Miscellaneous musings in beta

I just got a #3596: Duplicate variable definition working with Flex in Eclipse.

Normally that’s no biggie. It sometimes occurs in for loops, where I forget to change the variable name. That was certainly also the case this time:

for (var x:int = 0; x<oneArray.length; x++) {
}
for (var x:int = 0; x<anotherArray.length: x++) {
}

However this time the warning  persisted: After changing the variable name, the warning eerily lingered on. I gave my code another hard look, but couldn’t find the error. I went on to delete just a few lines in the function. And that made the warning indicator move to code with no variables at all.

Conclusion: The compiler was somehow getting confused. So I finally went into Flex compiler setting and switched the warnings off. The warning disappeared. And when I switched warnings on again the particular warning didn’t return. Problem solved. Somehow…

Anyone else seen this quirk?

This is a post from my iPod. Just to see if I could…

To be able to post a text that is globally accessible whereever and whenever (almost) you happen to be is very empowering.

The downside of this new-found ability is that your text isn’t necessarily being read by anyone. That depends on things outside of your control – mainly that the amount of text available today is simply staggering. The entire corpora of the internet is huge. We’re drowning in a sea of irrelevant information.

Or as in (somewhat) Macbeth: Today we’re all full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Hmm. Gotta cut down on coffee.

Just finished building Google Chrome OS. Actually I’m writing this on Chrome on my wife’s Asus Eee 901.

And I must say that I’m eerily impressed. Granted – this is but a shell of things to come, but even booting from my 4GB stick is faster than I’ve never seen before. Google Chrome OS boots in about 3 seconds flat. And I’m not kidding.

Neat. Very neat.

The building process is made easy by scripting most of it. I did all of the building on a Macbook Pro running Ubuntu Karmic. The compilation itself took about 10 minutes.

My first impressions are overall very positive. Chrome is responding quickly and every content page is also a webpage. The whole OS seems like a slim and streamlined window to the web. The chess game links to a Flash page, which I found funny considering Google’s push of HTML 5.

On the other side I couldn’t get wifi to work and the Eee keyboard settings didn’t work either. And when I dropped out to a prompt I had problems logging on. But again this is software in development a year away from release so I kinda expected this.

I’m looking forward to have a look at the code …

The long-awaited Google Chrome OS has arrived. Or rather the source code for the OS has arrived.

Google Chrome OS, as an OS for the end-user, is ready late 2010. At that time it will be available for purchase as part of a hardware package from selected netbook suppliers. In the meantime everyone interested in contributing can do so by downloading and building the OS from source. The code is available for download or to Git from here.

Google Chrome OS is a very bold move on many different levels. As of this writing the OS is designed for netbooks and composed solely of webapps based in a small Linux core. It will depend on HTML 5 which is a web-standard still in development and only partly implemented in browsers. It caters to the thin-client concept where your data and your processing all happens in the cloud. In fact you’ll be doing all your work in the Google Chrome browser.

And then there’s the small detail of the OS being open source like the Chrome browser.

Will this huge shift in paradigm catch on? Your guess is a good as mine. Or Google’s. But the fact remains that Google seems to believe so.  And the stakes are high. Nearly everything Google has done the last few years has something to do with their OS. If Google Chrome OS fails a lot of their work will be useless or at least a lot less significant like pieces of a puzzle missing the larger picture.

The future of computing will be interesting indeed. I’ll go build myself an OS.