Mike Slinn



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• The Greatest Benefit Of Online Schooling on Combining Technical Marketing Prognostication Curves
• Pinnacle finalizing disc takes how long | Abaq1 on Sony DCR-DVD403 Camcorder
• Just because it’s popular now … on Combining Technical Marketing Prognostication Curves
• Confluence: IDEA Team Home on Reading Java Properties Files from Bash
• Sending custom events between components « Price Talk on Debugging Flex Events Generated by Custom Components

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Recent Posts

• Proposal: Mandatory Countervailing Tip (MCT)
• Pigs Can Fly
• Working With Bug Fix and Feature Branches in Git
• Debugging SEVERE: Error ListenerStart
• Tracking Down A Mismatched JAR

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Dilbert … Remind you of anyone?

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World inequity between countries and ethnicities exploits individuals who are the primary producers and harms the individuals and societies that contain the primary consumers; it only benefits international traders. Over 99% of the world is exploited to serve less than the top 1%. This imbalance threatens world stability, as well as national, regional and local stability.

This proposal is designed to create US jobs, indeed jobs in every country where the trade balance is negative, and is intended to reverse the exploitation of individuals in producing countries. I propose a Mandatory Countervailing Tip (MCT). It’s like a tip that you might offer someone who provides service, and whose wages are not sufficient to justify their employment. Waiters, waitresses, bellhops and musicians are paid tips for this reason.  Read more

Details matter. If all you read are headlines and subtitles then it is likely that you are horribly misinformed. Let’s imagine that the text of an article titled “Pigs Can Fly” was something like this:

“Outfitted with 3D goggles and haptic feedback mechanisms customized for a pig’s extremities, porcine subjects showed that they quickly adapted to visual stimulus that suggested to them that their movements caused them to fly. With training, pigs demonstrated that they could control the flight of simulated cargo planes, stunt tri-planes, jet fighters and paper planes.” Read more

We are following A Successful git Branching Model with only a few modifications.
Read more

This Spring startup error can be mystifying if you don’t know how to tackle it. listenerStart() configures and invokes application event listeners for a Context. Most Spring applications have several listeners, and they should be invoked in the following order. Each of them causes debug output, so if you do not see any, the first listener died: Read more

For debugging mismatched jars, first build a list of the jars in question, then run jwhich to discover the jar that provides a specific Java class. Put the jar and the script provided in the download in /usr/local/bin.

• For *nix and Mac, build the list of jars under the current directory like this:

  export CLASSPATH=$(find . -name \*.jar -printf %h/%p:)

• For cygwin, build the list of jars under the current directory like this:

  export CLASSPATH=$(find . -name \*.jar -printf '%h/%p;')

Run the script like this:

jwhich classNameToFindHere

This is a collection of git infobits that I find useful. Read more

Adobe, this post is for you.

Yoxos is a way to manage Eclipse installations and their plugins. I downloaded the free basic version of Yoxos, and installed it into the default directory, which for me was C:\Users\Mike Slinn\.yoxoslauncher\YoxosLauncher.
Read more

My wife Ellen recently had a terrific opening event for her new art gallery, located at 840 Main Street in Half Moon Bay, CA. The gallery adjoins her art studio, and all of the art in the gallery was painted by her. I played background music.

We worked hard to get the gallery ready. Response has been terrific. The art is suitable for private individuals, corporate environments and health-care facilities. Come visit!

Once again I am reviewing programmer resumes for a client. This client needs to hire an entire team, including Flex and Java programmers. Because programmers write software, I always request sample code from candidates. I don’t ask stupid hypothetical questions or play mind games – I just want to assess the quality of their work. Read more

As principal of Micronautics Research I develop or oversee development of desktop and mobile client/server applications. We use whatever technology is appropriate for a client project, however as this posting describes there is a strong set of use cases for selecting Adobe Flex/AIR for clients.

I make a distinction between applications (apps) and web pages (HTML and HTML5). Over time this distinction will blur. This posting deals with current reality for apps that need to be developed and deployed using today’s technology. Read more

This posting is the counterpart to an earlier posting titled Adobe Flex/BlazeDS Assessment Questions. Whereas the previous posting was targeted to hiring managers, this posting is for software technologists being interviewed for a programming job. This posting is written tongue-in-cheek, as if coaching a poor programmer to appear better than he/she really is. Hiring managers should read this too, because it describes questions not to ask. Most hiring managers and interviewers are not experienced Flex developers; I have written this piece accordingly. Read more

Flex SDK 4.5 was announced yesterday, so I am now allowed to talk about it publicly.  AIR applications for Android require a different set of assumptions about what is reasonable and appropriate.  Here are some guidelines taken from our experience:
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I was recently asked by a client to develop a set of questions for a team that had created a BlazeDS application. Most of these questions would be useful for anyone who wants to get an overview of any Flex application.
Read more

I often find myself wanting to see how Adobe implemented a class in the Flex SDK. For convenience, here is a link using Google Advanced Search that will search within the current Flex SDK source for you.  Bookmark that link for quick reference, if you like.
Read more

What with the ongoing drama around Yahoo’s Delicious product, I discovered that there are many alternative services with similar features. I moved to Pinboard, which has a compatible API.

I whipped up an open source management client for Delicious and work-alikes that runs on Adobe AIR. I used Flash Builder 4 (Burrito) and Flex SDK v4.1 (Hero.) You are invited to install use the program, and/or to study the source code. Read more

If you are an avid sailor or power boater, you might have heard about the NMEA 2000 standard. Originally based on the CAN bus technology introduced for cars in 1986, NMEA 2000 carries instrumentation and control information and is designed for marine environments. I’ve been planning to update my boat’s old NMEA0183 instruments to NMEA2000 over the winter, and so it was a happy coincidence that I sat next to an engineer from Maretron at Adobe MAX earlier this week. Maretron is a leading vendor of NMEA 2000 products, and he told me that they now use Adobe AIR to create their software tools.
Read more

BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) both provide the ability for a Producer embedded in a Flex client to broadcast a message to all Consumers embedded in other Flex clients. The ActionScriptAdapter provided with both data services products acts as a reflector, bouncing messages sent to it to all Flex clients.
Read more

This silly story is taken from “Flex Data Services, Hibernate and Eclipse.” No other part of that book is deliberately silly. I thought it would be fun to post this here.  In the story, produce and food are allegories for data and a cellar is an allegory for a database. As for Klay and Adobe, well, you get the idea.
Read more

This entry was submitted and updated several days ago, but O’Reilly did not post it.  Since then events have moved quickly.  Were I to submit it today, I would entitle it “Oracle Restores Eclipse Functionality.”  - Mike
Read more

“HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash” was published April 30 2010 by Ray Valdes, David Smith and Eric Knipp of Gartner.  The last paragraph is most interesting.   Read the entire document to learn more.

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