A few people Twittered and blogged about Joshua Bell's solo in a Metro station. Most I read mourned humanity's lack of ability to recognize beauty around us, being too enraptured with our own trivial problems. I concurred and moved on. Next day, I thought about it a few times while waiting on compiles or sitting in traffic (omg , I'm driving again!). The more I thought about it, the more irritated I got. The whole thing just didn't sit right with me. It really seemed pompous, actually.

I have everything I need on a Mac now after finally getting svnX to work, and thus justifying it's existence (still doesn't work with Google Code, though... must need more practice). Subversion client? Check. All that's left is a diffing tool that is comparable to BeyondCompare for the PC. I hit Google, and read this blog entry as well as every single comment. Subclipse? Negative, Ghostrider. I do not work from my code base. SVN goes into 1 folder and my local copy into another.

Modules don't extend Application, but rather Module, which is basically a Container. As such, you can't "preview" modules in Flex Builder like you can Applications. You instead have to load them into a ModuleLoader. A ModuleLoader has to then be placed in at least an Application container. Therefore, you can't really develop with Modules in Flex without using Ant. You can, but it sucks. Ant, the build automation tool that comes with Eclipse, allows you to define a bunch of XML tags that encapsulate a task.

Joe Berkovitz has an entry here about a Java class in the free Flex 2 SDK that exposes how big each of your compiled ActionScript classes are in a given SWF. When an ActionScript class is compiled, it goes through a series of steps to become bytecode, a smaller size, more machine friendly format called "abc". So, your 6k ValueObject could become 1k, not including the additional LZW "ZIP" compression that the Flash Player has built in for it.

Alessandro posted a Flash Lite 3 video example shown at a financial meeting. Sharp-eyed Zeh wondered if he saw a motion blur. A lot of video codecs will compensate for fast-motion by blurring so you don't get the hardcore pixelation from a non-keyframe, and all in all smaller file size. However, the phone ISN'T moving and since that appears to be some form of component with dynamic content in it, that means they couldn't have done it by hand (say, using Photoshop or After Effects). I say it's a motion blur.

Dale and I played some mad tennis on the Wii. The next morning, both of us had a majorly sore right arm. I realized if I did that for 3 months I'd become Reggie from Lady in the Water. 'Course, if you're planning on hunting scrunts, there is no better training! Definitely plan on getting one for my birthday since I am really disappointed in the game selection for my XBox 360.

Shuriken is an open-source component framework for Flash Lite 2.x I started on back in September of 2006. I've uploaded some examples that showcase the different components that you can use from Shuriken as well as 2 example Flash Lite 2.1 applications. You can read the why's and how's at the project page. You are welcome to contribute to the project as well via writing code, writing docs, and/or whatever. Any feature / component requests, we're all ears.

I'm sitting in the terminal with her majesty at Atlanta airport, fixin' to board my flight to Los Angeles, California and then from there, fly to Sydney, Australia for the WebDU 2007 conference. This year is different because both her majesty and I are speaking, and she's toting something rad. It'll be 5 hours to LA with a 1 hour layover there, and then 14 1/2 hours to Oz.

I get a lot of emails regarding Flex & Flash opportunities, most on-site with no telecommuting options. These usually come in on average 1 every day. Some days I'll get 4, 2 for the same job, and some days none. As I started exploring employment opportunities back in November, it didn't really take long for the recruiter emails to start rolling in.

You know you've been coding in Flash Lite too long when you see this in your diff tool for a Flex file... BWAHAHAHA!