This article gives us a bit of insider gossip about Flash CS5. There are a few typos in it, and for someone whose English isn’t up to much, like me, it was enough to bring tears to your eyes. A few things I paid attention to: Adoption rateLooking at the current state of the Flash platform, FlashPlayer10 installs are still climbing, and the new figures are expected to reach over 90% coverage in the near term. Flash CS5 featuresThe biggest news for developers is that Flash authoring is finally integrated with FlashBuilder. If you’re using Flash CS5, you can export a new FlashBuilder project through a new export dialog.

I stumbled on this movie this afternoon. It’s no blockbuster, but it’s a genuinely rare gem. The cast gives me the same feeling as watching a DND live-play video. The imagination runs wild, it’s got a real spoof vibe, and it’s a lot of fun. Halfway through I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

Yesterday I went through the hassle of reinstalling the OS on my desktop. I’d been torn between Windows 7 and Ubuntu, but in the end it was Windows 7. Whenever I mention Windows 7, my friends’ first concern is always compatibility. The last stretch of time I used Windows 7, as I recall, was back at Qoolu, and every night WoW, CnC3 and RA3 all ran without a single compatibility issue. Older games are a different story, though (why do I always start with games…). EA games from before Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, Warcraft, Diablo and the like are all unsupported. Oddly enough, it is compatible with StarCraft — the “garbled graphics” version, that is. Taobao and online banking, naturally, are not compatible.

Half a year already — Season 2 has finally started airing overseas, which means we can download it. YYeTs is updating Season 2:

Domain email is a personalized mail service from Tencent. If you own a domain, a few simple settings are all it takes to create mailboxes that use your domain as the email suffix. It comes with the following features: a custom account name and email logo of your choosing, up to 10 mailboxes under the same domain, and group functionality.

Problem description:This afternoon I ran into a hassle: IE7 and IE8 intercept navigateToURL('xxx','_blank') inside Flash; getURL under AS2 gets intercepted the same way. I feel like I’ve run into this before, but it doesn’t happen that often, so I never bothered to dig into what conditions trigger the interception. It came up again today, so it’s a good chance to figure out why. After some searching, I found plenty of discussions from last year. Someone pointed out: IE7 and Firefox (the version I’m using is 2.0.0.11) block opening new windows with the navigateToURL method, while the getURL method in AS2 doesn’t — which is pretty annoying. Since the project chose AS3, we just have to find a way around it. The first thing that comes to mind is ExternalInterface, of course, but testing showed it still gets blocked. Then I wondered whether adding wmode would help, so I added the wmode attribute set to opaque to the page — and sure enough, it worked.

I happened to preview this album, and it’s the xianxia style I fell for on the very first listen. Why did 《相思引》 sound so familiar? Turns out a friend who plays 诛仙 had played it for me before. That reminds me — some of Liu Fang’s covers of classics are great too, and they really hold up. For a while I even had her version of 《青花瓷》 as my phone ringtone.

On September 4, 2009, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee (http://blog.sina.com.cn/kaifulee) left Google. The Creative Factory site surfaced. This should have been a great thing, but it kicked off an argument on a few IT blogs. http://initiative.yo2.cn/archives/642502 That post blew up. Just in case it gets “harmonized,” here’s a copy: http://www.innovation-works.com/New.asp 1. ASP — is that innovation? 2. In English, “news” and “new” are two completely different words, right? New.asp shows just what a knockoff job the outsourcing firm that built the site did. 3. I won’t even mention the td-based page layout; the real kicker is content=”text/html; charset=gb2312” — that alone deserves a good rant. 4. Under Media Contact, there’s actually a .doc file. Honestly, I can’t be bothered to install Word these days, and if it were installed I couldn’t be bothered to open it — I just drag everything into G Docs. Good thing it isn’t .docx. 5. Fine, the English version is UTF-8, but http://en.innovation-works.com/new.asp?page=1‘ throws an error.

These past two months, what I’ve been watching wasn’t movies — it was loneliness… Finally, though, I watched something with a bit of substance — last night I saw District 9.

I remember it only officially came out yesterday, and today there’s already a download… I’d like to play it too, but I never imagined a pirated copy would show up this fast. Is this game getting a lot of attention?

Last night I got to that mission, can’t remember the exact name. It’s the one you pick up from Playboy X — head into the construction site and kill a few gang leaders. I died a ton of times. Every restart meant driving for ages just to get back to the site, and I don’t even want to talk about how much time that wasted. Sigh… The combat in this mission is great though — lots of enemies, plenty of cover, outdoors, and it doesn’t show you where all the enemies are, so it feels pretty realistic.

It’s been a long time since I last played an RTS. Yan asked me how to deal with the aliens in Kane’s Wrath, which got me reminiscing about Red Alert 3 and Tiberium Wars all over again.Along the way I remembered a one-line tip I once gave to a newbie — let me share it:

Been swamped lately with a few websites, running myself half to death, but my resource pool is finally about to free up. Recycling worker thread 0… recycled successfully, resources released. Recycling worker thread 1… recycled successfully, resources released…

Plants vs. Zombies won over a lot of players with its adorable art and casual style — I’m one of them. Recently, while digging around for games, I found another management sim with the same cute look: Farm Frenzy 3. I never played the earlier titles, but judging from the description and screenshots, it’s a small, neat, thoroughly entertaining casual game too. Game overview: A farm simulation game, similar to QQ Farm — except this one is level-based. You keep completing tasks to move on to the next level, and the more money you make, the better farm equipment you can buy. You build five types of farms across the world’s five continents, i.e. five major levels, and each level yields farm equipment with different functions.

Requires Flash Player 10 code: