As I'm in the process of setting up my new machine, I thought I'd take a look at what's been happening in the area of one-click Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. installers. I find having the servers I use installed on my development machine to be an invaluable productivity boost but wouldn't like to go through the process of manually installing all the various modules.

Until now, I had been using FoxServ -- a free distribution that was, at one point, being updated rather regularly. I was, however, dismayed to find that the latest version hadn't been updated since 2003 (around when I last changed computers.) Googling around, I came upon XAMPP by a group called Apache Friends.

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No, it's not some crazy tag-team wrestling line-up. I was side-tracked in one of my Googling expeditions and came across a blog entry by Ted Neward titled Setting the Story Straight: AOP != Interception. In it, Ted provides an interesting comparison of the Interception pattern and Aspect-Oriented Programming.

Interception and AOP also have parallels with the Decorator pattern, filters and the Template method (in which you set up your Template methods so that they call hook operations that can be overriden by subclasses.) These concepts and patterns can be useful in Flash and ActionScript development too. For example, the Template pattern is used for the base classes in ARP and I had used Interception in the past to decorate the functionality of a method (I'll be damned if I can remember what exactly it was for.)

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I just received my new shiny new Acer Travelmate 8104 today and named him Saint (my computers, for some reason, are male!) This little guy is a scorcher: It's got the latest Sonoma processor (Pentium M 760, 2GHz with 533 MHz FSB and 2MB L2 cache) as well as an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 (128MB) graphics card and 1GB ram, coupled with a 100GB hard drive. All this in an under 3kg machine is quite something. My goodness, I still remember my first IBM Compatible -- it was an 8086 and had (for the time) a whopping 640KB of memory and get this, a 20MB hard drive. Oh yes, it was the Mercedes of its time. It was huge, metal and noisy. The 4-color CGA screen it had wasn't anything to write home about but I remember being excited that it even *had* color (C64 and Amiga owners from back in the day will kindly refrain from commenting -- I know, I know...) It's amazing to see how far computers have come in such a relatively short period of time and I can't wait to see where they go!

If I didn't get a chance to mention it earlier, FITC was amazing! I got to meet so many in the Flash community in person for the first time: Greets to Phillip, Keith, Ted, Darron, Jared, Dave, Andrea, Beau, Veronique, Robert and Colin -- it was great to meet and hang out with you guys. I just wish there had been more time to really get to talk with everyone. I don't believe I didn't even get time to play a round of Halo 2 with Mike C & Mike D and got to see way too little of Chafic.

Special thanks to Ted for the supplying us with room, pizza, dinner and codetalk and Media Temple for taking care of us on a wonderful night out.

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Little did I know that when we took the 10.06am Southern train from London Victoria to Brighton on our return from FITC, we were partaking in a first. I have to admit I was excited when I heard the conductor announce that WiFi service was available at the front of the train (it doesn't take much, really, I know) but didn't realize that it was the world's first moving high-speed internet connection. (This, according to today's The Argus newspaper.) How very cool. I was too tired to go all the way to the front of the train to try it out but I will definitely do so next time. I wonder how it will compare to my Vodafone 3G connection... (Vodafone's service being what it is, I am sure it will outshine it by a mile!)

Living in Brighton rocks... and now I have one more reason to love this town!