Ginormous

My Brain is full.

Like most people, I have to remember lots of stuff, I realize a lot of rubbish is in my head I'd like to purge (like the security code to a mcDonalds Store room I worked at in 1986 - 23609).  I have used notes on paper, notepad, outlook all kinds of tools but none stuck.

I've been using my personal brain for about 3 months now and am hooked, I bought the professional version and use it every day.  My only "nice to have" would be to have the brain database on a server so I can access it from anywhere, but I their brainEKP product seem to do that and since there is no price on the site I expect $$$.  You can try the free version of  personal brain and thats what got me hooked.

The tutorials and 101 class helped me get more out of it and understand what the brain does and doesn't do.

Once you "get it" its really easy to use which is why I use it, anything cumbersome would have gotten thrown to the side. I use it for contact info, project organization, software serial numbers, todo lists, grocery lists, how to's, links to websites etc.  Its removed my dependency on emails to myself, todo lists and generally forgetting :)

Here is a screen shot of my "work" brain.

Go get yourself a extra brain, you'll thank me if you remember :)

Cheers,
Grant

Flex Solutions Book

I've read a bunch of flex books, some being extremely erroneous and some just being replays of the manual/api. 

The one I just picked up Flex Solutions is great.  I don't know how it does for errors, but I love the "cookbook" style and it does cover very typical challenges we have to solve as flex developers.  I was especially happy to see they don't just cover 1 solution to each challenge but go into detail about how you may solve the problem with different techniques depending on the requirement.  I look forward working through the rest of the book.

Best prices here

Cheers,
Grant.

2008 - Begins

So its 2008 and I haven't written a bloody thing on this blog since last year.

I've been working for fluid like mad since about february and completely covered up.  Bluetube Interactive has done some freelance projects

• Atlanta Symphony - programing for their new site with .net 2.0, component art based controls and cleaned up the backend to use the latest version of NHibernate, Tribal chicken took care of the design and IA.

• Computrac's ecommerce and content management integration using modx and shopscript while tribal chicken did the information architecture, creative and design.

• We did a few small project with Gnoggin Studios for Kimberly Clark (pacman highscore to .net integration)

• Flex  prototype analytics Dash board for  Multicast Media

• Flex prototype report configuration engine for  Multicast Media

• Flex  and Flash integration prototype with flash maps prototype for miller and associates

• .NET integration for peachtree Tv's sweepstakes, designed by Tribal Chicken

• Asset Management system for   news readers, PHP, java and AJAX and mysql with Pheonix-sr

• Flash navigation controls for Kids AOL with Tribal Chicken

This years big project is aok.

its an invitation only "Best of the Best" outdoor kitchen company. The real site will be up by end of jan and it will be protected, but hopefully I can sneak out some screen shots.

On the books this year :

• Tempomine modx/ecommerce with Tribal Chicken is due to go live April 1st
• Some Flash Actionscript 3 video players for a private client
• Atlanta Symphony 2008/2009 season updates with Tribal Chicken
• A few others in the pipeline.

Thats it for now, maybe I'll update this blog this year :)

Slacking on the Blog, AGAIN.

Can you say busy?  2006 has been insane,  Bluetube Productions was supposed to be a company that would eventually be my full time job, this year revenue when up by 450%.

We worked on

http://www.classicchastain.com/index3.aspx
( flash, ARP and ARPX, Fluorine, .NET, NHibernate, and MS SQL)

http://www.atlantasymphony.com
( flash, ARP and ARPX, Fluorine, .NET, NHibernate, and MS SQL)

http://www.soapboxstudios.com

(Flash, fixed an existing site)

http://www.thinkingmedia.com

(online learning, flash, ARP and ARPX)

http://www.cnn.com in association with http://www.phoenix-sr.com
Asset ingest and archive system

CAKEPHP, mysql, php 5 and AJAX.

http://www.kol.com

Flash navigation systems for Kids AOL

(flash, arp and arpx)

There are other smaller projects I've probably forgotten but its been a fantastic year.  I've formed a new company Bluetube Interactive that specializes in RIA.  We have 2 flash projects running now through 2007, a flex project and a requirements project (to scope the project to see the overall cost/size, its a monster).

Our biggest bottle neck has been professional actionscript programmers there is me and Lee McColl Sylvester in the UK, Lees a great developer but its challenging to manage the project from 4000 miles away :) .  I'd really like to find some professional local actionscript developers in the Atlanta area, the only ones I know are  Jesse Warden and I've yet to talk with Leif Wells.

I've done a lot of updates to arpx over the year  but I need to clean it up and release it.  I'm considering using cairngorm with flex since I'd have to re-factor a lot of arpx to run under actionscript 3 and I don't have the time right now.

2007 looks to be a huge year for us with approved projects and requests for more the calendar is getting very full. We have 2 new developers with php and .net skills who'm I'm also training in flex and actionscript 3 and I'm bringing in a new partner too who has architect skills as well as programming.  We are still working very closely with Tribal Chicken and I don't think we have done a project without them due to Marks fantastic design skills as well as their ability to cover Information Architecture, I see all our projects continuing to designed by Tribal Chicken.

I'll try and be better about posting this year to share some of the things we have learned and in the meantime happy new year to you and yours.

Cheers
Grant

Full text search with sql server and nhibernate

I recently had to provide full text searching ability to the Atlanta Symphony website I co-created with Tribal Chicken.  I came across this article on setting up full text searching on a database.  Since I already use NHibernate with the Atlanta Symphony website I didn't want to have to introduce DAO so I played around with the CreateSqlQuery function of the NHibernate Session object.

As a simple example my table is the events table, it describes an event with a title, description and other fields not pertinent to this disucssion.

So from the database we have the EVENTS table, from my hibernate mapping files I have CalendarEvent which represents 1 row in the EVENTS table.  For my query I want to pass in a search string such as "conductor" or "conductor and beethoven"  and have list of CalendarEvents returned.

My code ended up being :

session.CreateSQLQuery("Select DISTINCT {calendarEvent.*} from EVENTS {calendarEvent} where Contains(calendarEvent.ProgramDescription, :searchString) or Contains(calendarEvent.title, :searchString)", "calendarEvent", typeof(CalendarEvent)).SetString("searchString", searchString).List();

The beauty if this is a I get to use a sql server feature but still keep NHibernate.

The table is EVENTS which has been aliased to calendarEvent.  The columns I'm searching on are ProgramDescription and title, these are the COLUMN names of the table, not properties of the CalendarEvent object I've declared for NHibernate to use. 

to seee a quick and dirty example in action see :

http://72.3.196.129/test/testdbsearch.aspx

try

spano and conductor
spano or conductor

to see it work.

 

Javascript and DHTML

I don't do much DHTML as anytime I need motion I usually do flash but I had a small project for a media company that displays an html page inside the windows media player and when you click one of the buttons inside the page a different div (layer) is displayed.

I've always been annoyed by javascript due to the lack of an IDE or decent debugger, but I've been saved by venkman and JSEclipse, check out the venkman javascript tutorial here :

http://www.svendtofte.com/code/learning_venkman/setup.php

and the JSEclipse, javascript eclipse plugin that rocks too.

http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/Eclipse/JSEclipse/Overview

Cheers
Grant.

Slacking on the Blog

So I've not posted in a while, been busy finishing up an RIA for a Norfolk Southern Corporation and a calendar for Princeton Retirement Group , worked more on bluetube's new site (pre alpha)  and got fluorine working with a .net app that uses nhibernate to ms sql server.  Also looking into javascript debuggers as I seem to be doing more and more dhtml.

Merry Christmas to all, and here's to a happy new year too.

Grant.

Open Source Flash Conference

The first open source flash conference will be held online on Friday 21st of October  2005 at 18:00 GMT, thats 1:00pm EST time for those on the east coast.

Topics will include Red5, High scale enterprise apps, and MTASC just to name a few. Checkout the full line up and get registered NOW !  :)

ASDT 8 build 5 mx classes fix

I came across an issue with ASDT 0.0.8 build 5 and MTASC. I have my ASDT setup so when I save an actionscript file it runs MTASC to syntax check the file. I found that with the latest ASDT I was getting errors on save for missing classes such as mx.controls.Label or mx.utils.Delegate even though I had imported those classes. When I used flashout to compile the entire project it worked fine, so was i sumized was that the new ASDT is not passing the "core" classes path to MTASC on a save which would be set in eclipse under: window | preferences | Actionscript 2 | Core Path so what I did to fix it was add the core classpath to the mtasc arguments here : window | preferences | Actionscript 2 | Compiler | MTASC and in the "More Parameters" box I added the line -cp "C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash MX 2004\en\First Run\Classes" now I can syntax check on save. Grant.

Flash plugin switcher

The site is german, the software in english, this tool rocks!

flash plugin switcher