Flex module for Apache and IIS released on Labs

Something which I wanted to happen from day one I started learning about Flex.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Module_for_Apache_and_IIS

Web 2.0 What is it?

I heard about Web 2.0 in a Adobe internal Tech conference at San Jose. I was so sleepy due to jet lag that I couldn't concentrate on the presentation. Today I found a reference to a good article about it from Kevin Lynch blog. Need to find time to read it !

Why do people blog?

I heard about blogging (please believe me) for the first time when I joined Macromedia in July 2005. I created my own blog after Manish sent out a mail to a group of people. As it is with any habit it is difficult to start and it is more difficult to get rid of it. And till now I have been able to blog only now and then but not regularly though I keep getting ideas on which I want to blog.

One such idea is : Why do people blog?

• Is it to share there thoughts?
• Is it the constant desire to communicate?
• Is it to develop friendship with people around the world?
• Is it to reduce feeling of loneliness which always creeps into once mind ?

Why, why do people blog?

4pm revelations

Daily around 4pm we go for coffee/tea/snacks. Few weeks back Ajit started a conversation saying he got thinking about religion,marriage after reading Anjali's blog about religion.

All people in their mid twenties have lot of confusion when it comes to marriage. They think they will loose their freedom after marriage. They think they may not find the correct match and run into trouble.

Ajit feels true friendships are developed from childhood and friendships started at later dates are superficial. That made me think about my fathers remark that child marriages were done keeping this view in mind. At that small age they become friends easily and adjust to each other very well.

I was happy and surprised to know from Sam that in their religion/community parents don't interfere with married life of their children and they are given a free hand. I think in India that approach makes lot of sense and if adopted by everyone all families will be more happier.

One of my maternal uncles keeps reminding me that who ever got married around the same time as me (Feb 14th 2001) have separated from their parents and I am the only one still living with parents.

Ajit visited Ramakrishna Ashram on one of the week-ends and bought some books on Vivekananda. After few pages he feels Vivekananda also had similar questions about life and religion which had come to his mind. Hopefully we will have more revelations about the book.

Speaking of coincidences

Soon after hitting the publish for the previous post I had to go and meet Nirav Mehta at the office who is a speaker at FOSS.IN and about whom I had read few minutes before.

Life has lot of surprises !

Jack and Suzy Welch on Work Life balance

Life has strange coincidences. After complaining about work/life balance few days back I was surprised to find the answer so soon from none other than Jack and Suzy.

I have been trying to get back to my routine of reading more about Homeopathy regularly everyday so that I can be ready to take care of my family whenever the need arises. Hopefully even with new assignments coming up at work for next version of Flex I would be able to keep up the balance and keep the routine.

My friend Jyoti is also a believer in Homeopathy and Magnetic therapy. She told me how she improved her eye sight and got rid of spectacles using them with the help of her father.

I also remembered that though I have bought the book Looking without glasses few months back I have not read through it.

While going through FOSS.IN schedule I found few interesting items. WET is open source automation testing tool built on Ruby. It also has a comparison with QTP and other tools and seems to be having all good things except for interactive debugging which QTP has.

It would be good to work on extending FLEX automated testing to work with WET. But I have to learn Ruby first.

Suddenly I have too much to read!

Automated testing support for Flex is DONE!

After many days oops... months of going underground due to heavy work schedule today got some free time to read something. Found a good one on Anjali's blog.

I have been working on Automated testing support for Flex for all these months. After a long time 7 years+ of gap I worked on many week-ends to finish the design and implementation. The 7 years I spent working on Studio and Maya from Alias (now Autodesk) I can't remember working on any week-end.

I was happy to find the items we worked on Adobe Photoshop Integration and Maya Artisan, Attribute and Script Painting, 3D Paint listed in the Maya features list. Vidyadhar, Sanjay, Venky and myself worked on Photoshop integration before I left Tata Elxsi. Chetan, Gowrishankar and myself were working on Artisan features before that.

Hopefully I would have free time to do things I have missed all these days. Though everyone talks about work/life balance it is difficult to achieve.

Flex 2 Released

Flex 2 got released last week. It is my first product shippment after I joined the Flex team in July 2005. I will be completing one year in another 16 days !

The basic SDK has been made free for the first time where as other pieces of the product suite are available for a price.

I have been busy making lot of changes and fixes to automated testing. More about it later.

I also started building an ActiveX control to communicate with a Flash SWF/ActionScript first hand. I could not get the ActiveX object to get created in JScript on IE for a whole day. Finally figured out that I need to add

BEGIN_CATEGORY_MAP(CTestTwo)
IMPLEMENTED_CATEGORY(CATID_SafeForScripting)
IMPLEMENTED_CATEGORY(CATID_SafeForInitializing)
END_CATEGORY_MAP()

to the interface to get going !

I don't know why few things have to be always hidden.

I was successfully able to pass strings across. ExternalInterface is a cool thing in Flash to communicate with JavaScript. I also want to try implementing the NPAPI to able to do the same thing in other browsers in next free time.

I have been trying to build a Graph component in Flex in my week-ends when my daughter is sleeping. But still long way to go before I can do the alpha release.

Automated testing support for Flex

I started working on AT for Flex last month. As of now it is supported only Quick Test Professional from Mercury and for the IE browser on Windows.

A preview release happened yesterday.

I have been working on bug fixing for few weeks now and moving on to supporting nested apps/RSLs from today.

I am new to RIA, Flash and internet. So I need to understand how to build RSLs and use them before I can start implementing/testing support for them in AT.

I found some material on RSL written by Roger here . But it is for Flex 1.5 and I couldnot make much use of it except for the information and advantages of RSL.


So I started using the FlexBuilder Beta 2 to build the apps. After some initial hickups I was able to build a shared library and a mother app using the lib.

Death by prescription

Read a article in a magazien about a Book "Death by prescription" by Dr Strand.

It is about deaths of people by taking drugs prescribed by Doctors in the US. I was surprised to learn that 70% of the doctors prescribe the medicine choosen by the patients by viewing TV ads ! It is also surprising that drug lobby is very powerful in the US too and it has lot of influence on the FDA to get drugs approved faster and by hiding reports which actually say that so and so drug has many side effects and may even cause death.

Ajax virus

Today I read in a article http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/mar152006/cyberspace16292006314.asp that now people are using AJAX to write viruses.

My Grandfather

My grandfather died on Monday night. He would have been 99 or so in May. No one remembers the exact date and year of his birth. So it is only a guess. His real age might have been higher.

He started life in a remote village in Karnataka and moved to Chennai in a very early age leaving his parents. He studied from 4th to Metriculation in Chennai living with his hosts and came to Bangalore in search of a job.

He moved from job to job as a stenographer before finally settling down in IISC then known as Tata Institute. He retired from IISC and went on to live in a house he had built in 16th cross Malleswaram. I am sure hundreads of people recognize him from the side business he did to supplement his income to bring up his large family of 5 sons and one daughter. He repaired watches. He picked up this art all by himself in very early age and it helped him through out his life.

He was very healthy through out his life and used to bicycle his way to 8th cross market even when he was 94-95. His only desire in the last years was to leave this world before he became dependent on anyone. He achieved it !

After his wifes death due to cancer he used to cook his own food for nearly 12 years. Only in the last year or so he was dependent on someone else for his food.

More on his life soon.

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.

---

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.”

---

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 :-)