Ouch! Right on the heals of April 15th (tax day in the U.S.) come big product releases from both Adobe and Microsoft. Long ago the term “Redmond Tax” was coined referring to the constant cost to stay current with Microsoft products but there’s an equal San Jose Adobe tax as well. If I were a [...]
I’m spending time this weekend (Labor Day in the U.S.) getting all my machines cleaned up, patched up and backed up. First on the list was to upgrade my WordPress blog due to a new worm that will hose your (precious) blog if it gets to you. You can read about it here. I have [...]
I spend my summers in Vail, Colorado and this time of the year is spectacular to say the least. Those of you in the southern hemisphere can look forward to your summer but we in the northern need to take some time to enjoy the world around us. I have taken the last few weeks [...]
Over the years I have ordered many, many books from bookpool.com who sold only technical books. Sometimes I would use Amazon for comments to see if I wanted a certain book but I would invariably order from bookpool as there was never any issue with delivery, billing or price. Well, it seems they have shut [...]
For many, many months this blog has remained dormant. This was mainly due to being employed and kept very busy on projects but also a bit related to my reluctance to blog while employed (as opposed to consulting) due to that ever (albeit remote) possibility that something I say or do will in some way [...]
One item that is constantly on my list is to “get better” at the visual side of programming. I started out with code when displays were character based, black backgrounds with white text. For me, the draw to computing in general was the logic. A pretty thing was (still is) a concise piece of code [...]
I always use livedocs while programming in Flex and ActionScript. I was certainly surprised when I opened Firefox to see the nuances of the ButtonBar control and saw this: Yikes! I opened the same link ( http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/controls/ButtonBar.html ) in “That popular browser from that very successful company” as well as Opera and saw the correct [...]
I had previously posted about flash lite and the iPhone. Well, that dream looks less likely according to this article which reports that Steve Jobs is not enamored with the Flash idea on the iPhone. However, perhaps in lieu of Flash, the “Unofficail Apple Weblog” says of Apple: “we plan to have an iPhone SDK [...]
I have a personality defect (feature?) in that I get attached to things. I keep cars for 15 years, am happy with the status quo, and generally do not change for change sake. But recently the handwriting was on the wall for my old laptop (circa 2002) as it was struggling to keep up. Even [...]
Yesterday Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to purchase Yahoo for many truck loads of cash. The offered price is something like 28% above current value so you have to figure Yahoo will agree. Given an OK from the Justice Department (not a slam dunk) and Microsoft will finally have a portal that somebody actually goes [...]