Den Of Ubiquity » Software Development

Former FEMA Chief Michael Brown has a new job sells Snake Oil

ijonas — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:10:24 +0000

This is funny because its classic case of desigining a black magic product thats scans all the databases in the world in-place using its adaptable plugin modules that enables it to extract hidden terrorist messages from your mum\’s recipe spreadsheet in her Documents folder and correlate with credit card spending in Indonesia, via the included plugin module that sits atop of the VISA global credit card database.

My favourite line in the pitch is…. and I guarantee that I\’m not taking it out of context:

because its distributed, its totally secure

Nuts! As someone working for a company where writing connectors into external systems is a constant drain on development resource, leaving data in-place is not a guaranteed best practice.

Still goes to show… You could be building complete and utter nonsense and get a discredited person like Michael Brown to sell it as snake oil.

Oh what a world….

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/08/PID_012101/Podtech_Michael_Brown_on_InferX.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/3766/former-fema-chief-michael-brown-on-data-mining&totalTime=832000&breadcrumb=18aaed5837da4ebead6f094f122e0d88]

Compiling ActionScript 3 Corelib compiled for Flex 3 Moxie & Adobe AIR

ijonas — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:37:16 +0000

I’ve been playing around with Adobe AIR and Flex 3 Beta 1… I reserve opinion on these technologies because I haven’t used them enough. But I thought I’d leave a wee tip…

One thing that’s really useful to Flex 3/AIR coders is the ActionScript 3 CoreLib (AS3CoreLib). It contains MD5, JSON, and some other really useful ‘routines’.

Following are guidelines on getting AS3CoreLib compiled for Flex 3 Moxie.

First of all you need a properly installed recent copy of Apache Ant, meaning the ant script needs to be on your system path (environment variable).

Download the corelib-.90.zip from the downloads section on the project site and unzip the contents into a folder, which I’ll reference as .

Open up the build.properties in the /build folder in your favourite text editor and amend the following properties to reflect your Flex 3 setup:

flex2sdk.bin.dir
flex2sdk.lib.dir

For example my Flex 3 Builder is installed in “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3″ . So my amended build.properties file contains the following two lines:

flex2sdk.bin.dir = C:/Program Files/Adobe/Flex Builder 3/sdks/moxie/bin
flex2sdk.lib.dir = C:/Program Files/Adobe/Flex Builder 3/sdks/moxie/frameworks/libs

Now open up a command prompt and navigate to the /build folder. The Flex 3 Beta install on Windows provides a pre-configured command-prompt with environment variables setup to point to the bundled Flex 3 SDK. You can find the shortcut to this command prompt in the Adobe programme group.

At the command prompt type:

ant

which should kickstart the build process and if everyone runs ok, you should find a corelib.swc in /bin.

Finally you can add corelib.swc as a library via the Build Path dialogue box in your Flex 3 project properties.

Hope it helps. Good luck.

Hoopla

ijonas — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:58:07 +0000

As part of the Upstart Hoopla! project I’ve started programming in Ruby, specifically using RubyOnRails(RoR). RoR an interesting programming language/framwork that is obviously the darling of the industry at the moment.
Its easy to see why… RoR cuts through so much of the redtape that’s associated with frameworks such as J2EE, or even .Net. The Ruby language itself is bit tougher to get to grips with. It has some mannerism that can be currently best described as strange, compared to the stuff I’m used to, i.e. Python & Java. I say “currently” because I’m still learning these mannerisms and fromwhat I’ve read its supposed to be an amazing programming language, once the penny drosp.
Upstart Hoopla is at the time of this writing a blog using the Typo blogging engine (as is this site I might add). I’ve chosen the Typo engine as the foundation for the Upstart project because the code’s in excellent shape and is relatively easy to manipulate into the functonality required for the project.
Hence I’m forking the Typo engine into the Hoopla engine so that it may provide amongst other things:

multiple-user signon and registration
‘related article’ functionality
relevance-based browsing of tags via user-profiles and a snazzy UI
podcast-hosting via Amazon S3

Once these features are made available and have proven to be robust, I’m considering republishing under the same open source license as the Typo engine. The other option is to get in touch with the Typo development team and suggest introducing the additional Hoopla functionality as add-ons or plugins.