Monthly Archives: October 2008

Isometric Graphics w/JS & HTML

Posted on October 31, 2008 by MXH

As an experiment, I decided to see if I could approximate a Flash game in JavaScript and HTML (without using the non-standard CANVAS tag). It turns out to be pretty easy to replicate an isometric display using some simple 2D … Continue reading →

Posted in Projects, Reverse Engineering | Comments Off

Extracting bitmaps from Flash

Posted on October 24, 2008 by MXH

Flash content is pretty common on the Web, but it is considerably less transparent than traditional HTML-based content. Whereas HTML-based content is built from human-readable script files and URL resource definitions, Flash content is locked inside a binary file format. … Continue reading →

Posted in Reverse Engineering, Web stuff | Comments Off

Quickie – Pythonic “if” statements

Posted on October 18, 2008 by MXH

In reference to my previous post, a reader writes: You don’t need parens around your if conditions in Python – and it’s more Pythonic not to have them… if size

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File-like Strings in Python

Posted on October 17, 2008 by MXH

Sometimes one has data stored in a string, and wishes to pass that data to a function that expects a file-like object. Writing the data to a file, then opening that file and passing it to the function is cumbersome … Continue reading →

Posted in The Hard Way | Comments Off

EC2 Instance Performance

Posted on October 10, 2008 by MXH

I’ve been working with a large-ish MySQL table on an EC2 instance. This table has approximately 147MM rows, and I’ve been disappointed with the performance I’ve seen. I took a look at how much performance I could gain by moving … Continue reading →

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Command Line Quickies

Posted on October 3, 2008 by MXH

One of the best things about working in the UNIX environment is the powerful command-line interface, which includes the available shells, scripting languages, standard utilities, and facilities for I/O manipulation. The strength of this interface is its modularity; a large-ish … Continue reading →

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