Simeon Says

I have started using git for most of my projects. It started as a way for me to continue working with my SVN repositories when I was offline, but as I got more familiar with the application I found I was choosing it over svn.

Why choose it over svn? Because I truly believe that if you are not versioning your code, you shouldn’t be writing code. Why don’t people use versioning systems? Because they are hard to work with and they get in they way. Having to go setup repositories and such can be a major pain. Git is simple. After installing git, CD to the directory of your project and type `git init`. Thats it. You are now ready to start writing code and making commits. Want to share your code with someone? Just zip up the directory and send it to them. Your single .git folder that is at the root of your project contains all the information they need to checkout the history of your work. Don’t want to share your history? Don’t send the .git directory with it

Git is a distributed version control system. What does that mean? There does not have to be a single central repository. Any single users copy can be cloned and published and shared on a network sever and accessed via many protocols.

What prompted me to write this post was actually this article on useful git utilities. My primary interaction with git is via the command line and sometimes I dont remember all the options that are available. Using this bash script will allow you to get auto completion for all the git commands. Nice! The trick is to just save that bash file to your home directory and then source it into your path. On the mac, you can edit your .profile file to add the line `source ~/git-completion.bash` (don’t put in the `’s though).

Go on now, get your Git on!

I read this and though it was a great description of what the SWF specification having the restrictions removed does for us. Lets pretend you had some cake at some fancy dinner. It was amazing, and delicious and suspiciously light on calories. Adobe opening the spec on Flash Player SWF file, is like giving you the recipe to a prize winning and amazing cake. It does not provide a free cake, nor does it provide the ingredients to make the cake, but it does tell you how you can make a cake. Now you can make the cake and share it with friends or sell it or whatever.

Thanks to Dave for Open at Adobe: Cooking with SWF, and the understanding of copyright

Maybe someone out there can help me with this. Sometimes I feel like blogging, and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes when I feel like blogging I don’t want to publish a bunch of articles in a row (like today) so I like to post date my entries so they will pop up in a couple days keeping the information on my blog fresh. The dashboard in wordpress says I have 3 scheduled posts. All of them are a couple months old that never went out when the time passed by.

Has anyone else seen this are put together a fix? TIA

When I recently started Geocaching I found that I wanted to have some kind of log that helped me keep track of what caches I had found and which I was still looking for. There are several of these on the market, but I saw this as an opportunity to build something cross-platform and with a rich mapping interface. So I started working on GeoLog, and application that uses the GPX files I download from Geocaching.com to display their location on a map. Thats about as far as I am with the application but I think this could be a great tool for all geocachers when I get done.

The core functionality of the application right now is the map interface. Since I am building this in AIR I saw no reason not to take this opportunity to use the Yahoo AS3 Map component. This is my first mapping application and I can not imagine yahoo having made this any easier. There are a whole bunch of examples and demos with code for how to do most tasks.

The map from yahoo is an AS3 component which I don’t think has any ties to the Flex framework. So when using it you must instantiate it and then add it as a child to a UIComponent in your appliaction. While this approach is fine, I wanted to encapsulate it a bit for my application. So I created a new Actionscript class and extended UIComponent. I then overrode the createChildren and updateDisplayList methods to implement the adding and manipulating of the yahoo map. I am posting the code for YahooMapViewer.as below in case anyone is interested.
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Ok, I will admit it, I have an addiction. Last week I bought my first GPS unit and I wanted to play with it. So I had heard people talk about geocaching, but I didn’t really understand what it was. So I visited Geocaching.com and read about the process. I searched and found a couple caches near my house ( a couple really near, but 50 within 5 miles). And I took my wife and my daughter out and went searching. WE HAD SUCH A BLAST! And we found nothing. Since that first night I have gone everyday and found at least one cache, although I usually look for a few.

This weekend we took a drive to the coast with Ryan and Ciara to show them around where I grew up. We found one out by the river. After Ryan and Ciara headed back to Seattle I hooked up with my dad and my brother and we went on to find 8 more caches that day! After coming back to portland my daughter and I went for a bike ride and found a couple more.

GeoCaching has been a wonderful combination of technology and nature, and just enough of a reason to get out of the house and go do something. If you have a GPS I really want to you to try geocaching. If you don’t have a gps? Well now you have a reason!

Keep an eye out for GeoLog an AIR application I am writing that uses the GPX files from geocaching.com and the AS3 Map Component from Yahoo to help you manage your geocache collection.

I was just going to comment on this article but CNET doesn’t support OpenID and I am not about to go making another account, so I’ll post about it here.

In the article Mozilla speaks out against the free-but-proprietary Web apps the author discusses the problems with free but proprietary software. In a quote from the Mozilla Europe’s founder:

“Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They’re not here for the glory; they’re here for the money.”

I really think this is ridiculous. With all of the products that Adobe has open sourced in the last two years, for them to even consider that they have an alternate agenda is just a little bit ridiculous. Not to mention that the core strength in the Flash player is the AVM2 (Actionscript Virtual Machine) which was donated to the Mozilla foundation (tamarin project) and is slated to provide the core functionality for the JS implementation of Firefox 4.

The recent news the article mentions that makes this statement total bullshit is that Adobe has released the full specification for SWF and FLV formats. And while there is not (yet) a viable Open Source alternative to the Adobe Flash Player, there is nothing stopping someone from building one now. They even have the the core technology for making it work in the Mozilla Tamarin project.

So while not all of Adobe’s tools are Open Source they have provided free and open source components to almost all of the technologies that the open source community might care about. Mozilla needs to quit it’s crying, they choose to go open and not for profit. They choose the life of the meaningful and enlightened (but poor) software provider. And they cry afoul when other companies don’t do the same. But I think the real problem for them here, is that a for profit company that is very successful in building great software and client relationships has also seen the benefits that can be received through opening up software. And now they are upset that not only does Adobe make lots of money on great software they are also giving great software away just to enrich the developer community.

Perhaps if Mozilla had gone the other way and built software to sell they could pay someone to fix the problems with Firefox crashing all the damn time. At least when a new flash player comes out its faster, feature-ful and stable. I am still looking for a version of firefox that can load up Gmail without crashing. If that is what software built with no agenda does, then I don’t see the point. What is the purpose of building software with no agenda. Especially if it leads me to use tools that are not based on open standards just so I can get through my day without wanting to through my computer.

The RIA War Is Brewing. I saw this article and was again disappointed that people continue to compare these platforms.

Curl and Siverlight? competitors. AIR? not so much its a desktop environment. Compare it to the Flash Platform and move on.

Prism? Its kinda like a half cocked attempt at building AIR applications. The entire platform can be simulated by building an AIR application that includes a single html control with a root url of a remote site. But that where the comparisons end.

AIR is an platform for building desktop applications with existing web tools. These are not RIA’s. You build them with the same tools you build RIA’s. However they do not run in the browser and do not require a back end server to be useful. They are not RIA’s themselves. You wanna compare something to AIR compare Java or WPF or something that actually runs on the users computer with or without the web, then you have a comparison worth getting into.

Quit trying to make news over crap that is unrelated. Just because they happen to be new tools from competing companies does not make them competitors automatically.

KthnxBye.

In working with new technologies I am always concerned about how a user will need to update the third party software that makes them work. Adobe AIR is no different. Although we have badge installs that make getting the runtime on the computer very easy and near seemless for the users, I was not sure how the runtime updates were going to look.

Well suprisingly enough I fired up an AIR application and was prompted to update my AIR Runtime. So I decided to video it if for reference. I used follow cursor so its a bit shaky but at least I know what users of my AIR applications will see.

Not only did I go outside this weekend but I went to the mountain and went skiing! My mother in law has recently rediscovered her love of skiing. But she is lacking friends to do it with. So while I spent 10 years snowboarding I decided to accompany her on a trip to the mountain this last sunday.

Plus this gives me a chance to use the new gallery feature of wordpress 2.5 so lets see how this looks.

Dear Driver,

I am really excited that we have this chance to talk. I think its really important that I take a second to express my feelings about what I just saw occur. You are an asshole. No really, you are. And its not really the fact that you swerved back and forth across a 4 lane highway or were driving damn near twice as fast as the rest of us. The part that makes me really upset is that you didn’t once use your turn signals.

In the three minutes or so of speeding, swerving and riding peoples asses, that I could see before you made your way out of sight, not once did you give any indication of your intentions or directions. Now I want to be very clear on this point, I don’t want to know where you are going so I can follow you, or impact your driving in any way. I want to know where you are going so I can work my hardest to be as far away from you as I can at any given moment. Because while you have been very lucky ( 3 near accidents that I have seen so far) you wont always be. I want to know so that when you crash and your car roles across the highway and you die in a spectacular flaming mess, its only you and the people who love you that have a bad day. I want to make sure that when you meet your amazingly bright and flame-full death, I am far enough away that I barely hear the sirens marking your departure from this world.

So please, regardless of the rest of your driving habits, please use your turn signals when you intend to change lanes.

thanks