Category: Uncategorized

This weekend some friends visited and we had a fabulous time playing together. One of our outings was to Stitches West, the land of yarn, patterns, and other knitting goodness. I had a wonderful time petting all the yarn, and found myself pulled back into the whole knitting thing. One of the booths was for…

A few months ago, Ketan Anjaria (aka KidBombay) made a cool spin viewer for things in freebase. One of my projects at Applied Minds is going to be springboarding off of that code, so I started off by changing the code to make the client configurable. We’re contributing our changes back to the code base,…

I’ve been working with the fabulous DisplayShelf code from simplyscheming.com to try to make various types of browsers in Flex. Yesterday, I *just about* had it working to browse images from flickr, but I ran into the old ‘checkpolicyfile’ problem. Even though Flickr has been nice enough to put crossdomain.xml files on all their static…

I have a friend who hearkens from the heartland of America, and is thus more schooled than I in the cosmic truths to be found on a farm. We were discussing the relative dimness of various farm animals, and he mentioned that sheep were pretty much the stupidest animals around. I asked why, and he…

… to mention that I now have red hair. And now, back to the program.

So I’ve now been at my new job for about 2 months, and there’s a major contrast between my last job and this job. We’ll start with the negatives because there aren’t many. I’m a remote worker at a company that does most of its collaboration and communication in person, so I’ve had to work…

I bet you think that I’m kidding, right? Perl allows programmers to build extremely bad habits, doesn’t force discipline, encourages shortcuts that simply aren’t possible in other languages. But I’m actually serious. I had a conversation with my new boss a few weeks ago that went something like this: Boss: Do you know what data…

Today I had one of those days you get as a programmer, when everything coalesces in a perfect way to shine a happy light on the universe. I had a list of bugs and a single feature I wanted to add to my Flex program. The single feature (dynamic filtering based on values in a…

I’ve been fussing with Flex this week (as I threatened earlier) and even with my fabulous experience of the tutorials, I have to admit that I’ve been seriously spoiled by working with Perl for so long. It’s such a mature language that someone else has *always* done something similar to what I’m trying to do,…

I need to learn Flex so that I can throw together a demo of an application in the next couple of weeks. I know what I need to do, some other kind soul has done the programming and even published the source for the hardest element in the application, so I just need to ramp…