It’s that time of the year – the SourceForge 2008 Comunity Choice Awards. If you want to participate and like Flex (or AIR) you can click here to vote for it.
Go Flex!
Later edit: Seems I’m last in the platoon to read the news and encourage people to vote – Mihai wrote about this before as well as Remus and Cornel. You’ve beaten me to the punch, guys.
Starting today, one of my colleagues, Mihai Corlan has started his own blog. If you’ve visited our local adobe site (myadobe.ro – sorry, romanian only) you have probably enjoyed some of his posts. He has posted on the myadobe blog for quite some time and now he’s got his own place to rant about stuff.
I can only wish him good luck and encourage you to visit him.
A week or so ago I shuffled computers around the house. As a result one of my desktops couldn’t be reached by wired Ethernet any more, so I thought of going wireless. Bought a cheap Asus PCI-Wireless card (WL-138G) which worked like a charm on Vista and XP. That’s the sunny side of the story.
In the spirit of weekly change, Thursday night I got my hands on OpenSuse’s latest and greatest – version 11, Beta 3. It installed fairly quickly, it looked nice, and it even seemed that it got all my cards – including the WiFi one. Oh joy. But my joy did not last too much – one click on the Firefox icon and doom came: there was no internet. So I tried changing the settings in the Network Settings menu of Yast2, using the Network Manager to shuffle even more seetings, but all in vain.
Back to the internet for a solution. Most links I found involved blacklisting the default driver and using ndiswrapper to extract the firmware from the Windows drivers. Which of course didn’t work. Late last night though I found a solution in a forum, somewhere. I had to tweak it a little, but it worked.
Technical data: the card uses a BroadCom 54G Air chipset, shown by a lspci command as BCM4318. I also had an ethernet port, which proved essential to get the wifi to work.
Steps:
So this is it, guide to WiFi in OpenSuse 11 Beta 3 in 8 easy steps 🙂
Now if I could get libxine, mplayer and lirc to work with my specs I can get rid of Windows.
The first edition of the 360 Flex conference in Europe is over. It’s been three interesting days of talking to people, attending sessions and networking. Overall the conference was interesting, although there were less people that I was expecting – but I guess this is because in Europe the conference doesn’t yet have that much popularity.
The sessions were mostly held by non-adobe speakers – there were three sessions held by Adobe guys and the keynote during the first day. The rest were people that used Flex, have done cool things with it, or developed tools to help in working and deploying Flex applications to clients. Some thoughts:
Fun facts at the conference:
Next post will have pictures – if I can get them from Mihai’s camera.
Just stumbled on this first chapter of an upcoming book on Gestural Interfaces. It’s pretty interesting to read, and it good me wanting more. I am so putting this book on my Amazon wishlist.
Go read the first chapter here.
The guys with the Flex 360 conference have extended the deadline for their Flex API contest, so that participants for Europe can sign in as well, The new deadline is 4th of April, the friday before the conference begins. See more information on this here and here.
Also, there’s almost a month to go until the conference. From the Romanian side of Flex I and Mihai Corlan will participate, with two sessions – Mihai with Developing Data-intensive Flex applications and me with a session on Flex and (web) services. I will mostly talk about SOAP services, but won’t ignore REST ones. As part of what I will present at Flex 360 I’ve started a series of articles on the blog – the first one is already live and presents a sample application that searches videos using web services. So let me know in the comments if I’m off track or not.,
I’m using Office 2007 for some time now and the ability to preview the content of some files without actually opening them in the dedicated editor is quite nice. It’s a pity that the number of supported file types is so small. A good thing is that they everyone can create such a preview handler, because the API is publicly available and documented on MSDN. So I looked around the net today for some handlers that would allow me to preview zip archives and some other common file types – like .as or .mxml. One of the interesting resources I’ve stumbled onto is a blog post that links to a msdn article and also to download the handlers demoed. Get at it here. Another pack of handlers for some of the programming language files is here.
Oh, and these handlers work for Windows Vista too, so if you have the preview pane opened, it will load a quick preview of the file in there.
That’s a question I’ve seen quite a few times on the Adobe labs and pre-release forums over the past months. And the question is used in relation with the code being generated by the web service introspection wizard.
Although we’ve tried to make the code as simple and versatile as possible, as in to cover most use-cases, it seems to still need some explaining. It is possibly caused by change. The way in which you used web services has changed substantially, and disruptive changes are not always easily understood. We’ve gone from a full run-time experience to strong-types and ActionScript representations of the service. So I’ve tried to put together a small application that uses a web service and shows how to use this new nifty feature.
The example will stretch over two posts/parts, each covering a way of using the generated code to arrive at the same result, structured like this: Continue reading
Finally, the combination for RIA goodness is upon us. Adobe, through the combined efforts of the Flex, AIR and BlazeDS teams has launched these three products aimed to making the life of web developers a bit easier, and the life of the web user a lot easier. You can check out the products on the adobe.com website, where you can also download a trial version (for Flex Builder) or the full versions of the Flex 3 SDK, AIR SDK and BlazeDS.
Now it’s time to see how the web experience shapes up – I’m looking forward to ever-increasing levels of interactivity on the web, and a nice blend between the web and the desktop (which AIR aims to increase).
Here are some stories on Digg, on the same topic, here, here and here.
Just got the bug up and running using OpenID – or so I hope – the plugin threw a warning, but seems to work ok … So if you have an OpenID account you can now use it to register or post a comment. The good side – you’re comment will get through moderation (I hope).
So, let’s see how much fun this will be and how long it takes for OpenID to really take off and get some major social websites on it.
Oh, I’m using WP-openid (search for it, the link is out of reach).
SideNote: My laptop is freaking me out tonight, it keeps pausing to do stuff with my hard-drive …. if it keeps it up it will end up in a corner of the room.
Cristi's thoughts 