Duane's World TV Show Episode 2 out today!

Show two airs today. It features multiple guests and outtakes from my trip to India and also has step-by-step instructions to build a Flex - Yahoo Map using the new AS3 SWC in Code and Tunes. The show's focus is on "Community in Software Development". Hope you enjoy. Please leave any feedback below.

Developers Tools and Examples for Flash Player 10

Yesterday, Adobe announced Flash Player 10 with tons of really new features (yes - Linux too). But - there didn't seem to be any way for developers to get into the action yesterday.

Luckily, Lee Brimelow (The Flash Blog) sent me this link to an excellent video explaining how you can use MXMLC (Flex Compiler Shell) to write some samples that use the new capabilities of Flash Player 10.

If you really get stuck - consider going to the Flash Player 10 public forum.

Moscone, Norovirus, JavaOne - The Truth Please

I made an earlier blog post here discussing my experience with a norovirus and passing out on stage. Like most people who attended JavaOne, I never really questioned the mainstream press story until people started posting comments on my blog that seem to contradict the official story. Now I want to call out and ask for people who have had similar experiences to add comments to this blog if they want to request a more thorough investigation of what really happened.

I have also contacted a couple of reporters and asked them to look into this further. Here are the things that concern me:

1. The Contra Costa Times and others reported that the SF Department of Health became aware of the norovirus problem on Wednesday, May 7. Why were JavaOne attendees not warned until Friday at 3:00 AM and why was food allowed to be served Wed, Thurs and Friday if it was suspected that it was a food issue?

2. The official statement from Jim Soos was that no one was hospitalized, however Greg H. (he left a comment on the earlier post) was. Besides, how would he know if we went to hospitals anyways? If a spokesperson doesn't know, they had no business making such statements as fact. Understandably, Jim is probably now aware that at least one person was hospitalized and maybe didn't know at the time he spoke.

3. Most of the official press reported that only 3 non-Moscone staff got sick. Obviously more than 3 non-Moscone workers contracted it as there are myself and 4 others just on the earlier blog post. If you had it or the symptoms please leave a comment on this blog. I want to find out how many people really got sick. This official number of "3" is now wrong. The number comes from David Perry, spokesperson for Moscone who stated:

David Perry, spokesman for the Moscone Center, said 67 of people infected were staff working at the weeklong conference and 3 were attendees

See full story here

4. What the hell was Moscone doing serving us food? Here is what a statement to ponder (courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle):

The source of the virus has not yet been identified, but generally the norovirus is passed when an infected person spreads microbes either by preparing food or sharing plates or utensils, said Jim Soos, assistant director of policy and planning at the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

So Moscone knew about it as early as Wednesday, but continued to serve us food Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Hmmm - was any testing done to make sure the food was safe? Were we warned that maybe the food might be the cause? No - nothing but silence! This is not right IMO.

I want to point out that I don't blame any one group. I love Sun (a lot of friends there) and I want to be at every JavaOne conference in the future. I will be back at Moscone for other conferences this year and actually know many of the staff there who are very polite and pleasant. I don't know Jim Soos but imagine he must have a tough job.

What I really want to do is to find the truth. If you know something, please add it here.

Which scripting language is most popular?

This is a totally unscientific bit of research to answer a question about the popularity of various scripting languages posed to me by Mike Chambers. After a quick search, it appears that there was no reliable data available. I deferred to a far less than scientific methodology to find out which of the four big languages (ActionScript, JavaScript, Perl, and VBScript) I am following are leading in different categories.

I realize that there are some languages left off this list. This is because I am lazy (something which I have admitted to before).

Here is the survey as of May 2008:

Monster.com jobs keyword search

The scientist must consider that first off, it only shows that JavaScript got over 5000, not the exact number. In all fairness, I never did a search on “Flash,” which includes ActionScript Skills. I figured if I had done this, I probably would have had to also search for “AJAX,” which obviously includes JavaScript. Here are the results in order of ranking.

*Javascript > 5,000
http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?re=130&cy=us&brd=1&JSNONREG=1&q=javascript&rad=20&rad_units=miles

Perl 4,442
http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?re=0&cy=us&brd=1&jsnonreg=1&q=perl&rad_units=miles&pg=1&vw=b

ActionScript 778
http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?re=0&cy=us&brd=1&jsnonreg=1&q=actionscript&rad_units=miles&pg=1&vw=b

VBScript 856
http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?re=0&cy=us&brd=1&jsnonreg=1&q=vbscript&rad_units=miles&pg=1&vw=b

* Did not give exact number

Note that “Flash” gave 3,552 results:
http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?re=130&cy=us&brd=1&JSNONREG=1&q=flash&rad=20&rad_units=miles

which was more than “AJAX” at 2,835
http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?re=0&cy=us&brd=1&jsnonreg=1&q=ajax&rad_units=miles&pg=1&vw=b

Amazon.com Books

Book searches on Amazon also appear to be totally unscientific. Given that Perl has been around the longest and was powering most of the first Internet bubble, it is no surprise it topped the rankings. ActionScript came in a dismal last place.

Perl 20,317
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=perl&x=0&y=0

JavaScript 7,338
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=javascript&x=0&y=0

VBScript 2,913
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=vbscript&x=0&y=0

ActionScript 666
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=actionscript&x=0&y=0

I decided to supplement this search with additional searches on “Flash” and “AJAX” to capture more of the current AS and JS crowd books.

Flash garnered 266,572 results
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_i_0?ie=UTF8&rs=&keywords=flash&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aflash%2Ci%3Astripbooks

while AJAX got around 15,000
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=AJAX&x=0&y=0

Google results “(term) developer”

For this search, the terms were enclosed in quotes making it a string search. Otherwise I suspected all the pages that merely contained the Script type="JavaScript” element and attribute set would have come up falsely strong. In fact, most pages that have Flash use JavaScript to load them and do detection of Flash Player version etc. The results here show that there are still lot of people discussing Perl Developers however ActionScript did come in second.

Perl developer 352,000
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22perl+developer%22&btnG=Search

ActionScript developer 99,400
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=%22Actionscript+developer%22&btnG=Google+Search

JavaScript developer 75,500
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=%22javascript+developer%22&btnG=Google+Search

VBScript developer 1,210
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22vbscript+developer%22&btnG=Search

Flash Developer got just over 1,000,000
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=%22flash+developer%22&btnG=Google+Search

Ajax Developer got 94,300
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pwst=1&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=%22ajax+developer%22&spell=1

and Flex Developer got 214,000
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22Flex+developer%22&btnG=Search

So what does it all mean? Not much really - it is an unscientific approximation of which scripting language might be more popular.

OASIS SOA Reference Architecture call for review

To OASIS members, Public Announce Lists:

The OASIS Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model (SOA-RM) TC has recently
approved the following specification as a Committee Draft and approved the
package for public review:

Reference Architecture for Service Oriented Architecture Version 1.0

The public review starts today, 9 May 2008, and ends 8 July 2008. This is an
open invitation to comment. We strongly encourage feedback from potential users,
developers and others, whether OASIS members or not, for the sake of improving
the interoperability and quality of OASIS work. Please feel free to distribute
this announcement within your organization and to other appropriate mail lists.

More non-normative information about the specification and the technical
committee may be found at the public home page of the TC at
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=soa-rm. Comments may
be submitted to the TC by any person through the use of the OASIS TC Comment
Facility which can be located via the button marked "Send A Comment" at the top
of that page, or directly at
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/index.php?wg_abbrev=soa-rm.

Submitted comments (for this work as well as other works of that TC) are
publicly archived and can be viewed at
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/soa-rm-comment/. All comments submitted to
OASIS are subject to the OASIS Feedback License, which ensures that the feedback
you provide carries the same obligations at least as the obligations of the TC
members.

The specification document and related files are available here:

Editable Source:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/soa-rm/soa-ra/v1.0/soa-ra-pr-01.doc

PDF (Authoritative):
http://docs.oasis-open.org/soa-rm/soa-ra/v1.0/soa-ra-pr-01.pdf

HTML:
http://docs.oasis-open.org/soa-rm/soa-ra/v1.0/soa-ra-pr-01.html

Abstract:
"This document specifies the OASIS Reference Architecture for Service Oriented
Architecture. It follows from the concepts and relationships defined in the
OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture. While it remains
abstract in nature, the current document describes one possible template upon
which a SOA concrete architecture can be built.

"Our focus in this architecture is on an approach to integrating business with
the information technology needed to support it. The issues involved with
integration are always present, but, we find, are thrown into clear focus when
business integration involves crossing ownership boundaries.

...

"The Reference Architecture has three main views: the Business via Service view
which lays the foundation for conducting business in the context of Service
Oriented Architecture; the Realizing Services view which addresses the
requirements for constructing a Service Oriented Architecture; and the Owning
Service Oriented Architecture view which focuses on the governance and
management of SOA-based systems."


OASIS and the Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model (SOA-RM) TC welcome
your comments.

Yes - I did pass out on stage at JavaOne.

Thank you for all the emails. I apparently contract the norovirus that was running rampant through JavaOne this year. While I spent most of the night vomiting (and worse), I did feel okay in the morning. I went to a medical clinic totally unaware the virus was around and they diagnosed it. I later found out via the news that a norovirus was the culprit.

I felt okay so I decided to go ahead with my final presentation on SOA, Standards and Java at 1:30 on Friday; however my co-presenter Steve Jones of Capgemini noticed I wasn't looking too good. To make a long story short, at the end of the code demo part I keeled over and apparently blacked out on stage in front of quite a few hundred people. I guess it is a good way to avoid Q&A. Goods news is we actually got the presentation done first.

The media picked up the story later that day:
CBS - http://cbs5.com/local/norovirus.moscone.outbreak.2.720481.html

SF Chronicle - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/10/BAB910JRM3.DTL&type=health

CNET - http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9940042-36.html?tag=cd.blog

Thank you to everyone who wrote in. I am still sick but okay enough to blog. Will update later.

Duane's World TV Show Launches today!

Duane's World, a new TV show focused on how technology impacts people lives and full of interviews and coding samples and tips, launched today. There are 12 episodes planned for 2008. The first show starts with a small talk on Web Services and SOA, continues with an interview with the guys from Nitobi, and concludes with a lesson on how to use the Flex Builder version 3 WSDL import wizard to build a full web service client. Andre discusses AJAX, Flex, and AIR development including fighting for Red Bull drinks with Mike Chambers and playing jokes on Grant Skinner.

Stupid JavaOne 2008 fun!!!!

I was bored so I decided to climb inside a large plastic ball and ask some guys to chuck me around. Does this thing or these guys look dangerous? See the movie below. LOL!!!

Yes Virginia - Adobe does listen to Slashdot

Today I saw a comment on Slashdot (my all time favorite online community) that made me realize just how far Adobe has come.

“The mere idea of higher ups at a previously assumed Big Evil Company paying attention to discussions on Slashdot (with critiques here often ruthless, multifaceted, and heavily biased towards consumer interests) is pretty shocking, and heartening.

If this signals a major shift in Adobe's operating culture, I think it's cause for celebration.”

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=539834&cid=23263596

Yes - it is true. In fact, we regularly peruse Slashdot to find out the latest, brutally honest opinions from the hardest to please tech-heads. I doubt we'll ever satisfy everyone but to recap, Adobe is definitely on the right track. PDF to ISO, The ActionScript Virtual Machine (VM behind Flash PLayer) open sourced via SourceForge, the Open Screen Project, The Flex Compiler open source project and BlazeDS are just a few examples of Adobe putting community and developers ahead of corporate greed. So what does this mean?

• Anyone who complains that Acrobat Reader is bloated is free to (try to) write a new PDF reader that works faster.
• Anyone who thinks the Flash Player is too slow is welcome to help.
• Anyone who wants a bug fixed in the Flex SDK can fix it for themselves and others.
• We all get to work together to build a cool technology stack that works for us.

Maybe I sound too much like an optimist or a hype. I do have faith in our company and really love working here. I love the change that is occurring and having a CEO and CTO that understand Slashdot and actually take time to read and take in what is being said.

What's next? Flash on the iPhone? Please already!!!

;-)

The Open Screen Project rocks the RIA world!!!!

Today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project, a major step forward to drive rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices and consumer electronics. The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics, Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers including BBC, MTV Networks and NBC Universal. The ASP removes barriers to adoption for all companies including:

- Removing restrictions on use of the Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV/F4V) specifications

- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player, enabling third parties to more easily embed it in devices

- Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol for robust data services

- Removing licensing fees – making the next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

- Working with partners to enable the client technology to be updated over the network to maintain consistency as we continue to innovate

- Working with partners to enable open access to web content and rich Internet applications by users across devices and networks

Web 2.0 Expo San Fransisco Materials

I will be shortly uploading the materials from the following two talks at Web 2.0 Expo:

1. Flex and AIR Boot Camp
- 25 code projects with source code [Download]
- instruction guide to present these [Download]
- PPT Slides (Feel free to use and re-label) [Download]
- Flex/Air Cookbook - Feb 2008 [Download]
- Bootcamp projects in MS Word with additional instruction [Download]

2. Ontologies for the Enterprise
- PDF version of slides. Note that you must check with John Sowa and Adam Pease before re-presenting these slides. [Download]

3. Specific Flex or AIR source code
- AIR Apple Shaped Application - no chrome, runtime morphing [Download]
- AIR Backwards Countdown Timer - counts backwards until specific date [Download]
- AIR FullScreen - app to mimic PPT presentation w/integrated demos [Download]

4. Misc Stuff I promised a few people
- 6 songs from my Band 22nd Century (zipped) [Download]

Please feel free to take the materials and use them to present. I'll post the URL's here once done.

Albelli Launches Photo Book Software on Adobe AIR

I am at Web 2.0 Expo today and got a really cool surprise. Joris sent me an email and announced that Albelli launched using PhotoBucket's API. This is one of the coolest AIR applications I have ever seen. The full site is here:

http://www.albelli.com/photobucket

Their application is written in Adobe AIR and can be downloaded. You can use it to build a custom photo album using your own photos and then order it to be printed and delivered to your house. This is a great mashup and has some very interesting technology behind it.

I first ran into Joris at Web 20 Expo in Berlin last year. Watch these guys and visit the site for sure.

LiveCycle Contest

The Acrobat User Community is hosting a PDF Forms contest. Forms creation, distribution and response tracking are one of the most popular uses for Acrobat. But users need more samples of great forms and useful templates.

The purpose of the PDF forms contest is to create a public library of sample PDF Forms and LiveCycle Designer templates that other PDF creators can use. The contest is open to qualified participants in any industry. You can even use a free 30-day trial copy of Acrobat 8 Professional to create your entries.

There are two entry categories:

Category: Fillable Forms
Show sophisticated and visually interesting fillable PDF Forms created using the forms toolbar in Acrobat 8 Professional, that may include interactive form elements, auto-formatting, calculations and Javascripting.

Category: LiveCycle Designer Templates
Develop form templates that can be used in LiveCycle Designer 8, and may include graphics, interactive form elements, library elements, auto-formatting, calculations and Javascripting. (LiveCycle Designer is included with every copy of Acrobat 8 Professional for Windows)

Notable entries will appear in the PDF Forms gallery. Entries may also qualify to win Adobe software, video cams and t-shirts.

The contest runs from Mar 10, 2008 until Apr 30, 2008.

Full details at http://www.acrobatusers.com/contests/forms/

The end of the web as we know it

Sounds like an REM song doesn't it. The title is actually a white paper I co-wrote with Brady Forrest and Jack Wilber for Webinale 08 in Karlsruhe, DE. I'll be speaking at the event in May this year. Ich liebe Deutschland!!

Das Deutschen Papier ist hier:
http://createordie.de/cod/artikel/Revolution-im
-Internet-Wie-das-Web-zur-Plattform-wurde-1650.html

The English version is available online at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/web_end.html

Moss on the brain?

I caught a weird Twit from a friend who forwarded it to me. Scott Barnes, an evangelist for Microsoft, made fun of LiveCycle by pointing to a 1988 demo of a Wang document with rudimentary voice, CRUD and digsig features. In his twit, he labeled it "the best Adobe LiveCycle sales pitch i've ever seen.. well done Adobe". The twit (note: using the word "twit" to refer to the twitter entry in this case; not the person who wrote it) can be found here.

I got curious to know why he is picking on LiveCycle and followed it to the MossyBlog. Being Canadian, I know that moss usually grows on things that do not get enough direct sunlight and has a way of sucking the life out of the host. It is curious to see a blog use this metaphor as its primary moniker.

Nevertheless, after reading a bit and becoming completely bored, I have to surmise that he is getting paid to knock LiveCycle, has not seen a demo (most demos involve Microsoft technology too such as office, Win 2003 server, .NET framework 1.1 and more), and has no idea what LiveCycle ES is.

I only hope that someone at Microsoft realizes that Adobe and Microsoft have worked together very hard to bring LiveCycle to the market on the Microsoft platform. We have worked hard on the development of standards and protocols for the WS-* stack, including WS-Security, the Kerberos protocol, integration with Active Directory and much more. Most intelligent document workflows start out authoring documents in Microsoft Office so we need to work together for the benefit of the customer.

Yes - we do compete in some areas but increasingly, both companies are working towards a common good - satisfying their customers!

Makes me curious why he would willingly mock all the work Microsoft and Adobe have done together over the years. I guess when you only blog and don't spend time in real customer engagements, this cause might get lost. Nuff said!

Apple OR pear shaped AIR application?

I was challenged by a reader to build an Apple shaped application in Adobe AIR several months ago. I got an interesting email today asking if such an application could be shape shifted during runtime to change between being Apple and Pear shaped. The application is very simple yet demonstrates how to build apps that escape conventional boundaries such as rectangles. You may download the complete source code for the project here.

SPAM war deepens - am I winning?

Today I woke up to check my email and found that my email address had once again been used to spoof the "send" for buckets of SPAM.  This is due to my open advocacy of finding and physically bestowing great pain upon those parasitic individuals who plague the rest of humanity with SPAM.  The picture below shows my inbox:

This has not resulted in one single person complaining to me which is great. It means that the average recipient has enough intelligence to understand that the true spammer is using the email addresses of those who fight spam as the "sent from" address.

So what can we do now?  I am working with a few agencies worldwide to find this particular culprit.  The Chinese government is very hard on those who break laws and will likely severely punish any Chinese citizen for this.  The Russians are less accommodating however I have heard that you can easily hire "third parties" to take care of business in that country.

Distributing the AIR Runtime

Today I read a great post from Mike Chambers on how third party development shops can distribute the Adobe AIR runtime. Mike's full article can be read here. Here is an excerpt:

In order to re-distribute the Adobe AIR installer, you must first apply for, and receive permission from Adobe to redistribute it (this requires accepting a license, and submitting a form). Once you do this, you can get all of the documentation for how to distribute the runtime and integrate it with your custom installer.

We have a ton of information on this on the website (including a FAQ).

In general, the license allows you to:

* distribute the runtime installer on a closed intranet
* distribute the runtime installer on fixed media, such as CD or DVD Roms.
* distribute and launch the runtime installer as part of another native installer

In general, the license does not allow you to:

* modify the installer, or files to allow AIR application to run without having the runtime installed on the user’s system.
* distribute DLL’s or other files from the runtime directly within an application

So why is this such an important issue? Simple - it is about the entire community ensuring the end users have a good experience. While there are strong technical reasons (read the FAQ) for getting Adobe permission, consider what would happen if we had rogue companies randomly distributing modified versions of the AIR runtime without some form of central methodology and management. It could be somewhat chaotic but more importantly, for the good of the overall community, we need to all work together to cater to the end users to deliver a positive experience. This latter point cannot be emphasized enough.

While most development shops will likely just use the "get AIR" badge and rely on Adobe to incur the bandwidth costs for distribution (similar to how Sun distributes the Java Runtime Environment), you may apply for the Adobe AIR Runtime Distribution License Agreement if you have a good reason to want to distribute it yourself. Both are valid options and each company must chose the option that works best for them. Anyone can apply for that license here.

Note: Installing the Adobe AIR Runtime silently, deploying via SMS or Group Policy Objects is currently not a supported option. If you require installing the runtime silently please send an email to license-air-silent@adobe.com so that we can notify you when that feature becomes available.

Some useful online security advice

Last week I spoke at the Massive Tech show on a security panel. During the talk, I quickly realized how far in the dark many consumers are as to the dangers of online behavior. Many people, via sheer ignorance, expose themselves to unnecessary risks. The following are some quick tips I want to share to help raise awareness.

1. Always log out. When you log into an online application (such as your online banking or brokerage account), a session is created. If you simply close the browser without logging out, the session may remain open for a short time leaving it vulnerable to replay style attacks. In these types of attacks, someone could send a request or hit the back button on your own browser and be able to access your account as if they were you. Closing the session properly by logging out removes a huge amount of risk.

2. Use at least 3 different passwords for all your online activities. I use 3 - one for low value logins (such as a user group), one for medium risk and one password for high risk, high value applications such as online banking, paypal and our corporate network. NEVER use your highest value password for low risk accounts. It is very conceivable that someone could socially engineer an attack against you by finding out your interest and sending you an offer you cannot refuse (free iPod Touch with each new account on "someAttractiveWebsite.com"). A clever webmaster and hacker could spoof a password text field and trick you into providing your high value password for some offer when you set up a new account. USE MORE THAN ONE PASSWORD!!!

3. Be very suspicious of emails at work asking you to log in to a remote site to do something work related using your intranet credentials. I recently got an email purporting to be from our legal department telling me that I had to take some training to comply with US laws and to use my normal credentials. The URL was a remote site. While this one was real, this could have very easily been a trick (spoofed email, fake site) to compromise my corporate credentials.

4. ALWAYS check the certificate of a site and that HTTPS is working properly. Most newer browsers have technology to help alert unsuspecting consumers of fraud however it is still possible that a CRL has not yet picked up an expired certificate or the webmasters themselves have made mistakes with secure and non-secure items on the same page.

5. Set your email to not automatically download pictures from HTML email. This is an attack that a person can use to get your IP address. If you load up the HTML email and any referenced image, a trickster could easily send you an email with a unique file name and use the incoming HTTP Request envelope to get your actual IP Address. Being behind a firewall helps.

6. When logging in to high value sites, type the URL manually. Some clever tricksters have used the International Domain Name (IDN) support in Konqueror 3.2.1 on KDE 3.2.1, which allows remote attackers to spoof domain names using punycode encoded domain names that are decoded in URLs and SSL certificates in a way that uses homograph characters from other character sets, which facilitates phishing attacks. These are very hard to detect unless you know exactly what to look for.

7. DO NOT BUY PIRATED SOFTWARE ONLINE! The email ads you get advertising "special web deals" on top software brands are 100% pure fiction. If you try to buy the software, you will accomplish nothing other than giving a criminal your credit card information. Think about it - the criminals are already breaking the law by selling pirated software. Why would they comply and give you software? All they do is capture your Credit Card information leaving you wondering when your download key is coming. By the time you wise up, they have compromised your credit card. These types of attacks are often not reported as the victims themselves are often reluctant to make statements they broke the law. This can lead to further confidence tricks such as.....

8. Do not answer questions on the phone. Here is a scam that is difficult to detect. You get a call from your "credit card company". They ask you if you are the owner of credit card # and ask you to confirm. Since they already have given you your own card number, you might be satisfied that they are the bank (after all - who else would call you and be able to give you your own CC number). They ask you if it has the same expiry date as your real expiry date. Then they tell you that your card has some suspicious activity on it and they are monitoring it and want to capture the thief in the act. At this point, you are 100% convinced they are the bank but what they are really after you will give to them willingly. The next thing they do is state that they need to verify you are in fact in possession of your card. They tell you that they need the three digit special ID number on the back of the card. If you do not suspect anything, you read it back to them.

What to do? When someone calls you telling you they are your bank or some other organization of trust, tell them you'd like to call them back to validate this. If it really is your bank calling, they will probably appreciated your vigilance. If they balk, it is probably not your bank.

9. If a deal is too good to be true it is. This rule is so old and should be the guiding principle for every person. New cons are being thought up every day. Confidence games, ID gambits and other tricks are invented to take something from you. Even if a company is borderline legitimate, ask yourself "why?". Why will someone give me a free iPod for simply looking at online ads?

10. Share your experiences. If you do get conned, tell others to save them from the same fate.

I hope this helps at least one person. If anyone reading this has any others to add, please drop a comment below to help spread the word.

JavaScript vs. ActionScript

Today on the Google LiveCycle Developers list, a message came across which requires some additional clarification. The message claimed the following:

Hello all,
I don't know if this has been discussed before but thought I'd bring
it up. The JavaScript in LiveCycle isn't ECMA script it's actually
Action script like with Flash.

While the claim is errant, it does deserve some attention to discuss the differences. LiveCycle ES itself is a server product and is Java. If referring to
the LiveCycle clients, there are two main types of clients that can be used
with LiveCycle, although there are no limits as LiveCycle ES is a service bus which facilitates the consumption of services and does not constrain clients use of the services in true SOA manner (note: any service policies still must be observed). The two most common types of clients are Flex/AIR clients and Acrobat/Reader.

Acrobat and Reader implement a virtual machine based on JavaScript version
1.5 of ISO-16262 (formerly known as ECMAScript), JavaScript in Adobe®
Acrobat® software implements objects, methods, and properties that enable
you to manipulate PDF files, produce database-driven PDF files, modify the
appearance of PDF files, and much more. You can tie Acrobat JavaScript code
to a specific PDF document, a page, field, or button within that document,
or a field or button within the PDF file, and even to a user action as you
an with HTML pages. This is fully documented in the supporting
documentation. See:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/AcroJSGuide.pdf

Flex and AIR applications are in fact compiled into SWF's (commonly known as
Flash). These do implement the Actionscript Virtual Machine based on
ECMAScript. The current version was added in Flash Player 9 as ActionScript
3.0 with the advent of a new virtual machine, called AVM2 (ActionScript
Virtual Machine 2), which coexists with the previous AVM1 needed to support
legacy content. Although a bit different, it is very close to being ECMA
262 compliant.

ActionScript is run inside the Tamarin Virtual Machine. It is a just in time compiler intended to implement the fourth edition of the ECMAScript standard, commonly referred to as JavaScript 2. Tamarin was initially developed by Adobe Systems for its ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) used in Flash. The code was donated to the Mozilla project on November 7, 2006. The contributed code is tri-licensed under the GPL, LGPL, and MPL and will continue to be developed in Mozilla CVS, as the rest of Mozilla source code.

The contributed code is approximately 135,000 lines of code making it the largest single donation of code to Mozilla project besides Netscape itself. Tamarin will be included in future builds of Mozilla and by default, FireFox. There is a separate project to integrate Tamarin and SpiderMonkey is called ActionMonkey. Tamarin will also continue to be used in the future versions of Flash.

Adobe wrote LiveCycle before acquiring/merging with Macromedia, there was
no ActionScript support in any product to my knowledge.