News

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.

The Craigslist desktop is a cool use of Adobe's AIR. It keeps all of your searches around so that you can run them again to see what's new. I find the user interface a little too 'transitiony', but otherwise I like the app and I'll continue to use it as I need to move offices.

Check this out. The video tag from HTML 5 written using Flash. Nice job guys!

I finished my third book for the year today. My sixth (or seventh) book overall depending on how you count. The book is called 'Building Media Sites' and it's a continuation of an article that I wrote for the O'Reilly Network that has been getting a lot of attention since it was first published.

This is a short book (~75 pages). It's the first book that I've written without having a publisher lined up. And really, any ideas there are welcome. I'll pitch it to the usual suspects, but if you have some alternative ideas I am all ears.

For it's size it's a pretty impressive piece of work. There is a lot of material in there on how to set up the site and debug it. There are several examples of video viewing applications written in Flex. There are AIR examples, including an uploader and a downloader. There is all of the code and step-by-step material on building cross-domain video widgets. There is even a chapter on building a mapping visualization with popup videos based on the Google Maps API for Flash.

I think short books are the way to go. Downloadable as PDF, with associated source code downloads. Honing in on a single subject with extensive detail around the application, how to extend it, debug it, put it into production and so on. With the package available for less than $20. Then with free updates provided by subscription.

Seems to me that this is the type of on-demand model people are looking for. I don't want to have to get in the car and burn the gas to get to Borders. Or what for a shipment from Amazon. I want the book, and particularly the code, right now. So that I can get started when I have the free-time. Which is usually right now and not several days from now.

I won the Flex article writing contest that SitePoint hosted. I've never won a content like this before. It's really exciting. I wanted to get that 3D configurators article out there and this was a cool way to do it. I can't wait to see it published.