Blogs

Comparing Files in Eclipse

To compare two files in Eclipse, first select them in the Flex Navigator with control-click.  Now right-click on one of the files, and the following context menu will appear.Select Compare With / Each Other.  A file comparison window will open.You...

EGovernment at the Legislature - From Emerald Isle to Emerald Slippers

Sean McGrath is writing a series around the design issues for KLISS (Kansas Legislative Information Services System) which his company is doing.

Gov 2.0 Week in Review

The past week's Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington showcased the culmination of months of planning, particularly the international nature of the movement towards open government and open data.

Data and simplicity can build the government platform

Tim O'Reilly and Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, had a wide-ranging discussion at this week's Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington D.C. Here's archived video and a breakdown of key insights from their chat.

The Watering Hole - Looks at Me Still Talking When There's Science to Do

The only hope that Portland has is that they are legendarily bad shots. Kinda like Imperial Storm Troopers

Four short links: 28 May 2010

The Intuition Behind the Fisher-Yates Shuffle -- this is a simple algorithm to randomize a list of things, but most people are initially puzzled that it is more efficient than a naive shuffling algorithm. This is a nice explanation of the logic behind it. Wikipedia and Inherent Open Source Bias -- a specific case of what I think of...

Writing Beyond Tech: Introducing Ripple Reader and Recorded "Bugville" Books

Last fall, all 15 of the original Bugville Critters books were released in a special "e" format for the beta of the Ripple Reader. Just recently, the Ripple team officially launched their Reader. If you are a parent with young...

Tim Berners-Lee on Data.gov.uk, open linked data and open standards

Tim Berners-Lee spoke at the Gov 2.0 Expo about open standards, the open web, and how to judge the success of open government efforts.

Four short links: 27 May 2010

Socorro: Mozilla's Crash Reporting System (Laura Thomson) -- We receive on our peak day each week 2.5 million crash reports, and process 15% of those, for a total of 50 GB. In total, we receive around 320Gb each day. Moving to a Hadoop-based system in the future, as they're limited by database and filesystem storage. DIY Atomic Force Microscopy...

Letting The Data Tell It's Own Story

In this post, I have decided to focus upon one of my favorite topics, data visualization. It all started when an old friend from high school posted a link indicating that this past January and April were the hotest ever recorded, according to a NASA data set. I want to avoid the political discussions associated with this topic, and rather allow the data to tell its own story through visualization using Adobe Flex. You could stare at a grid of data for hours, and never see the trends or intricacies that become obvious once you put the data into a visual format.

Venture capitalists do it. Why shouldn't philanthropists do it, too?

Our problems in education are too intense, funding is too thin and time too precious to take on duplicative efforts. We need to apply some of the same discriminating standards in our philanthropic Edu2.0 projects that we use in for-profit ones.

The Network Continues to Support Sustainability

The use of ICT to tackle climate issues is growing in sophistication, as well as the methods for tracking and measuring their effectiveness...

7 reasons to write in ActionScript

There seemed to be some disagreement about my previous post on InsideRIA about moving your Flex Components from MXML to an ActionScript only base. The article was intended to teach readers about the Flex Component lifecycle; but backed into...

@RIARadio Episode 15: Flex 4 Cookbook

Joshua Noble and Todd Anderson, Senior Software Engineer for Infrared5, join us to discuss the Flex 4 Cookbook and other projects they are currently working on.

Crisis Commons releases open source oil spill reporting

The new iPhone and Android apps will allow organizations responding to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to report on the go. "The cool thing about the app is that the photos and information will be open to anyone to use," said Heather Blanchard, co-founder of Crisis Commons.

Four short links: 26 May 2010

PSTSDK -- Apache-licensed code from Microsoft to read Outlook files. Covered by Microsoft's Open Specification Promise not to assert related patents against users of this library. Cheap Android Tablet -- not multitouch, but only $136. Good for hacking with in the meantime. (via Hacker News) Real-Time Collaborative Editing with Websockets, node.js, and Redis -- uses Chrome's websockets alternative to...

Flash And The City Recap

Flash And The City is over and I had an amazing time. This conference was special for many reasons so I thought I would share some of the highlights from this conference and talk about why it is so important to the Flash community.

Managing Developer Engagement Part 2

In my last entry I started discussing how to manage developer engagement. In the past this hasn't been an issue for me because my teams were around four or less developers and at that size it's much easier to know...

Flex 4 / PHP Data-Centric Solutions

Flash Builder provides server-side remoting technology supporting ASP.Net, J2EE, HTTP/REST and SOAP Web services, PHP, BlazeDS, ColdFusion, and LiveCycle Data Services for streaming data to and from a Flex 4 client. This article exclusively covers the PHP server-side remoting technology principally with Zend's PHP ZendFramework web application server. New RIA client and PHP sever development opportunities are emerging using the newly released Flash Builder 4 (Flex 4) IDE linked the recent additions to the Zend Framework PHP Web application server for messaging via Adobe Message Format 3 (AMF 3) serial data streams.

Facebook Open Graph: A new take on semantic web

In this guest post, Alex Iskold places Facebook's Open Graph Initiative within the context of past data-linking efforts. There's work to be done -- particularly on the "openness" front -- but this effort represents an important step toward weaving the the web of people and things.

Four short links: 25 May 2010

Lending Merry-Go-Round -- these guys have been Australia's sharpest satire for years, filling the role of the Daily Show. Here they ask some strong questions about the state of Europe's economies ... (via jdub on Twitter) What's Powering the Guardian's Content API -- Scala and Solr/Lucene on EC2 is the short answer. The long answer reveals the details of...

The iPad and immersive computing

Do you remember the first iPhone? Only a pathetically slow EDGE cell network, no GPS, 8 GB max, and worst of all, no app store? And still it changed everything about smartphones, and was the first step in what seems to be a new industry war. Would you buy one today? Oh, so limited -- never! I thought about that...

37signals' "Profitable and Proud"

I love the idea of this new blog series from 37signals, "Profitable and Proud." The first post covers Campaign Monitor, a mailing list service. Having used Campaign Monitor for several companies, I can attest that it's a fantastic service with extremely responsive employees -- like 37signals. The 37s are obviously furthering their point that venture capital isn't needed, and isn't...

AIR On Android Overview

At GoogleIO Adobe announced that Flash Player 10.1 and AIR for Android will be released for Android 2.2. However that wasn’t the only thing they announce. As of the 20th anyone can download the AIR Prerelease and begin testing...

Google vs Apple: Google doesn't need to win

Google does not have to dominate the smartphone business; they just have to make sure that there's an environment in which the business of selling ads thrives. While Apple wants to dominate smartphones, Google undeniably dominates online ad sales--and they clearly see ad placement on mobile as a huge opportunity. Conversely, failure to dominate mobile ad sales would be disastrous. At best, it would limit their potential; at worst, if we're heading for the end of the "desktop/laptop era", it could seriously threaten their core business.

What does Government 2.0 look like?

If you can't draw a picture, you don't understand the system you're trying to explain. Toward that end, Mark Drapeau breaks down his vision of Government 2.0 into easy-to-understand visual components.

Four short links: 24 May 2010

Google Documents API -- permissions, revisions, search, export, upload, and file. Somehow I had missed that this existed. Profile of Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange (Sydney Morning Herald) -- he draws no salary, is constantly on the move, lived for a while in a compound in Nairobi with other NGOs, and cowrote the rubberhose filesystem which offers deniable encryption. OpenPCR...

2 Years Later: Droppin' Malware on Your OSX, Carpet Bomb Style (and Then Some!)

2 years later from my original disclosure, the Carpet Bomb vulnerability on OSX remains un-patched.

The Watering Hole - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Haven't we learned anything from Japanese monster movies, folks?

Refactoring with Mat?

So, I lied last week when I said I wouldn't talk about the architecture of the example file I revamped to work with Maté. On further consideration, I thought it might be useful to go over it briefly, if only...

Managing Developer Engagement Part 1

As I detailed in a previous article my focus has shifted from a project-centric focus to a team and department -centric focus. A large part of my over all goals is to grow the larger team of developers, foster their...

Gov 2.0 Week in Review

Bernard Kouchner may have written that the "universal spirit of the Enlightenment should run through the new media" but this week, the zeitgeist of the government information revolution online was powered by open data.

Ebook Deal of the Day

There is a special offer going on today. You can O'Reilly Ebooks for only $9.99 including the new Flex 4 Cookbook that I was a part of. :-) Here are the details. Free to Choose: Ebook Deal of the Day...

My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy

In a recent Inc Magazine live chat, I found myself, somewhat surprisingly even to me defending Facebook regarding their ongoing and evolving privacy policy. Here's what I said: The essence of my argument is that there's enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions - asking ourselves when...

App contests are unlocking government innovation

Peter Corbett has helped usher in a wave of development innovation within government by spearheading a number of app contests. In this interview, Corbett looks at the surprising success of the contest model and offers guidance -- and a few warnings -- for organizations considering their own innovation contests.

Open space data can improve lives (and save birds)

Jeanne Holm, the former chief knowledge architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discusses her efforts to build an an international ontology for space data.

The solutions to our big problems are in the network

Massive issues around the environment, social change, and worldwide economies feel intractable, but "Sustainable Network" author Sarah Sorensen sees solutions to our biggest problems in something many of use every day: the global communications network.

You may not be writing software, but someday you'll probably write like the people who do

Hugh McGuire's post yesterday raised some great points about what a really effective web-friendly distributed and inherently social writing platform should look like. When it comes to the software tools...

Four short links: 21 May 2010

Infrastructures (xkcd) -- absolutely spot-on. The Michel Thomas App: Behind the Scenes (BERG) -- not interesting to me because it's iPhone, but for the insight into the design process. The main goal here was for me to do just enough to describe the idea, so that Nick could take it and iterate it in code. He’d then show me...

Reflections on Teaching ActionScript

I've been teaching ActionScript for going on seven years now. I've been teaching JavaScript for the same amount of time but teaching ActionScript has been a different experience. Each iteration of the technology has been not only been a syntactical...

AIR for Android Public Beta

Adobe announced AIR for Android Public Beta this morning at Google I/O. To join this beta program, please visit https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/android/

Make-offs: DIY indie innovations

With Maker Faire Bay Area scheduled for this weekend, we take a look at makers who are using low-cost, open-source tools to create sophisticated projects and experiments.

Four short links: 20 May 2010

People are Walking Architecture -- presentation by Matt Jones of BERG, taking a new lens to this AR/ubicomp/whatever-it-is-today world. "[Mobile phones are] a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities ...." Lexicalist -- insight into geographic and age distribution of language use, based on Twitter data. (via Language Log) Advanced Visualization Techniques -- nice overview...

The Watering Hole - The Brute Force Approach

Diverting rogue asteroids, capping oil spills, is there anything that nukes CAN'T do?

Google I/O 2010 Keynote Online

For those of you who aren't able to attend the Google I/O 2010 conference (like me), you're in luck! The entire first day keynote is online, and there are some pretty interesting announcements. HTML5 is the big push, and I've got to admit some of what they showed looked slick, and looks to provide for a bright future for Chrome OS.

An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform

This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on Wordpress.

What I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention

The health care technology track at the Open Source convention touches on core areas for improvement: patient-centered care, the use of mobile devices, administrative efficiencies, and the collection, processing, and display of statistics to improve health care

InsideRIA's NXNEi Conference Pass Giveaway

InsideRIA has two passes to give away to the upcoming NXNEi conference in Toronto, June 15 and 16, 2010! We'll be selecting two of our community members who will each win one free pass. Increase your chance of winning!...

Adobe Adds HTML5 Support for Dreamweaver CS5

Some news coming out of Google I/O concerning Adobe's adoption and support for HTML5. Adobe has announced the immediate availability of an HTML5 pack extension for Adobe Dreamweaver CS5. Availability of this HTML5 Pack extension is the direct result...

Going back to Portland

In my opinion, not since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press has their been as dramatic change in the distribution of the written word as we are experiencing right now.