New Duane's World Merchandise - Snow Blowers!

Since I live in Canada, I called up a friend of mine to test a new model of the Duane's World Snow Blower. This joint venture with a well known Japanese manufacturer is in early alpha testing. We are currently putting it through the paces in Ottawa where snowfall has already covered most of the province.



To be environmentally friendly, the new prototype engine runs on 100% pure alcohol. There was a slight argument as I tried to put some of Matt's finer single malts into the fuel tank at one point however....

LOL!!

Wrap up from MAX EMEA in Milan

Milan's MAX was fun but I was one busy camper. My schedule is below. It started by getting up early Friday morning and working until I got on the first of 3 legs of an airplane trip at 3:00 PM.

Saturday November 30 - arrived late evening in Milan, spent 4 hours with James, Phil, Ivan, et al., building images for the lab sessions. During this time, we ended up getting locked inside the building. One janitor let me out only for me to discover I was trapped inside a one square kilometer fenced in area with only one exit. It took 30 minutes of walking around in 1 degree weather and pissing rain to find the exit. Needless to say, I needed a scotch and fire. We got everything done but those guys rock. Without them, MAX would not happen.

Sunday Nov 31 08:00 - 17:45 - spent the day inside the hall handling last minute details, rehearsals, testing images, finalizing slides, etc.

18:00 - 19:30 - Speakers Reception

20:00 - 01:00 - Late night dinner.

Monday, December 1, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, Orange 3
Adobe AIR Boot Camp (Part 1 of 2)
James Ward and I delivered an introduction to working with Adobe AIR, in which we got an entire classrooom to build several projects from start to finish. Projects include an advanced "HelloWorld.air", a video player, a "full screen" application, a web service client, a simple example of how to make remote calls, a chromeless window application, writing data to and reading from a hard disk, working with XML (including RSS feeds), and packaging AIR applications for later distribution. Course materials include the presentation, all code for the projects, and a step-by-step written tutorial.

13:15- 13:35 - French Interview with journalist. Results are here:
http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lire-adobe-max-soa-bpm-et-cep-en-toile-de-fond-27555.html

Monday, December 1, 15:15 – 15:45
James Governor analyst debriefing. I love James - what can I say! Marc Duke
Analyst Relations, EMEA set this one up but I also filmed James for Duane's World and talked to a number of other journalists. Some wrote about it:
http://kurse.focus.de/news/ne-nadeInformations-und_id_news_90638900.html

4:00 pm - 5:30 pm, Orange 3
Adobe AIR Boot Camp (Part 2 of 2)
The last 90 minutes of the two part AIR Boot Camp.

6:30 – 7:30 – BOF Meet the Evangelists, Red Room. This was a chance for people to meet the evangelist team. Big Takeaway: We need to be more clear about the future of ColdFusion. Trust me - I'll be bringing this up several times in the near future!!!

Monday, December 1 7:30 – 10:30 – Press Dinner
From: ssaissay@adobe.com
As you attend the BOF session that ends at 7.30 pm, you will join us directly at the restaurant
Enrique will manage to get taxis for all of you – We met him in the Convention Center lobby to leave at 7.45 pm. Yet another very late night (past midnight).

Tuesday, December 2,

8:30 am - 10:00 am, Orange 3
Adobe AIR Boot Camp (Part 1 of 2) - second repeat of this session - first one and second were sold out!
I delivered an introduction to working with Adobe AIR, in which we got an entire classrooom to build several projects from start to finish. Projects include an advanced "HelloWorld.air", a video player, a "full screen" application, a web service client, a simple example of how to make remote calls, a chromeless window application, writing data to and reading from a hard disk, working with XML (including RSS feeds), and packaging AIR applications for later distribution. Course materials include the presentation, all code for the projects, and a step-by-step written tutorial.

12:15 – 12:45
Dutch journalists meeting at MAX in Milan. Can't remember the outcome.

12:45 – 13:15
French Journalist Olivier Raffal

13:30 pm - 3:00 pm, Orange 3
Adobe AIR Boot Camp (Part 2 of 2) - second session of 4 hour hands-on coding lab.

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm, Green 2
Building Service Clients with Flex and Adobe AIR

Learn how to build SOA clients with Flex and Adobe AIR. In this hands-on session, you will explore how to build various service clients using the WSDL Import Wizard, hand-coded ActionScript 3.0, and simple REST-based services. Flash Remoting and performance metrics will also be covered. This session is intended for those who build front-end service clients for business applications. Attendees should come prepared to write code or partner with someone else writing code. (This session complements "Deploying Services with BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES.")
Speakers: Duane Nickull, James Ward, Andrew Spaulding
Audience: Application Developer, Architect
Skill: Advanced
Products: AIR, Flex, Flex Builder, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle ES

17:15 – 18:00 h.17.15-16 interview
PCopen Studio Italian Press

Wednesday, December 3, 10:15 am - 11:15 am, Blue 1 - a lecture:
Adobe Adoption of Web Services, SOA, and REST
Learn about the OASIS Reference Model for SOA as well as other service architecture work. Attendees will see Adobe's messaging around and integration of Web services, REST, and SOA, including how they relate to one another and where they are implemented within the Adobe platform and product lines. We will include an overview of LiveCycle services to illustrate integration points using services.

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm, Green 2
Building Service Clients with Flex and Adobe AIR - second session.
Learn how to build SOA clients with Flex and Adobe AIR. In this hands-on session, you will explore how to build various service clients using the WSDL Import Wizard, hand-coded ActionScript 3.0, and simple REST-based services. Flash Remoting and performance metrics will also be covered. This session is intended for those who build front-end service clients for business applications. Attendees should come prepared to write code or partner with someone else writing code. (This session complements "Deploying Services with BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES.")
Speakers: Duane Nickull, James Ward
Audience: Application Developer, Architect
Skill: Advanced
Products: AIR, Flex, Flex Builder, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle ES

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Red 1
Forms Gone Wild (2008)
Learn how to avoid the top mistakes form developers make, whether they are working in Flex, Flash, Ajax, or LiveCycle, using HTML, PDF, or other formats. Back by popular demand, this session covers the top ten most serious mistakes, as voted on by previous session participants, as well as touching on other serious issues form developers struggle with. You'll walk away with winning strategies that you can put to work in your form design practices.

This latter was my best talk ever, however the session evaluation forms were not distributed during most of the conference. The ones on the chairs at this session were from the previous session so I probably got no feedback and the speaker before me got some good marks. Nevertheless, there were several who blogged nice things:

"Platogo at Adobe MAX 2008
By Christoph Atteneder
The third day was the best one regarding the quality of the talks, topics including RTMFP (Michael Thornburgh), Flash Player security (Jim Corbett) and as an entertaining last session Forms gone wild with Duane Nickull. ...
Platogo Blog - http://blog.platogo.com/"

Thursday: a 33 hours day of flying back just in time to take my wife out to Nitobi's Christmas party in Vancouver.

Another average week in evangelism!

Mac Pro 8-core RAM not recognized?

WARNING: Do not attempt this if you are not comfortable with hardware hacking. I will not accept any responsibility for anything you do trying to follow this article.

I went to the store yesterday to get more RAM for my Mac Pro, an essential need really if you are editing video as I am for Duane's World TV. I discovered that installing the RAM into an 8-core Mac Pro is not only somewhat difficult, but poorly documented. This step by step guide is aimed at helping save others the 4 hours it took me to get an answer from Apple.

First, the basics. For the new Mac Towers, RAM is distributed into two Printed Circuit ("Riser") cards, each with 4 DIMM slots that you can put RAM into. Before you begin, there are a few basics you should understand. Ground yourself!!! I cannot emphasize this enough. There are commercial products available or you can roll your own. I decided to use a 1/4 inch guitar cable taped to my wrist (metal touching skin) and grounded by connecting it to an Ampeg Bass head ground connection. You can also use a metal plumbing pipe but be careful that it is metal all the way into the ground (sometimes they use PVC in the middle). Here is my MacGyver setup:


This keeps static and other electrical flows from ruining the RAM. If you want to know why, read this article here. Believe me, this is not to be taken lightly as I have personally ruined RAM chipsets.

When you remove the panel to the Mac, you will see two RAM banks, an upper and a lower. Note that there are white dots that are aligned with the surface of the chassis to let you know that the boards are installed properly. See below:



On the newer machines, you can simply pull them out by placing your fingers in the holes as shown below and pulling gently. Be sure to read service bulletins to understand if a clasp or other lock in device gets added after this article runs to avoid breaking these board. In general, you must treat these PC ("Riser") boards very gently. Do not carry them across carpets then let them touch a metal window frame or bend them.


Gently remove both the upper and lower boards and place them on an insulated surface. Now here is the weird part. I always knew RAM had to be installed in matched pairs and I had a 2GB in DIMM 1 on both left and right and a 1 GB on DIMM 3 on both left and right so I installed an extra 1 GB on each side in DIMM 4 on both left and right as shown below.


This should have been 8 GB of RAM in total
((DIMM1-Left = 2GB + DIMM1-Right = 2GB) + (DIMM3-Left = 1GB + DIMM 3-Right = 1 GB) + (DIMM4=Left = 1 GB + DIMM4-Right = 1 GB) = 8 GB. WRONG!! It was not recognized. When I started up my system, this is what showed up.


It showed that DIMM 2 and 4 on both sides were empty and I only had 6 GB of total RAM. I tried various configurations before giving in and calling the shop that sold me the RAM. The guy there knew nothing about installing RAM and just told me I probably had bad RAM. I tried to explain that each RAM stick worked in positions 1 and 3 on both sides as long as it was balanced however he failed to grasp the most primitive forms of logic. I then called Apple who were much more knowledgeable. It turns out that not only do Left DIMM 1 and Right DIMM 1 have to be matched on 8-core systems, but DIMM 1 must match DIMM 2 on both right and left. This left me going back to the store to buy two more 2 GB RAM strips and installing them as shown below:


Place them back VERY gently into the two slots. Don't force these into the chassis. Before the final push (you will have to push hard) the white dots should be about 3 mm away from the metal chassis edge. If you try to do the hard push when they are 15mm away, you can break something. Also - before you try to place them back into your machine, make sure each RAM strip is locked into place as can be evidenced by the clips lining up as shown in the second photo below. If the clip is left open as shown in the first photo and you try to force it, you can easily break something that will cost a lot of money to fix.



After all is safely back into place, start up your Mac. Here is what I was rewarded with!


12 GB of RAM with 8 cores!! I am now faster than you!!! Bwahahahaah!!!

Duane's World Episode 14 - InterAct 2008, Media and Democracy

In this episode, Duane explores the InterAct 2008 conference event in Washington, DC and interviews Holly Hickman (formerly of Fox News) and Tamela Beene about the importance of a free and independent press to any democracy. Code and Tunes also features how to work with the Flex Color Picker component within the Flex 3 framework.

The Intense Duane Chaos!

This is what I look like when I am being intense.

...or lackadaisical....


...or just having fun....