Simeon Says

When my wife and I decided to have a baby we started planning for how we would take care of the baby after she was born. I started training and doing consulting in addition to my day job so that we could afford to have my wife stay home with the baby. This had really always been the plan.

So since Ana joined our family (almost 4 months ago) my wife has had the pleasure of spending all her days and nights with the baby. Pleasure may not be exactly the right word but she definitely has the experience going for her.

Tonight was the second time I have been left with the task of taking care of my daughter on my own. Now dont get me wrong, I work hard to be a supportive dad, and I come home everyday and take over the baby duties for my wife. But I still have her there to guide me through the fusses and squawks.

All in all I think the night went very well. After wifey left we watched some soccer. Well really I watch soccer and help her do physical therapy. We stretch the legs and bunch them up. We do quick feet and high knees. Then we play with the arms. She likes to arch her back and tip her head up so she can see the TV. So we practice rolling over and having tummy time. Its lots of fun. After an hour of that though she got tired and decided to take a short nap. After that she woke up hungry so dad (thats me) got the milk mom had pumped out of the fridge and warmed it up. She took to the bottle much better than the first time we tried, and actually ate for a while. It was getting near her bed time, so we took a break to burp and put on P.J.’s. Then I swaddled her up and put her back on the bottle. She did that for a bit more and then got fussy. We swapped out for the pacifier and climbed into the rocker. Ten minutes later she was asleep and I was reading my ruby book.

Another hour later and wifey came home. So all in all the night went very well. There were not too many moments of panic and unabashed bawling, I try not to bawl very often I think I may be getting this whole “daddy” thing, because we actually had a really good time.

Unhappy with the current standards moving data between the flash client and the application server, Aral Has created a new format called SWX.

Currently SWX is only supported between flash and PHP but he hopes through community involvement for that to grow. Its also only suppored by the Flash player 7-8 plugin, and doesnt support AS3 because in AS3 we lose loadMovie(). He has taken an interesting turn on moving the data. It works by wrapping your php data and converting it to a swf file which then gets loaded into your existing applications.

If you have been wondering about a different way to move data around in your applications take a look at the SWX documentation and see if this is what you have been looking for.

Apollo is a new platform independent runtime environment that allows us to use tools we already use everyday (html, js, flash, pdf) to build desktop applications. Think of it as Java without the hell that is java. Write your application using tools that are familiar and then delpoy that to users with all the simplicity of a web application. Sounds amazing to me.

However there are some that are willing to argue that this is not that great. They typically have one argument. Everyone is familiar with the browser, why would we want to take people out of it. And to be honest I dont know that traditionally I would. I see Apollo as a way to extend our web applications adding functionality that is not currently available in the browser.

What type of functionality am I talking about? I cant think of a better example than what the brilliant folks at FineTune.com have done. I didnt really get the FineTune experience to begin with. I saw examples were people would create playlists and then embed a swf in their personal page so that users could listen to music while they surfed. But I dont really get that. Although I like seeing what other folks are listening to I dont want to have to keep a browser open to listen. An extension to this is to have users link to their playlists on the FineTune web site. Brandon Ellis just did this and i am listening to his Music to code by playlist right now. But again, I have a problem with listening to music in the browser. One perfect reason for this, is that when I debug my flex apps it totally locks the browser on the mac, so the music stops. But FineTune has a solution to this problem, and it coms in the form of FineTune Desktop.

FineTune Desktop is an Apollo application that allows me to browse and play music from the finetune catalog. This allows me to get around that browser problem (I usually accidentally close the tab that has the music player in it) and have music streaming in the background. This in and of its self is a great application of the product. But the features do not end there. No beyond that when you choose to play a playlist in the browser if you have the FineTune Desktop application running it gives you the option to play it there. So now your web application can communicate with that apollo application on the desktop. THIS BLOWS MY MIND! This is the kind of functionality that I see apollo really making a difference for. Just take a look at this image to see how easy this is. Thanks FineTune for such a great example of the Apollo platform as well as a killer product.

I am trying to help my little site get a bit more visibility. I started this quest a while back, but as I wasnt posting much I let it slide. I checked technorati today and they seemed to think I had not updated my site in a few months. While the posting prior to this week had been slim, I have been posting.

At any rate somewhere along the lines in one of my upgrades I changed the main url of this site from /blog to /client and now they dont think I post anymore. So I am claiming this version of the blog as well.

Continuing with my visibility upgrade I need some help. Lots of rankings are based on the number of incoming links. If you read my site and enjoy the rantings I shout, please feel free to link me in your friends and bloggers section. Anything will help.

And lastly I am including the link that technorati wants so I can claim this blog. So at the very least this post wont be without some official reason to exist. Check me out my Technorati Profile.

I absolutely believe that one of the reasons that he web has been so successful is the ability for users to see how people do things. Not because they original developers chose to share but because, we could see the source regardless. I mean its just text after all, right?

Unfortunately for us the flash platform is not quite so easy to share. Dont get me wrong. I think a compiled swf is great for the easy of deployment and the speed I get from the flash platform rocks. But I cant just go look at the neat things people are doing.

This traditionally has been a problem but one that the Flash team was willing to help us deal with. I think Adobian’s remember the fun in finding out how some cool trick is done by looking at the source. Because many of the tools surrounding flex are free ( Frameworks, SDK, etc) they wanted to get some of that sharing tradition back. So in Flash Player 9 and with our flex applications we have the ability to share our code. Many of the community bloggers have been doing this for a long time. But what if you want to share your code with the world?

Its actually very easy to do and this article from the Flex documentation will show you how to enable view source in your flex applications. So get out there and share some code!

I was working on a form the other day in one of my flex applications. The flex framework provides several different built in controls for doing validation. NumberValidator, StringValidator, ZipCodeValidator all of these classes extend the base Validator class. We create one instance of a validator class for each of the fields we want to validate and bind the source and property values of the validator to our input control.

No matter how you use your validator it all starts there. However from this point there are several paths you can take to test the validity of your inputs. For the examples I am going to show we are going to have a simple base application. Just two input fields we are going to validate. Such a sample application might look something like this.

Blogging is one of those things you either get, or you dont. My wife’s mom doesn’t get it. She sees us putting our family lives on display for the whole world and she worries about stalkers and people trying to hurt us. And although that is certainly a possibility (see Kathy Sierra for example ) we would rather take that risk and share our lives with our family and friends. And the truth is we feel safe because people only get to see what we show them.

This kind of sharing gets me in a kind of mood. I start wanting to share all sorts of things. Things that I really cant justify actually writing a blog post over. I often think of 20 or 30 things a day that I think are funny or ironic and I want to share them with my internet buddies. But being aggregated by several popular tech sites, I don’t want to bombard the world with my ramblings. So what do you do? Well if you are like me you end up hold back most everything and not blogging often at all.

Until i found Twitter that is. Twitter is a social networking site unlike any other. Its not really about building relationships which you can benefit from next time you need a job. You are not going to have anyone recommend you to someone else based on your twitter content. Twitter is a site made up of short (140 chars max) posts which are only available for a little while. You choose the people who you want to follow (stalk) and in turn people choose to follow you. When you visit your home page of twitter you are presented with the conversation tree of all your friends most recent posts. This is a neat way to keep track of what is going on with your friends.

I started using Twitter before the 360Flex conference, because they created a twitter account that would allow anyone to watch the conversations of the conferences buddies. This is a great way to keep up on the happenings of the conference and the mood of the meetings. When i was at the conference I turned on the sms notification so that when my friends posted I would get messages and I could keep up on what was going on. You can also be notified of messages via IM.

So now I use twitter to post all those little things that I just cant justify writing a blog post over. Which has cleared up my time to actually blog about things that people may want to hear.

If you want feel free to stalk me in twitter. My screen name is “simbateman“. I look forward to knowing what you are doing every minute of the day

In part one of this little blogging rampage I am on I talked about how happy I am that the GUI (Aqua) and the underlying OS (BSD - Unix) are separate. Today that is more true than ever.

As all computers do my computer has been acting a little weird. But I really didnt think too much of it. After being gone for a week, I came back to it telling me there was a new os update. I consider those good things so I took the update and rebooted.

This is where disaster struck. The first time it came up but when i typed into my login panel I got the spinning beach ball. I forced it to reset and this time was able to actually start login in before being hung up. I tried this several more times and was never able to get locked in.

Since the computer comes up and runs just fine as long as I dont log in to the GUI I am guessing that one of my startup items is really mad. But I cant seem to get loaded in safe mode either.

I haven’t been using the computer for much lately anyway, but this site MY SITE runs on this box and if I cant start CF then I cant preach from the pulpit of sim. And that makes me very angry, much more angry than the computer not working. I need to preach

At any rate I decided to try something new. I dont know how many of you know this but at the login screen you can type into the user name box “>console” and the gui will unload and drop you to the standard unix command line interface. With this done I could log in normally and from there start CF so that my site could run.

I cant get at the gui, but that doesn’t really bother me. I think I will just leave it this way until leopard comes out and then I will reinstall the os. But the >console login can be a very nice trick.

I love that the GUI being broken doesnt stop me from continuing to use this Mac as I do 90% of the time. Show me that happen on a windows server.

Or so I was told. Here I was this morning just working away, when I got an IM from non-other than Ryan Stewart the infamous ZDNet Blogger himself. He says to me “hey man, I think somebody hacked your site” I start to panic and immediately run and load up my site. Hmmm…. looks ok to me. I click a couple links. No seems fine. I return to my IM window only to find he has typed a couple more messages. “yeah, they keep posting on your blog”, “looks like they might know something too”.

Its true, I am working harder to post more. I hope to have lots of good stuff up here. So instead of the oh-woe-is-me I have no time to blog stuff, I am just gonna make time for blogging.

So thanks to the other folks who noticed as well. It makes it much easier to make time to post when I know someone will read it:)

ps. Those are not real quotes from Ryan, We all know he is a master of the English language and I could never portray his eloquence with my poor college-drop-out vocabulary.

I am one of those crazy people who really like the OS X interface. I like it just the way it is. With the exception of changing my background and where my dock go I leave it pretty much as is.

My friend Sean just got a new Mac Book Pro and he likes to change things up and tweak his mac.

If updating the look and feel of our OS is something you are into then you should take a look at his suggestions, as well as those in the comments.