Stickfight

Category Flex Eclipse
If you are UK resident you may have discovered Flash builder 4's nasty little habit of bleating about the missing en_GB location, the reason for this is, as a Brit you have quite rightly set your eclipse for that location, but somewhere in the second beta of Flash builder 4 Adobe decided the green and pleasant land was unworthy of its own location and stripped it out of the build, just renaming the en_US location directory does not work as a fix, you have to right click on your flex project --> select properties, and set the compiler options to "-locale en_US" as per below



Sigh!, i never thought being a English man would be considered a minority group

Posted by Mark At 20:17:18 Location London | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category skillsmatter
Here is the results of another skillsmatters free talk, this one on HTML5 and CC3 and was presented by www.brucelawson.co.uk (@brucel )

Bruce was an excellent speaker and gave an amazing 101 session using only notepad++ which was nice (I have personally been accused recently of missing out the basics so its good to see how it should be done), you have all heard so much on this subject before, that I'm just going to bullet point the bits i took away from the session,

- He was at some pains to point out what HTML5 was and what it was not (ie its not another way of saying Web 3.0 or “just not flash”),

- He was definite on the point that HTML5 WILL NOT KILL FLASH, but it will provide people with a choice for a lot of functions that currently you can only do with flash.

- There was a lot of emphasis on coping with screen readers and making content easier for computers to parse intelligently and how HTML5 is better for that.

- Quite a lot of the tags have been redefined e.g. small = “small print in a contract” rather than “little in size”

- Most of HTML5 is JavaScript (50%+ of the spec)

- HTML5 does not care about quotes (its in the spec not just lazy)

- HTML5 does not care about case (its in the spec not just lazy)

- HTML5 ignores stuff it does know (like CSS)

- It has things like sliders and calendar pickers built in (its things like this that makes people look at it as an alternative to flash)

- Validation is build in (fairly crude but very like a jquery validator and he did say it would get better)

- The video element is really rather good (you can tab in and out and make it easily grow and shrink etc. which is hard to do on flash), but the much published codex problems are quite real, you have to currently encode 2 versions of your video: ogv and mp4 (this was caused by apple and nokia), webm could hopefully put a end to the problem. for old browsers you can use the current embed element


On CSS3

- CSS3 is Amazing!!! (transform and transition and webfonts)

- On CSS3 currently you have to put a “display:block” for ALL HTML5 elements you are using, as no browser currently supports them.

- The CSS5 media functions are really cool but I'm not going to talk about them as Ben Poole has just used them in anger and I'm hoping a bit of peer pressure will force him to write a proper bloody blog entry.

- Layered background are amazing (with good png transparency)

- Arrrrh!! where was background size when i wanted it for my client recently!!


Code Snippit
to make IE8 and below apply CSS to HTML5 you have to add the following:
document.createElement('xxxxx'); for each html5 tag you use, e.g.

document.createElement('header');
document.createElement('nav');

and you have to include a “body” element some where on the page

Links

Recommended validator: html5.validator.nu
To see how well you code parses running it by: http://www.nvda-project.org/
The Best place for free webfonts: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

Posted by Mark At 22:52:22 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Mark Barton Flex Google API
I accept your challenge Mr Barton and throw down my own gauntlet (though mine has been maimed by sword, squash rackets and more recently by cat)


You are to produce a Proof of concept using Flex and the Google docs API for spreadsheets to provide a calculation engine, data entered into flex is to be transferred to the spreadsheet and trigger a recalculation of said spreadsheet, the results is to be presented back and displayed on flex. This is to use the 3.0 API via Java (web services or blaze its your choice, though web services would be easier to port over to domino) and flex 4

Mad cackle!!

Posted by Mark At 15:52:45 Location | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category Future Mouse Hardware
My future mouse arrived last week from http://www.futuremouse.com/, and has spent this week being used as a travel mouse on trains and a replacement mouse for my tracker ball at work, on all counts it has passed with flying colours, if you treat is as a pen it feels natural to use and needs no learning curve, i did discover a slight cramping in my hand after using it all day, mind you I get that with a normal pen. it possesses it own rechargeable battery and its tiny usb transmitter that doubles as a magnetic dock and charging point ( 30secs charge = 1 hour use, 90mins charge = 2-4 weeks use). One of the most gratefully received features is the complete lack of software to install, advanced features such as reorientation of 'up' and setting the “only work when being held” are set via button combinations and watching the LEDS, for a Linux user who constantly misses out on the advanced features for consumer level products this is very very welcome. the mouse manages to squeeze in a full size and silent scroll wheel which is joy to use, it also comes with a stick on mouse pad for the bottom of you laptop but which seems mainly designed for the Mac or other laptops whos touch pads are not depressed, so I'm not using that, in a real life test i found I could share a GNER train table with another laptop user with no problems despite the laptops being only inches away, but for a travel mouse (and an expensive one at that), its strange it does not come with a little sleeve or draw bag to be carried in, (i ended up using the one that is supplied for the tips on the power money explorer).





Pro's
-Tiny (and i mean really tiny)
-Light (its hard to believe there is a 4 week rechargeable battery in there
-Excellent build quality
-Works in very small spaces
-Truly OS agnostic

Cons
-No travel pouch
-The transmitter/receiver does not clip securely into the mouse (yes you can attach it to the charge point but it always comes off when banged round in my bag)
-Expensive (but good values for money)

Conclusion
I am very pleased with the mouse, and it really does everything it says on the tin, and even if it does not replace my logitech trackman as my main pointer, it beats the hell out of the track pad, and turns “Oh F**K I have forgotten my mouse” to “Oh i have the spare mouse in my pack”.

Posted by Mark At 20:58:27 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Good Feedback Clients
The following quote was in a clients internal quarterly director's update on the subject of Client Wins:

"Winning this lead confirms **** as a major player in the US airline market. The aviation team cited the new Claims Online tracking system, as well as " ... "as some of the key reasons for this win."

I and Mark Barton wrote the system and its really nice to make a difference to a companies bottom line, this will be the third big difference I helped make during my time at my current main client, it feels good, after all even contractors have pride in their work .

Posted by Mark At 20:15:25 Location London | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category MyEclipse Eclipse Spring flex flash
For those of us who use the rather pleasant MyEclipse IDE (a commercial version of the Eclipse IDE as recommended by Matt White) and in particular "MyEclipse for Spring" we all have been waiting for their 8.6 update to take a look at the new MVC scaffolding feature which gives a comparable feature set to Spring Roo (basically giving the auto code generating and framework building that i remember people calling RAD, but without requiring a dedicated platform such as Domino),.

Anyway I installed the update which promptly broke my IDE in a major way, with it refusing to start and giving a

java.lang.RuntimeException: No application id has been found

error, which in the end turned out to be caused by my flash builder 4 plug-in, ah!, a bit of fiddling and i got it working again, but still it was not a happy ferret, so i just rolled back the VMWare image it lives on and continued as normal,

why is this noteworthy?

Well as i have had such success the powermonkey lot I thought a quick tweet to @skywaysoftware, would do no harm, quick as a flash I got a request from them for the error message and if possible the log, i sent the error message, and within a few hours the following link was sent to me: here, the full text is below

"For those with MyEclipse for Spring 8.5 who have the Adobe Flash Builder plug-in installed, there is an issue when upgrading to MyEclipse for Spring 8.6 that will prevent the IDE from restarting. It can be both avoided (and corrected) by removing the com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.nl1.link from the dropins folder.

If you are upgrading, remove the file before starting ME4S, then perform the 8.5 to 8.6 upgrade. After that is complete, shut down ME4S, re-add the Adobe file, and restart.

If you have upgraded and ME4S won't start, remove the Adobe drop-in, start ME4S, then stop and re-add the drop-in."

A nice useable work round, while they sort the problem out, and one that works,it didn't cost them much and kept me as a loyal customer,

LEARN BIG BUSINESS, LEARN!!!!

Now I'm up and going again, prepare for a review of MVC scaffolding Vs Spring Roo Vs Traditional Rad (in a few days).

Posted by Mark At 00:34:45 Location London | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category Flex London User Group
Mark Barton, Duncan and myself attended the Flex London User Group last night (August meet), its been a while since its been run, so it was a perfect time to pile in, it was hosted at skillsmatter's new place up near the barbican so the normal clean well appointed facilities (coffee/tea, wifi, etc etc) were provided.

The speaker was Mark Doherty who writes the http://www.flashmobileblog.com/ and unsurprisingly his talk was on the latest updates on the flash and air players with particular reference to mobile devices, all new stuff to me, if you head over to his site he has videos of all the stuff he demoed and you can even watch the podcast of it all here ,which saved me doing screen shots and writing loads of details, but some key point for me were:

- They now have remote debugging on the air platform on at least android.
- Multiple flash/flex instances now have a priority order so that when a CPU is pressed for power it can give all the effort to the in-focus app while lowering things like screen refresh (but not back ground stuff like audio).
- Due to different vendors using different chips, the accelerometer and geo locator functions vary from device to device.
- You can swap target runtime at anytime rather than only on project creation.

and some little useful bits are:

- If you press and hold on a flash app in a browser on a mobile device, a mobile menu pops up with options like full screen.
- The new TFL (Text Framework Layout) is very heavy on mobiles, avoid if you can.
- 128 dithering in photoshop really helps make the image smaller and is good for mobile apps.

Everyone was very friendly and I met some good people, unfortunately I left after the talk, next time I think I will do it properly and pop down the pup with the die hard's as that is where the real learning and fun begins. but it was a good beginning.

Oh, also discovered on the groups home page a comment from Bill Buchan and if thats not an endorsement I don't know what is :) .

Posted by Mark At 21:26:27 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Drobo review
After a couple of month drooling, and feeble attempts to be good, I have taken the plunge and purchased a Drobo FS (in the uk, Amazon is the cheapest after you have taken into consideration Amazon prime membership and lack of hassle ), as a long time user of both 1st and 2nd gen drobos and drobo shares, I was hoping for great things from this all in one model, and I was not disappointed.

After the normal pleasant unboxing that comes with a drobo, and a glance at the quick start instructions, I'm all plugged in a ready to go (lets be fair its only 2 plugs)




As I already had the drobo dashboard installed and upto date (via the normal alert notifications) for my other drobos I was surprised that the drobo FS was not detected, it was not till I installed the version that came on the disk that i discovered that upto date is a relative thing, but to be fair the instructions were very firm that software was to be installed first.


I would have like to have been able to move my drives across all at once, but as i wanted to get rid of the 2 TB shares imposed upon me by the droboshare, i have had to copy all my files across manually, doing this showed Initial speeds that were not impressive but this turned out to be my naff old 100mb hub, after i moved to a gigabit switch, then world was a better place. (about 20 MB/Sec at file transfer while streaming a cartoon from it to another computer). it does seem that the new limit is 12TB on the drive size as that's the size it is displaying when you map to it, which would signify that is supports individual drives up to 3TB in size ( 4 x 3TB = 12 TB, with the minimum of one drive lost to redundancy), which would in turn seem to imply that as it is using EXT3 that a 4kb block size is being used, and therefore a individual file size limit of 2TB

As always with drobos the Western Digital greens proved to be the best drives by a long way, being quiet and cool with out as far as i have ever experienced costing anything in speed.

I should really use the Drobo Apps more and they have a good cata log of them now, but I have computers for that kind of thing, i use the drobos as a secure way of keeping a S**t load of data on the network securely and hassle free, and this they do (even if they do cost a bit).

Pro's
- Proper steel case
- On/off button (at long bloody last)
- 2 Tb share limitation lifted!
- Much faster - in both transfer and raid build/repair
- Multi user behaviour far improved as is security
- Lots of useful little improvements that show they have thought about it - such as the ability to dim the led lights

Con's
- Power supply is now a brick, and based on the heat it gives off, a vampire brick at that
- Bit nosier that the 1st and 2nd Gen
- Slow to start with large shares 4TB+ (unproven, but a feeling)
- Still no true web interface, you still need a none VMware windows or Mac to set the darn thing up. (no linux grrrr)

Not quite perfect, but defantly a liner improvement from the drobo share, recommended.

Posted by Mark At 19:17:07 Location London | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category Fitness
A feeble effort all round this week, don't bother even reading

First person to win 250 squash games
Kieran: 50 Games
Mark: 79 Games
(1 point head start on a game for every 10 games the other person is ahead)
(we also play by "you have to WIN a game, genuine mistakes on game points are 'let' ")

Only 1 match played and we took it in turns to win games, and it seems even the case for points, if it wasn't for the sweat soaked shirts and pain filled hobbling it would seem as if we are not trying

First person to loose 2 stone
Kieran ( Initially 15 Stone, 8 pounds) : 14' 10"
Mark ( Initially 16 Stone, 8 pounds) : 16' 7"

No fencing yet and no change in weight, the same this week for the evil Green, not helped by my parents both achevingting their ideal weight and looking fab, sod this I'm off for a take away

Posted by Mark At 18:44:34 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Flex User Group London
The Adobe Flex London User Group (an evening starting at 18:30) is starting back up again, hosted by skillsmatter in central north London (next to the barbican) first meet on the 2nd of August, its free, you can register Here. I will be there, so I hope will Mark Barton and a few more Domino people

Note: This it not treacherous to Domino or false advertising (if you have reached here via planetlotus). I have long held the opinion that any thing that can be glued to Domino to make it look good or expand its functionality is something that should be pursued also I have learnt much from the Lotus LUGs I have attended and hope to learn the same from the pure flex boys ....so there

Posted by Mark At 22:44:10 Location London | Permalink | Comments (3)