Flex Monkey Patches

I know. I know. Quite a gap between the past and current Rubbernecker’s review. What can I say? It has been a busy year so far. With this new “Chapter”, I hope to get back into the swing of things and resume weekly (or even twice weekly) reviews (and this time with some commentary).

Here is another week’s worth of great links:

By far my favorite news of the week is the release of the pre-release versions of AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 as I mentioned here:
http://blog.flexmonkeypatches.com/2009/11/17/cant-touch-thisor-maybe-you-canpre-releases-for-adobe-air-20-and-flash-player-101-on-adobe-labs/

However, don’t let this completely overshadow some of the new things in the new release of LCDS 3.0 that is just out.
Specifically you should check out a presentation from one of the LCDS engineers from MAX that was noted by the LCDS Engineering Manager on his blog.
http://www.dcooper.org/blog/client/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=03587B4A-4E22-1671-55CD873C8F6F5FC1

This presentation is done by Mete Atamel, who I have had the opportunity to work with on a few occasions when troubleshooting customer issues and he really knows his stuff. To keep up with what he is doing, check out his blog at: http://meteatamel.wordpress.com/

Pre-release versions of Adobe AIR 2.0 (runtime and SDK) and Flash Player 10.1 were released on Adobe Labs.

Complete information available here:

http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2009/11/adobe_air_2_beta_now_available.html

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/

And to skip right to the interesting bits:

Get the Flash Player 10.1 here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
Get AIR 2.0 here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air2.html

By far the most exciting functionality for me is the multitouch functionality. In fact, I pretty much coincided my purchase of an HP Touchsmart tx2 laptop with the release of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1, just so I could dive into this new and exciting feature! (By the way, good prices on Amazon for these devices!)

To be sure, you’ll see some future blog posts on this blog regarding this new functionality after I have digested these cool looking sample apps on Adobe Labs

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/samples/#flash

that demo this functionality.

Flash Camp St. Louis is a full-day event featuring some top industry experts on the Adobe Flash Platform from both inside and outside Adobe. Come advance your Flash, Actionscript and Flex skills, meet members of the Adobe team and network with local companies and fellow developers. Sessions are geared towards designers and developers with beginning to intermediate level of experience with ActionScript 3, Flash, and/or Flex and AIR. There will be plenty of giveaways, swag, lunch.. and a free ticket to the City Museum!

Who: Designers and Developers for websites and Rich Internet Applications

When: Friday, September 11th 2009 – Registration begins at 9:00am with sessions going until 4pm.

Where: The Vault Room, The City Museum, downtown St. Louis

More info here: http://www.flashcampstlouis.com/

Register here: http://flashcampstlouis.eventbrite.com

It seems that since thanksgiving 2008 through December I have either been too busy with work or too busy with not working … ie vacation and so my blogging has suffered. Now with the start of the new year, I need to get myself back in shape to resume a well paced blogging regiment. The first few weeks will be tough, but bear with me as I get myself back into the routine.

-Kyle

The pilot light burns on.

See the previous blog entries for more background info:
flexmonkeypatches-pilot-episode-on-mogulus
flexmonkeypatches-pilot-episode-recap

Of course it does! Now that someone is watching it around the clock.

I was seeking to find more evidence as to why it was going out so that the next time it did and we got a repairman in to do something about it, we would have some concrete data as to what the cause of failure is.

But…the pilot light burns on and the “Pilot episode” streaming on Mogulus lives on. In fact the “Pilot episode” may have some “new legs”. My wife, Pamela (http://www.starstryder.com/) and I just finished a Skype interview with Chris Vallance of BBC Radio 4′s iPM (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ipm/) talking about this “Citizens Plumbing” project (a term applied to this by my wife in her blog entry: http://www.starstryder.com/2008/10/03/citizen-plumbing-its-not-quite-galaxy-zoo/).

So burn baby, burn…(although I’d rather have it go out so that I can hopefully figure out why and come to a resolution.)

-Kyle

-ps- I hope they cut most of my content out of the interview. My wife gives a much better interview than I do – better voice, presence and style.

Well, the weekend has come and gone and the pilot light is still burning without incident.
Here is a quick recap:

UPDATE#2 : 1 shower was taken around 1 PM CST (Fri Oct 3, 2008)- the main burner turned on. After the water reached the target temp, the main burner turned off. The pilot stayed on.

UPDATE #3 (approx 5:15 PM CST Fri, Oct 3, 2008): took a shower. Main burner turned on. Water in the tank reheated. Main burner went off. Pilot still on. So far, no idea why it went off 3 times in the past 2 days.

UPDATE #4 (approx 11:30 PM CST Fri, Oct 3, 2008): got back out from dinner. Pilot light still on. Hopefully it stays on all night and we have plenty of hot water for showers in the morning. Stay vigilant people…tweet if the flame dies.

UPDATE #5 (approx 11:45 PM CST Fri, Oct 3, 2008): just about to go to bed when the main burner kicked in. It lasted about 8 minutes and then shut off. Pilot still on. Lets hope that happen a few times overnight and the hot water tank is maintained up to temp overnight and of course, the pilot stays on. With everyone watching on the live Mogulus video feed (about 70 people currently)…I am betting that we will have hot showers tomorrow.

UPDATE #6 (approx 9 AM CST Sat, Oct 4, 2008): The pilot light is still on thanks to the vigilance of the blue flame watchers. Now we can have hot showers.

UPDATE #7 (approx 12:30 PM Sun, Oct 5, 2008): The pilot was on all day yesterday and so far today without failure. The main burner comes on and off as needed without any adverse consequence.

UPDATE #8 (approx 10:30 AM Mon, Oct 65, 2008): No failures yesterday or overnight and so far today the pilot light is still going strong.

Many thanks to all who participated and offered suggestions.

I think the most logical at this point were:

So this is not the thing that I usually blog about…but hey…I am grumpy since I didn’t get my hot shower this morning

The pilot light on my water heater keeps going out. I had a service man in to look at it. He replaced the thermocouple. It was fine for a few weeks after that. Now about 6 weeks later, the damn pilot keeps going out again every other day! I figured I would use technology to my advantage and broadcast a webcam view of my burner and watch it from the comfort of my office…
…and co-opt whoever cares to watch to alert me if they see the pilot light go out.

You can watch the live TV stream on my Mogulus channel:
http://www.mogulus.com/flexmonkeypatches

or go to the full post and view the channel on my site…

UPDATE: if anyone wants to chip in to help defray the cost of a new water heater or the repair bill should I call in a repairman again…you know what to do….paypall donation link at the right on the sidebar.

Read the rest of this post»

All right…follow up to my previous schwag post. I have designed a hat and t-shirt version of my website design and have printed a few up. I may give a few away at events, but these are a little more costly than the magnets . So if anyone is interested in purchasing…wink, wink, nudge, nudge…just drop me a line.

Shirt:

Hat (front):

Hat (back):

I had some business cards printed up a while ago and decided that I would get some magnets printed up to take with me to user group meetings and MAX (hopefully) and other random places to magically (and most likely unexpedtedly) appear on people’s fridges

Here is what they look like:

Well….about 2 weeks ago, I had a good run of blogging every weekday, but after about a week and a half, I had to go and ruin that trend. I decided to do some updates to my blog and that derailed my good posting record. Well now I am finished (hopefully) with most of my updates and will get back on track. Here are the things I have done:

1. Updated to wordpress 2.6.2
2. changed a few minor things in my custom theme
3. added a new feed: Rubbernecker’s Reviews
4. added a twitter widget to the sidebar

New Feed:

I used the Feed Wrangler wordpress plugin to create an additional feed. It was very handy and quite easy to use. I plan on adding another feed in the near future that contains all of my Monkey Index pages, so you can easily track when I add new pages.

Twitter
You will also probably note the new Twitter widget in my sidebar. I don’t have many followers, but if you would like to follow me you can do so by following this link.

I am also using the Twitter Updater plugin to automatically post new tweets for each blog post I do, so people can potentially keep up with new entries that way or through my main RSS feed

…and now back to the regularly scheduled programming…

-Kyle