My life with ActionScript, JavaScript and their families
As part of a larger project, I noticed an annoying thing, that kept consequently crashing Flash CS4 (on a Mac OS X Intel 10.6.1): Whenever I tried to copy or cut this one symbol from the stage (to place it in another layer), Flash crashed completely.
There were many conditions, that could have been the cause of this, but I managed to boil it down to something reportable.
After having written about the inner workings of SnapABug, I have now looked a bit further into signed applets and their permission levels. And the conclusion is, that the trust question is stupid.
SnapABug did the right thing, the only thing they could do. Untrusted (unsigned) code lives in a special sandbox and cannot use functions outside of this sandbox. The end user can change how much this sandbox has access to, but it is not trivial and the normal user would never touch that with a pitch fork. Trusted code lives in another sandbox with almost infinite possibilities. The end user can limit this sandbox too, but again almost no end user does that.
I just saw the SnapABug website, and was quite impressed, until I actually tried to submit a bug. Unrestricted access to my computer, why would I grant that to an unknown applet? And why do you even require unrestricted access to all files etc. on my computer to create a screenshot?
Well, I delved into the application and found the answers – they could of course have done with a more restrictive permission.
I finally got the time to clean up the code for MXHR4AS3 – an implementation of the Digg-introduced concept of requesting several files from the server in one request and returning it as a multipart/mixed http response to reduce overhead. The original was implemented in JS, and I have further re-implemented it in AS3.
As promised, the code has been uploaded to Bitbucket. Please enjoy and by all means request access if necessary. Please refer to the new project page here for details.
A huge part of the inner city of Copenhagen has recently been created in 3D on Google Earth. The most interesting thing would be to know how exactly it has been added. And it could be interesting to create an application, that would allow ordinary people to easily put there own houses on Google Earth without them having to know 3D programs – even though Sketch-up is quite simple.