I've been doing a lot of running lately and an iPhone application called RunKeeper has really helped. Here is a recent run around the neighborhood:

The application automatically tracks time and distance and even does complex training patterns. Plus it reads off the time, distance and pace as you are running. So you don't have to constantly look at your wrist.

The second issue of the Gates/Seinfled story has come out. This one clocks in at four minutes.

I kinda get what they are trying to do. They are trying to soften Gates and Microsoft. I think that's a good idea. But this particular commercial runs the risk of backfiring on them. The tone borders on being arrogant, for me at least, which probably means that it's really arrogant to most people.

I've put together a simple data filtering library for Flex. The project has the library, the code and two examples that show some data which you can filter using standard Flex controls, which is then display in data grids, graphs and tile lists.

You can order a free copy of my book Getting Started With Flex 3 right from Adobe. Sweet!

I can look over someone's code and tell if they are a slumming math guy. In other words, the guy who has a PhD in some esoteric math field, but now, for some reason, has to demean himself to coding for a living. Here are a few clues I see in the code:

• You use i, j, k, l as variable names, liberally.
• Your objects have no clear separation of responsibility.
• You pass way too much between functions as member variables, globals and so on.
• You don't make any use of reasonable language features like access controls, statics, constants, or anything like that.
• Your indenting looks like you just smoked some meth.
• You have no problem have three lines of continuous equation with no temporary variables.
• All of your data structures are arrays where each index has a special meaning.
• You have functions to convert between zero based arrays and one based arrays.
• All of the variables in your functions or methods are defined at the top regardless of when they are used.

Sorry to rant. I just spent an hour on a code fragment cleaning it up where each step I took I would run it again, see if I got the same result, then clean a little more and so on.

Spore is one of those legendary games that looks great in the demos takes forever to get into production. A portion of it, the creature creator is out as a demo. I'm downloading it now for Mac and will let you know what it's like.

My SitePoint article went live last week! Nobody bothered to mention it, but that's ok.

This 280 slides site is amazing. It's impressive what they have done using cross platform JS. I know personally how much of a pain in the butt this stuff can be. But when I tried this out first on Safari it worked without a hitch. Though the CSS load caused some of the borders to come up a little slowly. That's to be expected though, they can't do anything about that.

I'll be interested to see where Microsoft goes with IronRuby. We tend to think of Microsoft as this big monolithic entity, but it's really not. There are disparate groups, many of which are doing some very cool things. IronPython and IronRuby are examples of that. I'm not quite sure what the strategic direction is, but I think it's neat all the same.

O'Reilly is hosting a Flex cookbook cook-off with tickets to MAX as a grand prize. Have some fun. Put up a couple of recipes.