InterAct 2008 - a great conference in DC

The 2008 InterAct conference is one of the best run, most relevant conferences I have attended. Not only did it completely sell out (both attendees and exhibitors), I got the distinct impression it was really appreciated by all the people I talked to. My talk was part of a three person panel alongside Clearspring CEO & Co-founder Hooman Radfar and Google VP Marissa Mayer to discuss trends in IT. All three of us got an award for Excellence in IT as voted by our peers. It was very flattering.

I have posted my slides up here if anyone is interested in retrieving them. If you want a soft copy, please email me dnickull at adobe dot com.

Web2 0-SOA InterAct2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 2.0)

A longer version of the slides on Web 2.0 are here:

http://www.slideshare.net/adunne/web-20-design-patterns-models-and-analysis

A real Fire Drill at the US Commerce Department

I am in DC and just saw a fire drill as the US Commerce Department while enjoying my morning Espresso. I couldn't help but point out the metaphor to some employees outside given the current economic crisis. We had a good talk and they went back inside. I hope they solve this soon.

Duane's World 11 - Open Source, Open Everything

Part 1 of a two part show about the Open Everything event from Hollyhock on Cortes Island, BC. Duane interviews Joel Solomon who talks about Renewal Partners, social change and technology while contemplating what “Open” really means. During the Code and Tunes segment of the show, we show how to use svn, ant to retrieve and compile the free Flex SDK from the source code repository. Music guests 22nd Century offer a free music download.

Stop using the term "Web 3.0"!!!

I recently became aware that despite attempts to educate people to the contrary, the term "Web 3.0" continues to be used. It is only natural I guess given we use the term "Web 2.0". I do believe using either term in a purely literal sense is flawed as the convention is to use this to denote major version changes to a thing. The web is full of change but it remains incremental. To my knowledge, there has never been a wholesale, overnight, non-backwards compatible change to the entire Internet. I highly suspect Tim O'Reilly used the term in the exemplar context rather than as a literal term. Nevertheless, it seems to have run away now on its own. Let's examine why it is flawed as a path for the web community.

The Web 3.0 zealots claim that Web 3.0 is everything Web 2.0 is plus semantics, a ludicrous claim given semantics are ubiquitous, whether explicit or not. Semantics exist today. From a pure logical standpoint, making such claims is meaningless. Nevertheless, I believe it will persist. To begin with, I decided to check with Wikipedia on a definition (despite the fact Wikipedia has become notoriously inaccurate due to tin-pot dictator editors who delete factual elements and replace them with their views). I was surprised to see my friend John Markoff as being credited with the definition. At the time I write this, here is what it alluded to:

"Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web'—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience."

Let's start by ripping this apart. Semantics is the "meaning" of something. Like architecture, everything that exists can be linked to it (everything has an architecture, whether explicit or not). There is a triangular lexicon of the major concepts in most semantics work which includes the Referent (the object in question), the Term (the name or symbol representing the meaning and linking it to the referent) and the Conceptual domain (the place where meaning exists). There is also a fourth dimension of semantics which is a contextual plane. This is the set of circumstances that surrounds an object in question and can affect its meaning and importance.



Most semantics work gets stuck in the label region. It really should be done in the conceptual domain, which is the focus of ontology work. During the presentation I gave at Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year entitled "Ontologies for the Enterprise", this was explained (there is a link to the slides).

Since the objects and labels exist today (plain English is a natural language filled with terms or labels for just about every referent that exists), we have the tangible parts of the Semantic Web today, hence there is no logic behind advancing the version number of the web to Web 3.0. I think Tim has stated himself that it was a bad idea to name it Web 2.0 as it leads to this kind of foolishness and (I would presume) that "Web 2.0" should not be taken literally as so many have, but only in the exemplar context. What we need to concentrate on is the Conceptual plane's ontology work. While a lot of this does exist today, making it more explicit and providing concrete interfaces to such work is where semantic web work should be focused IMHO.

Some of the other elements cited in that Wikipedia entry exist today, including microformats and natural language searching. Google and Yahoo are both very competent at searching (when was the last time Google could not find what you wanted?). Don't get me wrong - John Markoff is a true genius and I deeply respect him. I think what I can infer is that John summarized what he noted other people have used the term to describe.

Web 2.0 is a collection of design, architectural, social, and business patterns implemented over the Internet. Some of these patterns deal with semantics, microformats (Small Things, Loosely Joined) , computational intelligence, data mining, and more TODAY! The pattern of "the constant beta", a pattern whereby continual, incremental innovation happens, ipso facto denotes that no further version numbers (like Web 3.0) should ever be used as the Web embraces the notion of change at its very heart.

I vote that the web community never version the web with 3.0, 4.0, and so on unless there is literally a non-backwards compatible version of the Internet invented. That is my $0.02 CAD worth!

MAX AIR Boot Camp filling up fast

The talk James Ward and I are delivering on day one of Adobe MAX 2008 is filling up fast. The talk is entitled AIR Boot Camp and will be delivered both in San Francisco and Milan. Curious about AIR? This is the place to go! If you are planning to attend, please register soon, space is limited to only 300 and it is over half gone as of today.

Also - if you are attending, we might get through the content before the time is up (it is a 3 hour mega lab session and all hands on coding). Accordingly, in true community style, James and I would like to ask you to suggest additional topics we can address. So far the outline is as follows; comments are also welcome:

Adobe AIR Boot Camp
Duane Nickull + James Ward
Teachers Aides: Andrew Spaulding (need 2 more).

Audience Assumptions
- This is a 101 Boot camp to introduce people to AIR
who have never used it before or want to go past Hello World.
- Attendees have Adobe’s AIR runtime installed
- Attendees are roughly familiar with XML syntax rules
- Attendees have Flex Builder 3 installed

Description

Join us for an introduction to working with Adobe AIR, in which we will build several projects from start to finish. Projects include "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 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.

Topics

An overview of AIR
Architecture
Runtime Architecture
Development environment
Code, Code and more Code!

Projects:

1. Advanced Hello World (learn data binding, compiling, using [Binding], variables, using AS3 and MXML in a project, and much more
2. Chromeless applications - building applications with no system chrome
3. Video Capture and manipulation - use a stream
4. Video playbakc and full screen controls
5. Working with Audio and Events - event handling, audio playback controls
6. HTML - using HTML within an AIR app
7. Reading and writing to the local disk
8. Working with XML - all about E4X, pre-requisite to learn how to manipulate RSS and Web Services call returns.
9. Web Service Introspection and Consumption
10. Exporting, Signing, Distributing and installing AIR applications

Extra projects (we may not get to these if time goes slowly)

11. MySQLite
12. Using NativeWindowing API's

How about a solution that benefits the people (gasp!)

I am angered today by the continuing rhetoric from Washington on how to solve the financial sector meltdown. The powers that be want to spend Americans tax dollars (hard earned by the average American) to bail out big Wall Street firms. Under the current plan, this includes paying CEOs multi-millions of dollars for running a business into the ground. Is this fair to the average person who works very hard? Will this even solve the problem (it really just transfers debt from one balance sheet to another). Luckily, several legislators have jumped in to question the bill before congress.

Why not give the money directly to the homeowners to pay their mortgages? If the big Wall Street firms still cannot survive, let them die but do not take money from Americans to give to companies who have flawed business plans. From my limited understanding, it appears that under such a plan, the average American would be able to keep their house, most of the big banks would benefit from lower foreclosure rates and not fall into chaos and the average American would then have extra $$ to further stimulate the economy. Note that the entire deal could be done via immediate tax cuts. After all, aren't Republicans supposed to be about small government and lower taxes? What sense does it make to have a big lender financially solvent while having millions of people out on the streets, no longer having a home?

There are lots of smart people in the financial sector. Warren Buffett warned of the time bomb the derivatives practices would have on the sector over five years ago. He called them financial weapons of mass destruction. Why did some chose to ignore him? What about those who did heed the warnings? There is certainly a lot of good opportunity to see which banks and mortgage lenders are left to take the business lost by their insolvent counterparts.

I need a beer.

Recording of my SOA, Web 2.0 talk with HP's Jeff Myers

On Tuesday, Sept 9, Jeff and I presented a Webinar (1,000 registered) to discuss Web 2.0 and SOA in very pragmatic terms including establishing a comprehensive IT testing framework for enterprise adoptions of Web 2.0. The first part of the talk really focuses in on the definition of Web 2.0 and SOA. When you accept that Web 2.0 is a set of architectural, social, and design patterns that can be re-purposed for other enterprises, the question then becomes one of how to develop an orderly deployment, management, and testing strategy. Jeff addresses the latter.

The session is now available on demand at
http://www.eseminarslive.com/c/a/Service-Oriented-Architecture/HP090908/?partnerref=CL090908HP1

The first set of talks I did on this subject still remain popular. In fact, my presentation from last year on SlideShare has now garnered over 22,000 views. Here is the slide deck. Anyone is welcome to use this resource to help explain Web 2.0 to others.

Web 2.0 Design Patterns, Models, and Analysis

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web 2.0 expo berlin web2expoberlin)

Kraft to replace AIG on Dow?

I just saw a report from Forbes indicating that amidst the recent financial market turmoil, Kraft Inc will now replace AIG on the Dow Industrial Index. I guess this is only fitting as a lot more people will be dining on Kraft dinner given the recent market events. Maybe worth investing into?

Doing the Math:

Seriously, I think too many people are not appreciating the true gravity of the current economic situation. Is the United States of America potentially insolvent? This is a striking question. As of September 2008, the total U.S. federal debt was approximately $9.7 trillion, about $31,700 per capita (that is, per U.S. resident). Note that this figure is inclusive of children and retirees; the actual burden on working, middle class Americans is higher. Now add in the recent $4.4 trillion bailout of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. This brings the total Federal debt to over $14 trillion USD. Given that only about 250,000,000 Americans work, this equals $56,000 per person. That figure is only the Fed's debt however. Now add in the average American's personal debt and the government's other debt and the numbers should scare everyone. The sum of all this is that even being taxed at close to 50%, the revenue from income tax alone might not be sufficient to pay off the interest alone (never mind the principal) of the debt if interest rates rise a modest 2%. Yikes!

As someone who has financial views closely aligned with the classical Republic platform of smaller government, financial responsibility, accountability and fiscal growth, I have found that the current administration's economics are far worse than any other administration in history. As someone who cares deeply for the USA, I am saddened to see what has happened and hope someone can turn it around for the sake of all Americans.

What pains me beyond belief is that if I ran a business into the ground, I would never ask taxpayers to fund my bad business decisions yet when the large banks and insurance companies do this, the government uses taxpayer money to bail them out. Think about this. The government is taking your tax money to give to banks to lend back to you at interest. This seems wrong IMO.

What happened to fiscal accountability? Why are people not being investigated for this? Better question- who can fix it? Obama? McCain? Certainly not Palin. Time to invest in food producing land and gold?

What to do?

The first thing I urge people to do is educate themselves. Watch this show on Google video. It is called the Money Masters. Do you know how your money is printed in the US? Do you know how money is created from debt? Where is the gold that used to back the US currency? This show has some of these answers.

Then go to the store and buy some Kraft dinner. Some things never go out of style.

Some thoughts on how to leave a smaller footprint

Since the whole "ecosustainabiodiversorganicgreenvironmentality" noise is rampant in Vancouver, I have been using some of my spare intellect cycles to put thoughts around how we can mitigate our footprints on this planet. Many of these ideas are unique to Vancouver but some of them might be useful outside of Canada. Not all of these ideas will necessarily be useful or good for all, but I do want to offer these to anyone who is in a position to make change.

Some of these ideas are not possible at the local level and require national leadership - likely chance given our current government.

1. Require all manufacturers who ship food in glass jars to use Mason-style canning jars or other re-usable glass shapes (such as drinking glasses) which can be re-used by consumers rather than recycled. It struck me as odd that only one or two companies (Catelli Pasta/Pizza Sauce and Kuhne Mustard) seem to have caught on to this trend. It makes no sense that consumers will buy a can of pizza sauce then go to another aisle to purchase canning jars if they could get both in one purchase and repurpose the container. Accounting for the unnecessary trips to buy canning/preserving jars and for trucks to deliver these items to store shelves and the energy savings can add up. The cost to existing manufacturers would be minimal - no losers here as the canning jar manufacturers would be selling to the food manufacturers.

Caveat: Vancouver alone will not be able to force change on this and lobbying other governments at a higher level will be necessary to invoke change.

2. Immediately ban the sale of the following items from store shelves within Vancouver:

a. Disposable razor blades. Alternatives – non-disposable razors. There are no valid use cases for disposable razors over non-disposables and the plastic in the handles can be reused if a consumer could simply fit in new blades.

b. Liquid plumber and all other dangerous chemical compounds for plumbing system cleansing. These are harmful to marine wildlife and compounds end up coming back into the food chain and being consumed by humans. Alternatives – compressed air, snake lines, calling a plumber.

c. Incandescent light bulbs (except certain types). Alternatives – compact fluorescent. Old style bulbs waste a lot of energy dissipating it as thermal heat and light that is beyond the visible spectrum.

Note that the initial net costs of the alternative items are higher but all pay for themselves over time.

3. Within Schools, ban the consumption of small (200 ml or less) juice or beverage packages and require parents to use a thermos or other reusable container. While tetra packs can be recycled, the evidence suggests that the net cost is still rather high in terms of forming the packaging and using extra packaging to aggregate multiple smaller containers. A better option would be to use reusable containers for all smaller beverages.

4. Lobby the BC liquor board to relax its monopoly over alcohol sales and allow sales of beer and wine in most grocery stores. Right now, many citizens are driving longer trips to get to the small number of liquor outlets in Vancouver. The driving that could be reduced is significant. If each citizen drove an average of 5 km less in a year, the savings of energy would be spectacular. The provincial government is stuck on this old school model of alcohol sales and BC remains one of the few locations in the world that does not allow beer and wine to be sold in grocery stores. It is time for this model to die in the name of the environment.

5. Add mandatory packaging material recycling stations to all Canada Post outlets where people can return Styrofoam chips, air packaging, boxes and other re-useable packing materials. The big loser here would be Canada Post as they cannot keep selling new packaging materials. Big winner – all people who need packaging materials and do not have to purchase them.

6. Build a gypsum recycling plant and mandate that all drywall and other gypsum board waste be recycled. Included in this idea would be a fuel efficient truck fleet to pick up gypsum waste by scheduling routes to avoid owners of waste having to drive long distances to recycle. The owners would pay a small fee to cover the charge or this could be billed with the sale of new drywall.

7. Expand the current car co-op/Zip car type programs to include more free parking spaces to encourage community car sharing. The city has opted to test a few of these by providing special parking spaces for community (“co-op”) cars. Encourage people to use these at least as a second vehicle rather than buy a second car for part time use. Note that some people use these as their primary cars.

8. Begin to adopt the Israeli electric car fleet idea with battery replacement stations. The Israeli’s have the most motivation to get off foreign oil of any country in the world. They have a great plan which seems to be making sense from a physics standpoint. The scheme involves consumers buying or leasing an electric auto with a quick change battery pack that can be replaced in minutes at service stations, allowing up to 125 KM per battery. Consumers will subscribe to monthly plans.

9. Mandate all new buildings must be certified LEED Silver or higher starting in 2009. Offer tax incentives and extra floor space for buildings that make the highest standards where the NET energy gains are greatest. Encourage innovation.

10. Increase the number of roundabouts where they can replace stoplights. Roundabouts do not require cars to come to a complete stop thus save energy over requiring cars to completely stop and re-accelerate. Cars also do not have to wait at red lights idling nor does the city have to provide power for the traffic lights and spend energy replacing bulbs etc.

11. (Note: this particular item is probably not going to work as a provincial level as people would cross provincial borders to procure cheaper items. This one needs to be implemented at a national level). Require every manufacturer who sells automobiles, major appliances, small appliances, utility vehicles and other consumer items within BC to certify their items will last at least 5 years (most warranties on items like microwave ovens are less than 1 year). This will initially be more expensive for manufacturers however the cost to the consumer will be less over time if appliances and other household items do not have to be replaced every two years. Furthermore, every manufacturer who offers their items for sale in BC must be required to supply parts for their items and make them repairable vs. throw away. All major components must be orderable by certified repair centres (items like Blender motors, microwave power supplies, etc.) at an aggregate cost of less than the original product cost.

12. Increase incentives for food bank trucks to pick up and distribute unused foods from conferences, restaurants, or other events where excess food is abundant and often wasted. Food that is made available at a buffet style event can often be reused by donation to the food bank for immediate consumption. There are liability issues which cause many restaurants to elect not to join these programs and government intervention might be worth investigating (similar to the good Samaritan act) to mitigate the risk to participating donors. A study to ensure a net gain in terms of energy used vs energy saved would be required before such a policy can be implemented.

13. Lobby the federal government hard to increase the fuel efficiency for ALL passenger cars imported and sold in Canada starting as soon as possible. Set maximum NET energy requirements for all cars and offer strong incentives to both consumers and industry to abide by these standards.

14. Plant fruit bearing trees in the boulevards and more coniferous trees in urban areas to help regulate heat, cold. The fruit trees help a domestic social problem by allowing those who cannot afford food free access to fruit at certain times of the year while taking no more resources than existing trees.

15. Bring back streetcars along strategic routes (Granville Street from Waterfront Station to 16th Avenue, Waterfront Station through Gastown around false creek to Granville Island and a branch line connecting to the Canada Line ALRT termination at Clarke, Denman Avenue from Stanley Park to Davie [loop], Canada Line to Stanley Park) with an eye to moving large numbers of people along corridors where foot traffic and shopping is high.

16. Impose a fee on plastic bags at grocery stores of $0.10 each to force people to think if they *really* need a bag after all. Too many times I have witnessed a person using one bag to carry a single item leaving a store. This behavior needs to change. It needs to be painful to not think.

That's all for now. If you have other ideas, I invite you to post them here.

How to run LC ES 8.0 and 8.2 on the same machine!

Okay - if you read the headline and are now reading this, you are a geek, a developer or both. There is no way normal people would read up on this topic. What about me though - I wrote it. Dang!!

About a week or two ago on the Google LiveCycle Developers list, Jochem van Dietem posted a question asking if it was possible to run two versions of LiveCycle ES (8.0 and 8.2) side by side. After some preliminary advice from members, we basically realized this was new ground and Jochem graciously agreed to be a guinea pig and see if it was possible. Not even Adobe Product Management had done this (to be fair, there is not really any valid use case for this other than developers who want to write and test Adobe LiveCycle applications on two different versions).

Jochem got both the install done and then documented how to install and run the two versions. The articles are here:

http://jochem.vandieten.net/2008/09/15/installing-multiple-versions-of-livecycle-es/

And the followup article about running them simultaneously:

http://jochem.vandieten.net/2008/09/16/running-multiple-versions-of-livecycle-es-simultaneously/

A way to get into MAX 2008 for free

One lucky person is going to get into Adobe MAX 2008 for free. Adobe and ZIO Pro are offering an exclusive opportunity to send a Creative or IT Director to Adobe’s MAX 2008 conference in San Francisco.

Registrants will be entered for a chance to win a trip to Adobe MAX 2008 in San Francisco. The winner will receive a free all access pass to the event as well as free air travel to San Francisco and free hotel stay. No obligation and no credit card information necessary.

In addition, every registrant for ZIO's contest will get access to a 30 Day 10 Seat software training license for their team - absolutely free – including full length training courses on Dreamweaver CS3, Flash CS3, and Photoshop CS3. Every qualified registrant will also receive a free e-Book – ‘Adobe Air with Ajax’ or ‘Presentation Zen’.

To register for this limited time offer:
IT Directors/Managers can go to: http://www.zoom-in.com/promo/30daytrial-usergroups.html?utm_source=press_release&utm_medium=IT&utm_campaign=adobe
Creative Directors/Managers can go to: http://www.zoom-in.com/promo/30daytrial-creative.html?utm_source=press_release&utm_medium=creative&utm_campaign=adobe

Duane's World Episode 10

Duane's World on Adobe TV and InsideRIA has now reached into double digits with Episode 10. In this show, Flash guru Clive Goodinson shows an in depth demo of the Pixton online comic strip creator and discusses how he balanced AJAX, Flash and PHP within the application. Clive also gives a tutorial on how to create comics on Pixton by building a Duane's World Comic strip.

The Codes and Tunes tutorial in this episode shows how to draw simple vector graphics in Flex Builder 3 with music guests Canadian rockers “6th Avenue Nightmare”.

Narrowing my new car choices

Well, the Porsche is gone and my wife and I are sharing a Land Rover Discovery. The Disco has to go though. I detest most newer British cars with a passion, although the Bentley and Austins are nice. Then again, why on god's green earth would someone build a power drivers seat that can adjust so far forward the head rest hits the steering wheel?

I have been researching getting a new 2008 BMW X3 compared
to the 2007 X3 there's more storage, and overall, the styling is more like BMW's
own 3-Series cars, with a touch of wood trim on the panels. The new features include a panoramic-style roof, heated front seats, available heated steering wheel (for the cold weather package,a must for Canadians like me), heated second row seats, side impact/curtain airbags, stability/traction control, park assist, and Bluetooth wireless technology.

The MSRP is about $36,000. I plan to test drive several automobiles
but for some reason I can’t wait to test drive the BMW X3,
hit the highway with a cup of Starbucks and throw in an acai for an
additional energy boost! The X3 is a far cry from my Porsche twin turbo but
for my family I think it’s just perfect.

A hybrid is also an option but I am waiting an environmental report that can clearly show a *NET* gain of being environmentally sensible. The BMW X3 will be far better than the Disco though for the environment.

Mix Match Music - a rising star using Flash and Flex!

The more the music industry flounders, the more musicians who understand technology will start to innovate. This is the latest example and it is built on the Adobe technology platform.

The real heavy metal of the 1980s!

I was there. This was not the 1980s 'poofter poodle' metal (Poison, Ratt) of MTV but the real, down to earth, in your face heavy metal. Ace Koden was a ground breaking band at the time from Victoria. While shunned by the mainstream media, the quietly scheming metal and punk acts had their own events, their own fan base and bootleg recording distribution networks. Watching bands like Black Flag and playing gigs with the Dayglows and No Means No at the FOE in Victoria were commonplace. This is when music had real heart - we were social rejects and we wanted everyone to know it. This was embraced in the way we dressed, the way we talked and our clothing. That is me on the right hand side. I was a metal head and proud of it!

Flash FireFox 3 Bug - Please help us!

People - we need your help on this one. The issue:

There are reports from various parties on a Firefox 3, Flash bug pertaining to video playback. A post on the Fireox Bugzilla site by Kirsten sums it up nicely:

Googling this problem, I've seen it's a persistant and ongoing problem for a lot of people, but I don't see that it's been addressed anywhere by firefox.

I've noticed since the latest update that sometimes (not all the time) flash audio/video will load and look as if it's starting to play, but then will freeze at two seconds. Even if you open a new browser, or tab, the problem persists. I will then have to close all currently open firefox windows and tabs, start again, and then (usually) videos will play.

This is a persistent, frustrating problem. IE will play these vids/audio no problem. It's a bummer. I certainly don't want to go back to go back to IE. Yuk.

Firefox, Help!!

I have the latest versions of both Firefox, Flash (and java). And I don't have the ActiveX plugin.

Sadly, today this has not been solved. WHY? It is not as easy to solve this as it appears.
Rafe Needleman made a fairly interesting post about how this problem has been known about since May yet neither Adobe nor Mozilla seem to be able to fix it. We actually have not even determined what causes the behavior or where it originates from. Rays post was very well balanced although the Mozilla spokesperson Mike Beltzner's quote really made me twitch when I read it. A very myopic mind might be inclined to blame Adobe solely for the purpose he views us as "proprietary" based on his narrow definition of "Open Source" (Adobe has moved a lot towards open source in the last 3 years and we love open source). I would rather avoid finger pointing and concentrate on how we (all of us) work together to solve this issue.

So what is the real problem? Why can this bug not be squashed? How can you help?

Kudos to John Dowdell who took the time to really illustrate the difficulties in tracking it down and document his thoughts (linked to from Rafe’s page). Before you read the rest of this, you might want to read John's post.

Additionally, since this is a non-fatal error, it does not generate one of those system snapshots and send it back to us or anyone else. This means we do not have a very good picture of what is exactly happening.

Conclusions?

I would like to invite all invite people to contact us who can produce this bug on demand. As John states, you cannot fix something you cannot see and it seems no one has been able to produce this behavior on demand in a sandbox. Since we (Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla, Users) cannot produce this bug on demand, it is not possible to fix. John also notes that it might be a mistake to assume this is only "a" bug; it may be several.

Here are some clues:
1. It (apparently) only appears on XP and Vista with FF and FP9. Since I am on a Mac, I have never noticed this.
2. Many people seem to note that Java somehow has an influence. It seems to be possible but there are not yet consistent patterns.
3. While running Windows XP/Vista in Safe mode, the bug does not happen. Note that this is possibly due to coincidence and if you have managed to encounter it in safe mode, please drop a comment here to tell us so we don't look up the wrong tree.
4. Many people report they only encounter it only after FF has been running for a while (>60 min).

Here is what you can help with.

- if you encounter this bug, please note the following:

1. What specific version of FF and Flash Player are you on?
2. What specific version of Windows are you using?
3. how long has FF3 been open before the crash occurs?
4. What specific video are you trying to play?
5. What language settings do you have?

Bonus points for the following:

6. How many tabs did you have open? Are any of them also playing video or Flash content?
7. Can you capture your system memory profile?
8. Check your system error log and note any peculiar information.
9. By taking the exacty same steps, can you reproduce it?

Be vigilent for any extra bits of details to help notice the pattern. Are you VPN'd when it happens vs direct connection? What other applications were open?

Most important - if you can produce this on demand, please contact us directly (email me at dnickull at adobe dot com) and we can rush it to the right people.

There is a page set up to collect input. While you can post relevant information here to help others out, please don't forget to tell the Adobe and others teams working on this:

https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?component=10640&sorter/field=priority&mode=hide&reset=true&pid=10080&sorter/order=ASC

That's all for now - thank you in advance.

Eine neues Web Zwei-punkt-null Filme mit Tim und Duane?

Hier, ein neuer Web 2.0 Film aus dem Netz mit Tim O'Reilly, mir und anderen. Wir sprechen nur Deutsch (Berliner Akzent?) aber es ist fuer alle ein guter Film. Wir fragen "Was ist Web 2.0".



Unendliche Weiten, jeder redet darüber, aber die wenigsten wissen überhaupt, was sich hinter diesem Bergriff versteckt: Web 2.0. Ein Erklärungsversuch ist vielleicht die Definition, dass man viele bekannte Web-Programmiertechnologien intelligent zusammengefügt hat, um die Benutzung des Internets einfacher zu machen.



Tim ist ganz Kool!

Duane's World 9 - Tim O'Reilly and John Markoff @ FooCamp

This episode of Duane's World is by far my favorite and has two spectacular interviews. One is with Web 2.0 guru and media mogul Tim O'Reilly (founder - O'Reilly Media); the second interview is a killer exploration of the new media with New York Times Reporter John Markoff. During this interview, we discuss the Iranian Missile test Photoshop debacle and the importance of a free, independent press for any democracy. John raises some great thoughts on why we might be in ambiguity for a few years. Tim provides some interesting thoughts on the future of technology as well as mind-body hacking and what Foo Camp is all about.

BitPakkit (a.k.a. Ben Watson) provides the mix for Code and Tunes. The Code and Tunes segment is based on fault event detection and handling as submitted by Matt MacKenzie. Very worthwhile for anyone who wants to learn how to interact with remote resources in Flex or AIR.

I have to say that Duane's World has been more successful than I ever imagined and I am honored by the guests who are willing to be interviewed for the show. This is truly a humbling experience. Enjoy!

SMX - the premiere Search Engine Optimization event

SMX East, scheduled for Oct 6-8, 2008, is fast approaching. I have only been to one SMX event, but I believe it is the premiere Search Engine Optimization event in the world. SMX East is 3 days long and holds more than 50 sessions and keynotes.

SMX is the brain child of two experts in SEO: long time SEO guru Danny Sullivan (formerly of www.searchenginewatch.org) and Vanessa Fox. Most of the SEO tips and tricks I learned in the 1990s were gleaned from Danny's writing and research. I consider both of them formidable experts on the subject of SEO. Google's Tim Armstrong will also be on hand to present.

I have posted some recent tips for Flash SEO and will be speaking at the Web 2.0 event with an all new presentation in Berlin called "Search Engines and Flash: Secrets, Tricks, and Black Magic". The talk will cover several key workarounds for better SEO results on Flash and new technical developments that have made new functionality available to search engines and developers alike. I will showcase some advanced tips and tricks to give you the edge over the competition as well as share some secrets so attendees will learn how to increase initial page rankings as well as monitor and increase dynamic page ranks.

Oh yeah - get to both of these events if you want to know more about Flash and SEO.

An Adobe LiveCycle ES course not to be missed

At Adobe MAX 2008, Bob Bailey is going to teach a full day long course on LiveCycle ES. Adobe's LiveCycle ES has been heralded by many architects as the best SOA platform for business process automation and is driving a resurgence in service bus thinking. The key platform has all the core tenets of the OASIS Reference Model for SOA baked in as well as a rich business process modeling and deployment toolset.

The Abstract is reprinted here for your information.

LiveCycle ES: Building Applications

Learn how to develop and deploy applications with Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite). By enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM), LiveCycle ES allows both business and IT professionals to visually assemble end-to-end processes that unify systems, people, business rules, and web services quickly and flexibly. We'll develop a LiveCycle based application using LiveCycle solution components and determine how to implement business rules in a process. We'll also cover process deployment and the LiveCycle workspace and use the record and playback feature to debug an application.

You may register here:

http://max.adobe.com/na/experience/#?s=3&p=0

Whistler Mountain Bike Park Video

The last two days I did some mountain bike filming for an upcoming video. This is a sample of the rider's point of view of the run "Crank it Up" on a pace of around 8 minutes. The rider ahead of me is my son Chris Nickull; I am wearing a helmet cam. For a greasy, muddy day it was a lot of fun.

Functional Testing Framework for AIR AJAX from Mihai!

My friend Mihai Corlan has written a great post on a project in which they have modified Selenium so you can run automated / functional tests on AIR applications developed with HTML/JS. This is a must read!

Duane's World Episode 8 - Foo Camp, Dries Buytaert, Bob Glushko!

Duane's World Episode 8 launched today. This episode is one of a two part series with great coverage of O'Reilly's Foo Camp, interviews from Drupal Founder Dries Buytaert (yes - he talks about his new venture with Jeff Whatcott), and Berkeley Professor Dr. Bob Glushko. The second part will air in two weeks with interviews with John Markoff (New York Times) and Tim O'Reilly.

Enjoy!

Mike on AIR on Linux

Once again Mike Chambers, guru of all things AIR, has made a great tutorial on getting started with AIR on Linux. Since a lot of readers of Duane's World poked me about posting more on Linux and Mike has prepared this, I wanted to make sure it gets some airtime (yeah it is a pun).

You can read Mike's Post here:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/08/11/getting-started-with-adobe-air-on-linux-video/

LiveCycle ES courses at MAX 2008

This year the Adobe MAX event will have the most comprehensive LiveCycle ES program of any event. In case you missed the previous announcements, MAX 2008 is going to take place November 16-19 in San Francisco. You can find out more at the MAX 2008 site here. It is the single focal point for LC ES training this year on our planet! Some of the top picks for LC ES training include these courses:

Adobe Roadmap: Enterprise

Hear about Adobe’s product and solutions roadmap and discuss Adobe’s vision so that together we can create the enterprise of the future.

Speakers:	Joel Heinke
Audience:	Web Developer, Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	Acrobat, ActionScript, Ajax, Blaze DS, ColdFusion, Contribute, Flex, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle ES, Open Source
When:	Monday, November 17, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm

Agile Testing of Enterprise RIAs with Flex and LiveCycle ES

Hear how Adobe Consulting delivers complex rich Internet applications built on Flex and LiveCycle ES, while still employing agile engineering methods to assure quality. Learn about testing with FlexUnit; using Code Coverage tools, designing for testing, and improving test coverage; and how to extend these capabilities to unit-test LiveCycle ES applications "behind the glass."

Speakers:	Alex Uhlmann, Herve Dupriez
Audience:	Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Architectural Best Practices for Flex and LiveCycle ES Applications

Hear Adobe Consulting discuss their "Blueprint Architecture" for creating applications with Flex, Adobe AIR, LiveCycle Data Services ES, and LiveCycle ES. Learn how to integrate these technologies to create complex rich Internet applications with Adobe technology.

Speakers:	Tunde Turner, Steven Webster
Audience:	Architect
Skill:	Advanced
Products:	LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 9:30 am - 10:30 am

Building Enterprise Applications Using Flex, Adobe AIR, and LiveCycle ES

See how Adobe's client and server technologies can be leveraged together to build engaging applications. See how Flex and AIR can be used as a front end to a complex back-end process deployed on LiveCycle ES.

Speakers:	Marcel Boucher
Audience:	Web Developer, IS/IT, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex Builder, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Building RIAs Using Form Guides

Learn how to build and deploy rich Internet applications using form guides, part of Adobe LiveCycle Designer. Form guides are an alternative view of a form based on Adobe Flash technology that guides users through the form-filling process step by step. Form authors build on an existing form design to provide a more visually appealing and streamlined method of capturing form data. The enhanced interface can help reduce data entry errors by simplifying the amount of information presented to a form filler at a given time.

Speakers:	Paul Guerette
Audience:	Web Developer, Web Designer, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm Monday, November 17, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Wednesday, November 19, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm

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
Audience:	Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Advanced
Products:	LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex Builder, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Tuesday, November 18, 8:30 am - 10:00 am Wednesday, November 19, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Building Your First Application Using LiveCycle ES

Build an end-to-end application from scratch using Adobe LiveCycle ES. The application will utilize forms, orchestration, and many of the Adobe LiveCycle platform features. Learn how to easily integrate with external systems and how to include people in business processes for approvals, reviews, and more.

Speakers:	Valerie Snider-Lynch
Audience:	Web Developer, IS/IT, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Beginner
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Tuesday, November 18, 8:30 am - 10:00 am Wednesday, November 19, 9:00 am - 10:30 am Wednesday, November 19, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Information Assurance: Rights Management and Digital Security

Explore the information assurance capabilities in Adobe LiveCycle. Learn how organizations use rights management and digital security features to protect sensitive information by enabling confidentiality, privacy, authentication, integrity, nonrepudiation, and availability.

Speakers:	Steve Forrest
Audience:	Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 9:30 am - 10:30 am

Inside the Adobe AIR Cook-off: The Best Show Off Their Winning Chops

See some of the best work being done in AIR application development today. Get insight from the authors of the Adobe AIR Cookbook, plus a group of the top contributors to the Adobe AIR Cookbook website. For the past six months, there's been an open call to the RIA developer community to show off their top tricks and best practices; in this session, you'll see their work in action and get a chance to exchange information with the panelists. There may be a bonus interactive feature or two in this session (hint: involving prizes and all comers).

Speakers:	Michael Koch, Rich Tretola , Marco Casario, Koen De Weggheleire
Audience:	Web Developer, Web Designer, Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	Spry, Open Source, LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex Builder, Flex, FlashCast, Flash Player, Flash Media Server, Flash Lite, Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Blaze DS, Ajax, AIR, Adobe Media Player, Adobe Device Central, ActionScript, Acrobat, "Thermo"
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

InsideRIA Outlook, 2009: What Every Developer Needs to Be Thinking About

Join top experts to hear how standards, the economy, emerging players, workflow, client expectations, and more are affecting the industry. InsideRIA regulars representing some of the top houses in the business discuss the top strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the industry. Panelists have five minutes to outline their top SWOT points; then the panel and audience have an open Q&A on what we can expect in the next 12 to 18 months.

Speakers:	Rich Tretola , Adam Flater, RJ Owen
Audience:	Web Developer, Web Designer, Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	Spry, Open Source, LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex Builder, Flex, FlashCast, Flash Player, Flash Media Server, Flash Lite, Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Connect, ColdFusion, Blaze DS, Ajax, AIR, Adobe XD, Adobe Media Player, Adobe Device Central, ActionScript, Acrobat 3D, Acrobat, "Thermo"
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Introduction to LiveCycle ES

Peel back the marketing-speak and take a real look at what LiveCycle ES is all about from the platform to the tooling. Topics will include how LiveCycle ES fits into the enterprise and which types of applications are well suited for LiveCycle. This session will also include a product demo.

Speakers:	Greg Wilson, Christoph Rooms
Audience:	Web Developer, Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Beginner
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm

LiveCycle ES and Adobe Solution Accelerators

Learn how Adobe Solution Accelerators can help LiveCycle ES customers reduce development time and increase the quality of their applications by leveraging prebuilt deployable code and best practice methodologies.

Speakers:	Valerie Snider-Lynch
Audience:	Partner Decision Maker, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

LiveCycle ES Architecture Deep Dive

Deep dive into the LiveCycle ES platform architecture. Topics will include the service container, invocation layer, service orchestration, and events and techniques for extending and customizing the platform.

Speakers:	Shone Sadler
Audience:	Web Developer, IS/IT, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Advanced
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

LiveCycle ES: Building Applications

Learn how to develop and deploy applications with Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite). By enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM), LiveCycle ES allows both business and IT professionals to visually assemble end-to-end processes that unify systems, people, business rules, and web services quickly and flexibly. We'll develop a LiveCycle based application using LiveCycle solution components and determine how to implement business rules in a process. We'll also cover process deployment and the LiveCycle workspace and use the record and playback feature to debug an application.

Speakers:	Bob Bailey
Audience:	Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Sunday, November 16, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Rapid Enterprise RIA Development with Solution Accelerators

Find out how Adobe Solution Accelerators enable the rapid development of recurring industry solutions with Flex, Adobe AIR, and LiveCycle ES. In this presentation, Adobe Consulting will look at two problem spaces — customer enrollment and correspondence management — and show how to create innovative experiences with Flex, AIR, and LiveCycle ES by leveraging freely available Solution Accelerators.

Speakers:	Danny Saikaly, Steven Webster
Audience:	Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Service Component Architecture (SCA)

This session explores the SCA work at OASIS, including bindings to Java and similarities with LiveCycle ES in methodology. Those involved with enterprise architecture will find this session of particular interest.

Speakers:	Mike Edwards, Martin Chapman
Audience:	Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS
When:	Tuesday, November 18, 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Service-Oriented Architecture for the Enterprise

Attend this session to hear an examination of the OASIS Reference Model for SOA and a discussion of concrete service architecture work. We will relate the concepts of the model to concrete implementations. LiveCycle ES will be used as a case study for implementing a full-blown services platform for facilitating automated business processes and working with human-centric business processes.

Speakers:	Matt Butler
Audience:	Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Using LiveCycle Content Services ES

Explore LiveCycle Content Services ES, a fully integrated set of content services ranging from an enterprise content repository to social collaboration tools such as enterprise forums. LiveCycle Content Services ES is now part of the base LiveCycle ES platform, providing features such as check-in/checkout, version control, auditing, archiving/retention, and access rights management.

Speakers:	Paul Guerette
Audience:	IS/IT, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Beginner
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm Tuesday, November 18, 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm Wednesday, November 19, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

What's New in LiveCycle ES Update 1

See the new features of LiveCycle ES Update 1. New features include content services, PDF Generator 3D, an improved development environment, improved deployment, expanded platform support, and much more.

Speakers:	Marcel Boucher
Audience:	Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	LiveCycle ES, Acrobat 3D
When:	Tuesday, November 18, 9:00 am - 10:00 am

Doug and Ben rock it with SpatialKey

I came across what might be the most efficient Flex mapping application on the web, launched by the Universal Mind geniuses and others like Ben Stucki, Andy Powell and Doug McCune. It's called SpatialKey and the technology preview release just came out. This is a product doing fully client-side heatmap renderings of thousands of data points and can do up to about 100k completely client-side. The architecture uses a hybrid approach and when client side loads exceed the 100K, processing moves to a server to do aggregation.



SpatialKey loads a ton of data into a Flex app and produces sweet visuals that tell a much better story about the data than looking at points on a map. They're only launching the client-side stuff as a "technology preview" while working on an enterprise offering that includes a database product. Potential use cases include deploying to police departments to handle their entire crime databases.

Doug wrote a much more detailed blog article about it here.

VMWare joins Linux Foundation alongside Adobe, others!

As reported in the Washington Post,

"Virtualization giant VMware has joined the Linux Foundation, lining up alongside existing members like Adobe, Google and IBM, the organization announced Wednesday.

Virtualization, the ability to run software in virtualized containers so multiple OSes or versions can run on one physical machine, is becoming more prevalent in IT environments. At its core, virtualization is enabled by software called a hypervisor, and can help drive down data-center costs, among other benefits."

To me, this is an awesome development. I am about to add Debian to my VMWare list and am glad to see they are seeing the light. For those of you who have not tried Linux lately, it has come a long way. Awesome day today!!

O'Reilly Open Source 2008 Slides available

James Ward and I jointly presented a session at this year's OSCON conference in Portland. The session was titled Flex: the Open Source SDK for RIAs and it includes step by step instructions on how to download the source trunk via svn and use Apache Ant to build.

Presentation: Flex_ the Open Source SDK for RIAs Presentation [PPT]
Paper: Flex_ the Open Source SDK for RIAs Paper [PDF]

Abstract: Adobe has released the Flex SDK open source under Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, the Java source code for the compilers, the debugger, and the core libraries. Flex can run in any browser—on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and AIR. This session will introduce people to Flex, provide code samples, use cases and a roadmap.

Duane's World Episode 7

In this episode we explore LiveCycle ES including demonstrating an AIR Client written by Jorg Knippschild on Adobe in Munich. Dave Liao and Vlad Ghelesel from Ensemble Systems are interviewed and discuss trends in LiveCycle ES development including coupling Flex and AIR. The Code and Tunes segment features great high-quality Imperial metal from my good friend Kurt Phillips' band Warhag.



The code samples will be uploaded to duanesworldtv.org later.

WTO Talks Collapse - this affects EVERYONE!

I was deeply saddened to read the following from the BBC website this evening:

"Marathon talks in Geneva aimed at liberalising global trade have collapsed, the head of the World Trade Organisation has said.

Pascal Lamy confirmed the failure, which officials have blamed on China, India and the US failing to agree on import rules. EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said the result was "heartbreaking". The talks were launched in 2001 in Doha and were seen as providing a cornerstone for future global trade.

The main stumbling block was farm import rules, which allow countries to protect poor farmers by imposing a tariff on certain goods in the event of a drop in prices or a surge in imports."

This is very serious. You might not think it affects you but this does. I worked with the United Nations (UN/CEFACT) as a vice chair to remove barriers to global trade for close to 6 years. I saw many things that were beyond change and a lot of things that could be changed. There was doubt of course, after all, who am I (a mountain biker/musician / tech guy) to help the world and defend those who cannot help themselves. Luckily I killed that small voice in the back of my head and dove in deep and felt I have caused change.

The failure of this round of talks on farm subsidies and farm tariffs means we are all going to pay more for food and people in some countries are going to die because they have no food. I have pinged Avaaz.org to get a petition started to bring to Pascal Lamy to urge the member nations to get back to the table and remind them that every day they stall, people die. Statistically, people have died because of failures in world trade in the time it takes you to read this blog.

If you see a petition from avaaz.org, please sign it. Stop this madness.

Tutorial on PHP-AMF

Fellow evangelist Lee Brimlow just built and posted a wicked tutorial on using Action Message Format with PHP. I think it is one of the best ever online tutorials on this subject. Lee takes you through the high level overview, then the server side AMFPHP and finally the client side code. You can access it here and see Lee's blog here. It is easy to code along with.

Adobe TV - Working with Flex Builders' Web Services WSDL Wizard

The following video is a simplified version of the Duane's World episode 1 Web Services AS3 code generation wizard. The source code for this is available here alongside other code samples. If you want the more thorough explanation of what is going on, the Duane's World 1 show is the best place.

The lowest form of life just left the planet

I saw a story on Slashdot today that made me ill. The Spam King apparently escaped from a prison then killed himself, his wife and child. At the same time, I got a report of bombs going off in Bangalore, India where I have been.

Harmony and Peace please! Both of these stories evoked strong feelings.

The Spam King was the lowest form of life on the planet. He collectively hurt our global economy more than most other criminals and deserved to go to jail. He took some of my life away and probably some of yours. SPAM is a crime. Make no mistake about it. The selfishness of this individual has now cost others their lives. This confirms my belief that spammers are in fact the lowest form of life and he probably would have been lower on the prison hierarchy than any other inmate.

The second story really worries me as I have good friends in Bangalore. When I last visited it, I found Bangalore to be alive and thriving. I wonder who would do this and why?

Killing of innocents can never be justified. I have to go speak at OSCON now.

OSCON 2008 and New Flex/AIR Course for GeoWeb

James Ward and I are heading down to OSCON today to speak and hang out. OSCON is a great conference but I haven't been in a few years. Looking really forward to it.

Yesterday we delivered a new 3+ hour course on Flex and AIR map based RIA development at GeoWeb 2008 (one of the best conferences in the world!). After completing the writing of the course and giving it once, we really want to offer it up to the community. It takes attendees through 9 projects with lots of coding to demonstrate concepts related to Geo-spatial mashups/RIAs in Flex and AIR.

Directories:

~/AttendeeProjects - the starter projects with the code completed and comments where students have to add code
~/CompleteProjects – the solutions source code
~/TeachersDocument (PDF and DOCX) – the manual for anyone wanting to teach this course. It has a lot of cut and paste code in it to speed up solutions.
~/Presentation (PPT and PDF) - the presentation slides

It is fairly well documented to allow anyone to present but if you find anything missing, please feel free to contribute. If you want the course, contact me at dnickull at adobe dot com. We'll send it out for anyone to use.

UPDATE:  I have uploaded the ZIP file here.  This is not a Flex archive but contains Flex Archives.  Unzip the course first then you can import the project and use the assets.

Car Reviews Indicate that New Cars are Cool But They Aren't Hot Cars

As some of you know, I am trading in my 2002 Porsche Twin Turbo. No - this is nothing to do with the price of gas, I just really don't drive it enough. The car has been a feature on Duane's World but is now up for sale. In the meantime, I am in need of another car. One of the things that I've noticed lately whenever I've been reading car reviews is that the new cars everyone is interested in are cool but they're not hot. What I mean by that is that these cars have some really interesting features but they aren't the kind of cars that you want to go cruising in with your buddies. Emerging car designers should think about ways to incorporate the cool features of these cars with a style that hot people are going to want to be seen driving. I guess people are maturing and realizing that things like hybrids are actually far cooler than a Porsche Turbo. Go figure?

For example, the Toyota Prius is great in terms of the technology used in hybrid cars and the fact that it gets great gas mileage but you aren't exactly going to want to drive up to your friend's house specifically to show off this car. Likewise, the Smart car is a cool car with a unique design that's different from a lot of the new cars out there but it's not as though you're going to be able to really feel like you're a hot guy while driving around in one of these cars. You don't drive up to someone else in one of these cars and rev your car engine to get attention on the road.

There's nothing wrong with the new cars that are coming out today. All of the car reviews about vehicles like the Toyota Prius and the Smart car seem to indicate that there are some features about these cars that are worth keeping as we design new cars in the future. I just think that we need to take some of the benefits of hybrid cars and small cars and make them a little bit more stylish. I'm all for driving a cool car with modern features but I don't want to look like a tool while doing it.

Why doesn't FIA or some other organization have a racing class for these cars? A lot of car technology (Radial Tires, Seatbelts, crumple zones, improved fuel mileage to name a few) are the direct result of innovation stemmed by racing. I can see two cars guys 10 years from now having this conversation:

Car Guy 1: "Hey - nice rod. What is that? A 20 Gigawatt DC inverter under the hood?"
Car Guy 2: "I wish. It's the stock 15 GW but I added a boost capacitor to give me 150 kw of torque when I hit the pedal hard"
Car Guy 1: "Wicked - nice styling too. Those 28" rims with regenerative braking kick ass".
....

You get the idea.

A personal interview with Andre Michelle, Webinale 2008 and Spoiler

Duane's World episode 6 is now out. I was really grateful to have been able to spend time interviewing Flash guru Andre Michelle. He discusses his new venture (www.hobnox.com) and shows off some cool screenshots of the new audio tools. These are really amazing!! Andre's work takes Flash to the ultimate edge.

The music for the Code and Tunes sessions is provided by Spoiler, my newest favorite metal band from Germany. Bass player Marc Thiele hand picked the songs for the video. If you get a chance to see Spoiler live - check them out! The code and tunes shows some Flex code to work with audio and explains how to add a pause, play and stop button to an audio player in a few minutes. Thanks to all the guys from Webinale 2008 (Felix, Stefan et al) for appearing in the video and helping me with interviews and location logistics as well as putting on a great conference! Here is the show. Feel free to use the embed code to redistribute wherever!



Oh yeah - there is also film of driving at 210 KPH on the autobahn!

Doc Or Die: XML Fever

Bob Glushko made a really funny post about XML fever to celebrate XML's tenth birthday.

Doc Or Die: XML Fever

Do you feel a wicked urge to build a meta schema language, fix the semantic web or start data modeling (only advanced cases of XML fever)? This doc explains why. LOL - thanks Bob!

O'Reilly Foo Camp 2008

I just got back from O'Reilly's Foo Camp 2008. It was really a life changing experience. The ability to mesh/mind meld with the world's greatest minds was incredible. Topics ranged from serious discussions on UN policy to create global fair trade and equality to guitar hacks and inventing new games.

I'd go as far to say that the 300 colleagues and peers at this year's Foo Camp should be consulted to set world policy. My head is full and it will take weeks to digest. I feel grateful for the interactions and the invitation to attend this weekend. There will be a future episode of Duane's World TV highlighting the event with interviews from Bob Glushko (UC Berkeley), Tim O'Reilly (founder - O'Reilly Media), John Markoff (New York Times) and Dries Buytaert (Drupal Founder).

I also want to express sincere gratitude for all the staff at O'Reilly for putting on this event. Everyone pitched in to make this a perfect weekend. Too many people to thank, but thanks to Tim, Sarah, the cooks, facilities staff and all others that made this possible.

Duane
(Feeling really grateful and optimistic about the future of our planet)

Frankenstein Fender?

22nd Century is remaining a three piece band. In order to cover the extra leads when we play live, I have acquired a rare doubleneck body and am building a Cremer/Fender hybrid doubleneck. The guitar will have a standard American Precision Bass on the bottom and strat on the top. Playing live will be a bit tricky as I'll have to switch back and forth between lead and bass while Tim learns to play guitar and bass pedals at the same time.

Here are the photos:

World Record Download? Where was the contest?

NOTE: This is not a rant against FireFox. For the record, it is my browser of choice and gets equal time with Safari.

I recently became aware and annoyed of a claim by Mozilla stating they own the world record (stamped by Guiness World Records nonetheless) for the most software downloads in one single day. This claim is obviously somewhat hollow as the details are slim to none, nor was anyone else in the industry that I am aware of even invited to the party.

You can read the claim here:

"Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web."

How many downloads does Apple or Microsoft get when they update their OS? I looked at the figures of both Microsoft and Apple and figure both of them have probably beat this on several days based on install numbers alone (SP2 anyone?). Furthermore, as noted by fellow Evangelist Ben Forta, there have been over a billion downloads of the Adobe Flash Player in the first 5 months of 2008 alone. This averages around 6.7 million (1,000,000,000 / 150) every day sustained over 5 months and Adobe has actually publicly stated that we've had days where software downloads exceeded 10 million in a day. Some even place this number to 12 million per day.

I seriously doubt Mozilla beat yesterday's massive coordinated DNS upgrade patch. According to CERT and others, "This is the largest synchronized security update in the history of the Internet, and is the result of hard work and dedication across dozens of organizations."

Speaking for myself, I dispute Firefox's claim. Not that is really matters. I just prefer the truth please.


Sorry FireFox. I love your software, I use your software but if you want to have a real contest, you have to at least invite the competition.

Duanes World Episode 5 - E.B.U., Switzerland, Flex and Helcion!

Duane's World Episode five is now live. Special music guests and one of my favorite bands Helcion (Check them out!!!) supply ripping music for the Code and Tunes segment while I show how to work with video in Flex Builder 3. Other guests include Marcus Metzner (S4M - Germany) and Roger Roberts (RTBF - Belguim). Discussions include metadata for archiving media packages as well as the SOA infrastructure for enabling Media Assets to be repurposed for the web to meet new distribution and business models.