BrainBrain View Note

I recently had a problem that some of my Flash programs were not behaving correctly when served from my http://disemia.com/↗ website. This led to a very difficult situation of being able to properly test my flash.

At first I discovered the standalone player does not actually behave the same as the plugin with regards to handling net content. In fact the speed of the connection changes the behaviour!↗

I'm also using a 64-bit operating system which is not supported by Adobe, and the 32-bit plugin and player also behave quite differently. That is, the 32-bit plugin in 64-bit firefox, and the 32-bit plugin in 32-bit firefox, and the standalone player. Subtle changes in behaviour during startup are not very nice for a supposedly platform independent solution.

To get a clean environment to test I finally opted for VirtualBox, a virtual machine host. I installed Ubuntu 8.04↗ on the virtual machine, the 32-bit version, installed the flash plugin, and now have as close to a stock installation as possible. Strange that 32-bit apps actually behave better in a 32-bit virtual machine on a 64-bit linux than on the real machine itself.

In any case this ellicited a startup bug relating to resize messages. This one was easily fixed, but there are a still a few other nuances I've noticed. I should probably also install an XP VM and test the most popular plugin variant.