OpenLaszlo

Today I started studying OpenLaszlo.

• I was impressed by the learn in ten minutes explorer which allows you to play around and see the result. I wonder why MM didnot provide something similar with their Flex explorer.
• The container and its children are repeated automatically when the datapath points to an array of elements.
• Data access is XML based in Laszlo and I was interested to see their syntax for accessing the sub-nodes as I was not very successful and the way it can be done in Flex. I was happy to note the absolute and relative way of specifying the datapath properties as it helps a great deal to change only the relavent parent property without changing all the children.
  I have not yet tried E4X support being provided in Flex. I need to test it soon to compare the two.
• Creating user classes and derived classes in Laszlo is another cool feature which I liked. Does Flex allow a similar feature ? I have come across extending Flex framework classes in MXML but not creating user classes. I need to exploer this too.
• Defining events under object-orientation is confusing because it is different from defining attributes and defining methods. It should have been named defining event handlers.
  

I visited the company site too. The internet consumer/user facts presented there as a background for RIA development is very interesting. Though I have been one of those users being a developer I have never thought about the possible solution. To advance on the technical ladder which I plan to do as part of my long term carrier plan I need to develop the habit and ideas to have a look out for these kind of problems and their solutions.

I keep remembering a very good peom repeated very often my grand father.

What the other folk can do,
Why with patience may not you,
Only keep this rule in view,
Try, Try, Try again.

Product : http://www.openlaszlo.org
Company: http://www.laszlosystems.com

Charts in Flex

From the first day of the week I decided to dedicate the last half to one hour of the day to learn something new and interesting. So this week I started with learning Charts in Flex. I searched on google for a tutorial and it happened to point out this on MM site itself.

I followed the tutorial and was really amazed at its capabilites. So little code but so much of functionality. I was impressed by the animation effect added in the end. May be my Maya background is playing a part here :-)

Earlier while working on my own mutual fund investment performance tracker in C# I had searched the net for some free C# code for graph. I found ZGraph. I was impressed by its working too. Now I would like to develop the same app with Flex and compare them. But they may not happen early because of the work load and holidays coming up !

I will play around with charts more in Flex and test other RIA products to see what do they provide and what not.

Someone against homoeopathy

Millions of people get cured by homoeopathy all over the world and still some foolish people try to argue that it is not so. What follows is a article I came across yesterday.

I don't know why don't they conduct research on millions of people suffering from alleviate. I am sure even if they conduct one there are people and companies around to make sure those articles do not get published. I have seen many of my relatives suffering at the hands on the allopathic doctor.

Even if homoeopathy doesn't work at least it doesn't harm anyone like allopathy does.

So why not leave it alone and go after allopathy which does harm ?!

I wish this professor gets a very good disease which cannot be cured by any other medicinal line and comes to beg at the hands of homoeopathy for a cure or may be make him keep drinking water all his life as mentioned by himself.

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Professor savages homeopathy

By Robin McKie The Observer London:

Millions of people use it to deal with illnesses ranging from asthma to migraine. Prince Charles believes it is the answer to many of the evils of modern life. But now Britain’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst of Exeter University, has denounced homeopathy as ineffective. “Homeopathic remedies don’t work,” he told The Observer. “Study after study has shown it is simply the purest form of placebo. You may as well take a glass of water than a homeopathic medicine.” Nor is Ernst’s disdain confined to homeopathy. Chiropractic, which involves spine manipulation to treat illnesses, and the laying on of hands to “cure” patients, are equally invalid, he says. Not surprisingly, his views and his studies have provoked furious reactions. Chiropractors and homeopaths have written in droves to Exeter to denounce him. But now the scourge of alternative medicine says he is going to have to quit because Exeter will no longer support him or his department. “They have never provided me with the money they originally promised me. Now we have been told in no uncertain terms that this department is going to close.” The university denied the charge. “Professor Ernst’s department has enough money to go on for a couple of more years,” said a spokesman. “We are trying to raise cash. It is premature to talk of closure.”

Ernst’s department was created in 1993 when Exeter was given £1.5 million by construction magnate Maurice Laing. When accepting these funds, Ernst said the university promised to raise the same amount again. “They never did,” he added. Ernst, then a professor of rehabilitation medicine in Vienna, took the job to bring scientific rigour to the study of alternative medicines, an approach that has made him a controversial figure in the field. An example is provided by Ernst’s study of arnica, given as a standard homeopathic treatment for bruising. Arnica or placebo “We arranged for patients after surgery to be given arnica or a placebo,” he said. “They didn’t know which they were getting. It made no difference. They got better at the same rate, whether they got arnica or the placebo. And arnica is a classic homeopathic remedy. It doesn’t work, however.” In another study, Ernst got five homeopaths to examine children with asthma. “Children are supposed to respond better than adults to homeopathy, and asthma is said to be particularly responsive to homeopathic treatments,” he said. “However, again we found no evidence homeopathy worked.”

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Search Engine wars

After browser wars it seems to be days of search engine wars. http://beta.previewseek.com is making rounds as better than www.google.com.

I tried searching a solution for my windows 2000 sp4 problem on both. I got good results only in google. I tried searching for Deccan Herald e-paper which has been newly started. It was the first result in google and I could not trace it in previewseek. May be because they are in Beta or may be because I used to google I will continue to use google for some more time :-)

Windows 2000 SP4 problems...

I installed SP4 for Windows 2000 on my home computer and it won't boot up!

I searched the internet (better late then never :-( ) to find that many users have faced similar problems. I found various solutions including bad sectors on hard-disk, ESCD problems, card problems, USB problems. But to my bad luck nothing worked for me. Even tried renaming the mup.sys file which was the last one to get loaded. But no luck.

Today I want to try the setup/recovery CD and see how it goes.

I will always hate Windows and its service packs.

Wait for a frame !

I started working with Flash only after I joined MM to work on Flex and today I encountered my first frame problem ! When you set the dataProvider or selectedIndex of a control you cannot access the seletedItem immediately :-( You need to wait for a frame.

The requirement stems from the fact that it may be required to fetch the data before selectedItem can point to the correct item.

In the past while reading about improving performance I have read about lazy evaluation where in you defer the computation till the value is required. Does waiting for a frame fall into this category ? I feel it does because the evaluation of selectedItem is deferred and user is allowed to change dataProvider / selectedIndex (which may be the case mostly) without evaluating selectedItem.

In the past I also noticed a performance improvemnt being done by increasing the frame rate to a high value for a brief period of time and then using the normal frame rate value otherwise.

From C++ world to Script world

I have been a C, C++ programmer from my day number one in software industry (1994 to 2005).

After joining Macromedia I entered the world of ActionScript when I started working on Flex.

Do I miss all the features I enjoyed in C++ like multiple inheritence, operator overloading etc etc?

Not much. May be because I am developing a framework or may be I am getting used to interfaces now !

Now that I have been working on AS for nearly 5-6 months I feel both have their positive and negative points or should I say positive and positive points :-)

One of the strange new things I faced was the equal (==) and strictly equal operator (===).
The first one checks for value equality and second one checks for value and type equality.

You can find a discussion about this and the problem it can create here.

One week into Adobe

It is one week + one day at Adobe. Some changes have happened and some changes are at to happen. Over the week end we shifted to adobe mail system. Lot of mailing problems for many people. I have been lucky enough not to get into any trouble.

The password policy is very strict and I had to spend some energy to get a password which will be accepted. It may soon come to a point where in I have to write down the password somewhere so that I won't forget it ! Should I blame the hackers out there for all this trouble ?

Flex development work continues. It is sometimes challenging and at other times painful to work on a framework. The number of things one needs to consider while implementing anything can be depressing ! And while making any small change you need to think several times to cover all use cases to make sure nothing else will be broken :-)

Met a colleague from my previous company Tata Elxsi today. Harsha is currently working in Japan in Cannon. He is working on printer drivers. Learnt a bit about English language in Japan. They have created a separate script to write English words and they have made it in such a way that no word can be correctly represented for pronunciation ! He told no one seems to know the reason behind the creation of the new script when it has such a serious drawback :-)

QA vs Dev

Dec 8 2005

If QAs are given a goal to find n number of bugs per day and Dev is given a goal to fix n number of bugs per day (without injections!) how can both achieve their goals ?

I was writing about this topic yesterday and today I received an answer from a new Messenger friend of mine Rakesh Reddy from Hyderabad.

Newton's Laws to the Software World

Law 1. Every Software Engineer continues his state of chatting or forwarding mails unless he is assigned work by external unbalanced manager.

Law 2. The rate of change in the software is directly proportional to the payment received from client and takes place at the quick rate as when deadline force is applied.

Law 3 . For every Use Case Manifestation there is an equal but opposite Software Implementation.

Bonus Law 4. Bugs can neither be created nor be removed from software by a developer. It can only be converted from one form to another. The total number of bugs in the software always remains constant.

I think the bonus law answers my question !

Second day at Adobe...

This is my second day of office at Adobe after Macromedia became Adobe. Yesterday we had a all hands meet where Naresh Gupta gave a presentation of the organizational strucutre which will be directly affecting us. Sankalp Saxena also took the opportunity to officially hand over the MM Bangalore office to Naresh.

Browser wars

Just got a mail from one of my colleagues about browser wars taking one more step ahead. There are scripts available now to prompt users to use FireFox instead of IE.

Are people against MS success or MS policies or MS way of marketing or MS way of driving monopoly ? What are they really fighting against ?

What ever one does in this world there are always people who support you and people who are against you. Is it just to do with mind set or something else?

I have tried to use FireFox but normally I fall back to IE after some days because some of the sites I regualary visit like www.mutualfundsindia.com cannot be viewed properly in FireFox. For a bug reported on similar issue in www.ebay.com the mozilla developers have replied that it is a problem with the site itself as they are using IE specific tags in the pages !

I am sure with the above script making rounds on the internet may also conribute to increase in number of sites with similar pages !