When i started with flex development back in 2003 or 2004 with the release of Flex 1.5 i was around 12 years old , naive to the business world and how a client/consultant relationship worked. I had a few solid examples of my flex 1.5 work running on my server , and so one day a man named Barclay Layman saying he is from a company called Interspot approached me and said he wanted me to do some development on there interspotsms service made in flex 1.5. Being 12 , i jumped on the opportunity without asking for a initial deposit and did all the work he told me to do. He promised me 1000$ for it and that seemed like a lot to a 12 year old (it still seems like a lot!). I finished his entire sms application to his requirements and he told me to upload it on his flex server and hell send me the pay pal transfer. The next day I waited for his email, nothing, then waited a week for his email nothing. Called him and he didnt reply. Emailed him and he didn't reply. Soon I realized Ive just been burned. Good thing to do to a 12 year old don't you think. The moral of my story is, if your new to development always take an initial deposit.

I was developing a coldfusion/flex app today and i ran accross the most weirdest bug. The following code is pseudo code :

say if you have a remote object

<mx: remoteobjec id=something destination=ColdFusion >
<mx : method name=test result=result(event)>
<mx : arguments>
<arg1>inputtext.text</arg1>
<arg2>inputArrayCollection</arg2>
<arguments>
<method>
<remoteobjec>

This will work and send arg1 to the server but arg2 which is an array collection will be blank ,desptite the collection having over a 100 records

however if i send the same remote object like this , something.test(inputtext.text,inputArrayCollection)
it will work perfectly fine

werid ?

Lately what i have been noticing is that these captcha files have been becoming harder and harder to decode till the point that they make you feel your working for the NSA trying to decrypt something. Plus its also a pain in the ass for people like one of my friends who has partial color blindness. Looking at all these features i came up with an alternative to captcha that uses flash and javascript, all you have to do is draw the right shape and you'll be a human. The javscript is not the most secure code in the world but that can be fixed, the point here is to be able to see how a simple captcha alternative can be implemented instead of making those silly words look like a lost language.

If I get enough attention on this, i will implement an API and etc to get it to production standards

The Javascript code is there as a quick mock-up , Under no circumstances will that type of Javascript code be used in the release if there should be one.


PS I havent decided on a name so suggest one!
also it will make errors, and I will fix that if i get enough attention on this by people who want a captcha alternative.
http://g-unix.com/alter/

Check this out . Weird? Any reason why it runs better if at all it does, which i doubt it does.
http://www.g-unix.com/screencap.jpg

Italy lost :( what more can i say

My final exams are over, the biggest stress is gone . Now I can concetrate on G-uniX , Flex , Flash , GAIQL , and everything else cool in the computer world, without worrying about studying and doing homework!.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4

To all the people who singed up to test GAIQL , I will be emailing you a link so you can view a night release build system. Also these testers will get the beta , while the public will be getting the alpha ( the same one i used in the code when i showed the example). The differences in alpha and beta release is that the beta has an extremely fast GAIQL parser while the alpha is realtivly buggy. By all means if you want to be a beta tester just email me faisal @ g-unix . com and youll be in on the latest cool stuff!

ITS OUT!!!!!!!!!

Im going to be attending FlexCamp On Thursday , Hope to see cool stuff there! Cant wait :D

One of the coolest things about Silverlight is that it is using languages from the .NET platform such as C# and Visual Basic. While we all know VB is crap , C# is quite a powerful language especially with its vast amounts of cool libraries in which you can do all sorts of neat stuff. One of these libraries is the ParallelFX by Microsoft which lets you make your code take advantage of multiple cores on the clients computer. But what does this have to do with silverlight, well you can make your silverlight application use C# and have C# take advantage of the cores making the application much fast. Also you can use PLINQ which is a parallel implementation of LINQ .

On a side note if your looking for a solution like LINQ on the flash platform, check out my previous post on GAIQL which is essentially a PLINQ implementation in actionscript

For the past week I have been deeply involved over on the .NET side working with C#, Parallel FX and PLINQ ( Parallel LINQ). LINQ has been very useful as it saved me tons of times getting data back from large data structures and I thought to my self it would be neat if there was something like this for Actionscript 3. Well after i finished my work with .NET I fired up Flex Builder and started to work on a library for actionscript that does exactly what LINQ does . Its turning out to be really great and i want to give a few people the chance to test it out . If you want to play around with GAIQL (G-unIX Actionscript Integrated Query Language) then leave a comment or email me at Faisal@g-unix.com with the subject GAIQL Tester . Ill send you the swc to test it out.

For others who want to wait till the final release (Why Would you do that!) here is something that might convince you . Say if you wanted to check if an entry was in the array , all you would have to do to find out is the following :

private var q:GAIQL = new GAIQL()
private var result:Array = q.Call("FROM myarray GET thevalueiwant" ,this);

and the value you want doesn't have to be hard coded, it can be passed as a variable . Then you can simply check the length of your result array to see if it got populated or not .

Ive been always involved in frameworks , I wrote an article talking about frameworks on CFDJ and Ive always experimented with them. Recently a new Flex Framework was released, oh great another framework you say , but wait till you see how ridiculous simple it is to use and manage. Its all tag based and it probably the most logical framework I ever worked with . Good work AsFusion!

http://mate.asfusion.com

Recently during the free time I get from school, finishing up FlexInAction , and working for a big client , I sit back and try to learn new things. One of which is F#. F# is a purely functional programming language ,very similar to LISP. Ive been giving it a try for the past couple of days and it seems pretty powerful, plus with the addition of the integration in visual studio its probably a good thing to look at for the future , especially with A.I a growing theme on the web.

I was at FITC today and i got to see the presentation on Flash Player 10 . Man does this look cool, They had the framerate going at liek 90 something frames per second and it was running as smooth as butter. And some big news is that the Flash Player can do processing at 64 times the current processing rate. HOLY Smokes, this means really good news for 3D and complex R.I.A's .

In ohter news : The Silverlight project was shut down after hearing of this remarkable feats by the Flash Player 10!