Occasional Thoughts

Pecha Kucha Timer

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:04:07 +0100

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues held a couple of Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology that limits the presentation to 20 slides where the next slide is displayed after 20 seconds automatically. During the preparation and for the presentation session we felt the lack for a decent timer that counts down from 20 to1 for each slide and gives a clearly visible feedback before the time for the current slide ends.

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Adobe to Drop MacOS Support Starting With CS6

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:20:00 +0200

Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.

Most probably you've already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash and his claims that HTML 5 is superior to Flash (I already blogged about this topic). The current climax is the change in the famous section 3.3.1 of the Apple developer contract that forbids the use of any programming language which is not approved by Apple directly targeting towards the Flash Packager contained in the Creative Suite 5 (CS5). This Flash Packager can create a native iPhone application from Flash code.

This change in the Apple developer license domination eventually forced Adobe to throw away their work in the Flash Packager shortly after its announcement and a refocus on other platforms as written by Mike Chambers.

Understandably this caused quite some uproar and finally Steve Jobs has felt the need to comment on this on the Apple web site. However his Thoughts on Flash contain several falsehoods and half-truth. Jesse Warden has written a long post commenting several of such points. I recommend reading this for the details and I do not want to repeat this. Just some points I would like to highlight and add.

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Hey Spammers! Congratulations!

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:38:39 +0100

You won! Be proud of yourselves, you stinkers!

I am not a big fan of blogs that moderate every single comment. This hinders active and timely discussions and can be seen as a kind of censorship. Unfortunately my blog seems to have gained the interest of spammers and since their comments seem to be manual posts, captchas do not help. During the last days I had to delete about 10 spam comments per day, while there were were just about a few comments during the last weeks.

Since the effort to delete SPAM is higher than to accept valid comments and I really do not want to support some obscure sites just because I didn't check my mails for a few hours I decided to turn moderation on.

I promise that I will do me best to confirm any valid comments within a few hours.

At least you get easier to read captchas in return.

Mark Zuckerberg Uses KDE

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 22:20:35 +0200

Dear David Fincher, Director of The Social Network,

yesterday evening I saw your great movie and I must say that I enjoyed it very much.

Besides the very interesting plot I was very happy that you have chosen KDE as Desktop environment for Marks computer (that does not prove that Mark is using KDE in real-life, of course - but as Mark is a smart guy, I would not wonder). At least you haven't followed the rest of Hollywood and gave him an Apple or made him use Windows.

I was very delighted that you did your homework and showed us the magic of wget and perl and no unrealistic Hollywood typical computer voodoo. People that did not know how to fetch a bunch of images from a website really learned something. Thank you very much for that.

But... really... was it necessary to ruin this good impression with the close up of the terminal session, where Mark had typed

> ping localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.031 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=0.036 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=5 ttl=64 time=0.047 ms
^C
--- localhost.localdomain ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3996ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.031/0.040/0.047/0.005 ms

I guess Mark knows that his computer is up and running, while he sits in front of it surfing Facebook.

Watch out! ActionScript Bumps Below

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 23:03:53 +0200

When reading through ActionScript code I frequently see two ActionScript mistakes that are likely to cause runtime misbehavior and confusions. Sometimes thing do not appear at first glance what you might think at the beginning. However both ActionScript bumps can easily be driven around.

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Size of Flex RSLs with dependencies to other RSLs

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:47:00 +0200

Maven module structure of the project.

Recently I had switched a complex Flex project that previously used all libraries as statically compiled SWCs to dynamically loaded Runtime Shared Libraries (RSL). In the picture on the right you can see the module structure of the whole build, which was done using Maven and the flex-mojos plugin.

You can see that there is one high level library (library A) that is shared across all applications and a more specialized library (library B) that is providing components and classes to a certain subset of other applications.

Library A contains a couple of embedded images containing various icons and a lot of components, while Library B contained just a few components. So after compilation the obvious expected result would be to have an RSL file of library A that is much bigger than the RSL file of library B in case library B uses library A as RSL and not as statically linked SWC.

Well the dynamic linkage worked well for all the applications, which where just a couple of KBs in size after the change in contrast to more than 1 MB before the change. However this was not the case for the libraries. Library A had a size of 1.2 MB but library B had a size of 1.25 MB???

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The Value of Open Standards

nospam@example.com (Carsten Schlipf) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:18:00 +0100

...or why HTML 5 will fail as replacement for Flash (at least for the next years).

But first let me make clear that I am not a fan of closed standards and closed source. I love Open Source and I use Open Source software wherever possible. However sometimes it's better if there is one instance that has the control not just over a format, but also about the interpreter and renderer.

With the announcement of Apples iPad a big discussion started regarding the non-existence of Flash on it. Steve Jobs responded. He claims that Apple won't support Flash since they claim it's buggy and responsible for a lot of crashes on Mac OS, but what really makes me upset is that sentence:

No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML 5.

Also in blogs postings that talk about this topic several people mention that HTML 5 will be the future and that no one needs Flash.

Bullshit! Will people never learn from the past?

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Maven Housekeeping: Cleanup your local repository on Linux

nospam@example.com (Jörn Schimmelpfeng) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:46:05 +0200

For all those that where seeking for a method to roll out outdated artifacts from their Maven repository like me, but could not find a solution. Here is a simple shell script doing that work for you.
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Official Maven support for Groovypp

nospam@example.com (Jörn Schimmelpfeng) — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:11:01 +0200

I'm glad to be able to depricate my own post Groovy++-with-Maven a couple of weeks ago. The Groovy++ team has already taken action and provides the groovvypp libraries in a commonly accessible repository. They also provide a preliminary version of the gmaven plugin that supports statically linked Groovy.

For details see Using-groovypp-with-maven and also the related update Using-groovypp-with-maven (update).