Simeon Says

So if anybody follows my twitters you would know that I am a lonely man on my own. My wife is out in the wilderness camping with my daughter. This is a family outing that we do every year, but this year I needed to stay behind. But the real killer is today is my wifes birthday and she isn’t even here for me to celebrate her!

So after I got off work today I came home and took to doing some chores that she had hoped for me to accomplish. I swept out the garage, and cleaned out the trash. I then went out and mowed the lawn and set to watering the dieing plant life in my yard. When I got all I had hoped to accomplished I decided to take advantage of the whaning light, and get out my DirtBoard. Its been a long really long time since I got on my board. At first just putting my feet on the darn thing had me wobbling back and forth. It felt so foreign. How could this good friend that I commuted on for years, be such a stranger in my control. I decided to be adventurous and started taking runs down the driveway. I dont have a particularly long, or steep drive way, but its enough of both that my first couple runs were a bit scary. But it only took that couple runs for my feet to remember what they were supposed to do and soon I was carving around the cul-de-sac and doing 180’s both directions.

It felt so great to get out and actually do something. I have been so busy working and being a dad (totally by choice) that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed sweating for a reason other than being hot. Who knows, maybe next week I will get my mountain bike out and go hit forest park.

Ok, so I will be the first to admit I am a coder. I make a pretty good sys-admin too. But I have never declared myself to be a network engineer or whatever the heck I need to be to know the correct way to wire a rack.

What I do know is that when we switched offices last year we got into one that had a rack already mounted in the corner of the storage room. So we put it to use and mounted all our phone and Ethernet blocks and wiring harnesses and such to it. It started off looking pretty clean, but as time has gone on and I have expanded our office it has gotten pretty scary looking.

So we just got a new server and I want to stick it in the rack, but looking at the spaghetti wiring is making me dizzy. I need to clean up a bit. So it takes me back to the beginning of the entry. I have a couple really stupid questions.

1. The first is, can I cut the cables to length? I remember something my college physics about length of cable and wavelengths and crap. Does that apply here?

2. Does it really matter if phone lines are bundled with phone lines and Ethernet with Ethernet?

Does anybody have any tips for cleaning up? Because its gonna be me and some cable cutters and some zip ties here in a bit if someone can’t put me on the right path.

I get bored easy. I go through phases and I need to change things up. To that end I have moved my blog on over to http://blog.simb.net. I have several posts over there. I have redirected my rss feeds to my new feedburner url (http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheSimfluence). If you subscribe directly to my rss then you should continue getting posts, but i would recommend switching to the new url. It seems that mxna isnt picking up my posts. I will email them and see if I can get that updated.

Anyhow, its seems that working with the new system has sparked my desire to blog, so hopefully you will here more from me soon.

I am leaving this blog in place for a while. This will allow the search engines content to be right until i get my old content moved. So if you hit http://www.simb.net/blog directly you should be forwarded. However links to existing entries, categories and dates should still be fine.

See you on the new site!

gskinner.com: gBlog: SWFBridge: Easier AS3 to AS2 Communication

I just saw this article and wanted to mark it  down for later consumption.  It appears Grant has taken all the grunt work out of using localconnection to communicate between the 2 types of applications.

Wicked slick!

technorati tags:flex

So I have an app I am building at work and we started it about 5 months ago. I put in about 3 weeks building a prototype of the UI and then got pulled onto another project. Now its time to revisit it and I found some design choices I am unsure about.

So this application has many views. One workflow is that as a user you login and you purchase a new product. Part of the process of making payment is that I have to send off to the server to have your credit card debited. So I create and instance of some CairngormEvent and attach my data. In turn the correct command gets launched and actually starts the call through my business delegate. Now in this case my delegate is (not?)important because its pretending to make the calls against a backend that doesn’t exist. Regardless the result is sent back to the result function of my command to be processed.

So here is what I propose. If the auth was a success then I think we should just send them to the next step from here. I can update a property in my ModelLocator and the viewstack will move along. But if the card failed, then I need to tell the user. I imagine that back when ViewHelpers were popular this would be an appropriate use. However now what is the best course of action?

I can tell you what I did. I have a CallBackEvent that extends my CairgnormEvent and I attach to it the function I would like called when the process is complete. This allows me to update my view without having to perform much witchcraft. And then my view can be responsible for its self in how it should proceed. I currently use the callback wether it was successful or not, and this morning i put the code to change my modelLocator in the callback function of the view. Thats the part I am not really liking. I feel like that should be put in the command, but what if I need to update the display locally if the auth is successful also(think loading screen)? So then would it be better to launch another event that says take me to the next page, and create a new command to handle that? Then the logic is maintained in my business layer, but its 2 more classes for 1 line of code. Which of course seems like overkill.

So how does that sound? Anybody for or against this method? I am still early enough that I can change if I am so swayed. So what would you do?

Technorati Tags: flex, cairngorm

Over on Wood for the Trees I found an article that backs up my choice for using Typo as my new blog platform. Although Matthew doesnt really get into the hard core parts of why to use Typo, he covers why not to use WordPress which I think is almost as important when considering alternatives.

Plus, this post is evidence of one of the reasons I switched blog engines. I never could get flock to work with BlogCFC so the “blog this” feature in flock, which I love, never did me any good.

Blogged with Flock

Technorati Profile

Well its seems kinda funny. On the day Adobe releases ColdFusion 8 I launch a new blog that doesnt use CF at all. Regulars will notice that the url for my site has changed. I am now blogging from blog.simb.net as a subdomain. I am using Typo a rails based blog system that has some great features. Plus since its a personal site I can host it for dirt cheap and dont have to find cf hosting for it. Anyhow, not much else will change in my content, but I wanted to play with something new.

Technorati Tags: blog, cf

I was following twitter this morning and noticed a couple posts from Eric about apples stock prices. In one he mentions an article that was published today that expects apple shares to reach as high as $205 a share. Thats seemed amazingly high to me so I started looking around. As everyone always compares Apple and Microsoft I was curious how the 2 looked on the stock market. A link from another of Eric’s posts led me to Yahoo Finance where I compared the stock prices of the 2 companies. I was surprised to see that there was very little similarities to be had. Microsoft has moved along pretty consistently for the last 4 year, while apple has had an 1800% increase in stock prices. I noticed the date that apple over took microsoft in the price of the stocks being the week of April 28 2003. I couldnt remember what happened that month, so i googled it, and found this Press Release from apple. April 28 was the day they announced the iTunes Store. Who could have know that that little enhancement to their business would put them on the path to the growth they have seen over the last 4 years.

Granted they have done many things in the last 4 years to garner such growth, like updates to product lines and switching to Intel processors. But the one that really set them off was not computer releated at all. Somehow the announcement to remove the word “computer” from the company name doesnt seem so off base anymore.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my little divergence from work. I thought it was neat to see how things have changed.

Well the onAIR tour bus made its first days trip yesterday. I had a great time following the Twits from the bus as well as checking in once in a while to see live video feed.

Today the gang is doing a full day workshop in Seattle Washington. Tomorrow they swing out to Vancouver BC, then thursday they hit Portland.

I was really excited to see they were stopping in Portland, and although we don’t get a full day workshop, we should have a full evening down at Kell’s Irish Pub. So if you haven’t registered for the event make sure you do so soon.

See you Thursday!