adobe has put bandaids on all the bugs I found long ago. Along the way, I imagine they introduced about twice as many features and about as many new bugs, all of which are probably much harder to run across than the older ones, and take much longer to isolate when you do.
Adobe provides two methods for reporting bugs with its products. The “wish form” has been around for some time. It gives a simple interface for submitting a bug report or a feature request confidentially. Items submitted via the form are categorised by Adobe into an internal bug database. One recieves no feedback after submitting a bug via the form. However, I have submitted two bugs using this form, and both of them were quietly fixed by the next release.
The more grandiose interface is the triply named “Adobe Public Bug Database and Issue Reporting System”, “Adobe Bug Reporting System”, or “Adobe Bug and Issue Management System”, which I call simply the bugbase. This public bug database contains a subset of the bugs in the internal database — most of the public bugs have been submitted by members of the community who have registered at the site. A number have also been imported from some older (Macromedia?) bug and feature tracking systems. The advantage of a public bugbase is being able to search for workarounds to existing bugs, to watch bugs and receive updates when they change, and to show your support for bugs you care about.
The public bugbase has a feature shared by many others — that of ‘voting‘ for issues. A given bug is not shown to Adobe developers, and is left with a status of “Open” or “Community”, until it has passed some unknown vote threshold. This feature makes it much easier for Adobe to totally ignore the problems that not many people encounter. Unfortunately, there are a lot of those.
At the time of this writing, there are over three and a half thousand bugs in the bugbase marked “Open”, “New”, or “Community”. Only 15 of these have ten or more votes, and 2833 of them have no votes at all.
I would encourage anyone who uses Adobe products and has encountered strange things occurring to visit the bugbase and give your issues a vote. Especially if the issue gives you the impression that something important should really, really be refactored.