Infinite State

Seems to work. I’m using the following chain:

- Flash MX 2004 targeting FP6 with AS2
- Plain NetServices.as (haven’t tried J Lott’s update yet)
- AS2 classes registered to Java types
- Deployed to iPAQ 2210
- Requests a service running under Tomcat 5 + OpenAMF 1.0RC5 + ASTranslator 1.5.5 + Hibernate 2.1
- MySQL 4 on the back-end

The bottom line is that it basically works, though the performance of the PPC is much slower than desktop and V2 components are definitely sluggish. Overall, a promising combination.

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This one was hard to find, and painful to find out. If you want your AS2 classes to contain references to other AS2 classes that are in a package namespace, then you must add the root of the package namespace to your global classpath in Flash or you will get compile-time errors that cryptically indicate something’s wrong. This is bad from a software engineering perspective.

Java != ActionScript 2
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I just upgraded this blog to MovableType 2.661 in the hopes of defending against comment spambot attacks. So far I’ve mostly gotten only a handful at a time, but it’s clear that there are much larger spam attacks underway against MT sites.

The upgrade was pretty painless — just copy over the newer files and add the configuration file entry to specify a number of seconds before a posting IP address can post again. Yecch, spammers are rotten scum who steal from us all for their own profit. Perhaps Mr. Gates will have some impact.

I’m starting to get a sense of the populations that make up the Flash world. As with most technology landscapes, there are a range of groups that make up the whole, some masters and some beginners, some teachers and some fakers. What interests me is finding out what the boundaries say about the price of living in that landscape and as a visitor what you have to plan for if you’re going to get what you want out of it.

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After all the hassles of the Belkin Bluetooth USB adaptor, I was not expecting an easy time with my replacement — but I was most pleasantly surprised. The Linksys USBBT100 Class 1 device is small, looks like a tiny Linksys unit (blue and black and kind curved-rectangular) and has a little black antenna that rotates up. But the best part is this: I installed the software, plugged it in when prompted, rebooted as instructed (why is this necessary with Windows 2000?) and it just worked. I’m ecstatic.

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I’ve been using the Freespeak Bluetooth headset with my Ericsson T610 cell phone for about a day now and I really like it. The ergonomics are wonderful — I forget to take it off my ear when the call’s done, seriously. The sound quality is pretty good, with a bit of low-level static noise at times, which could be due to any number of other radio frequency sources around me. The user guide’s clear, the pairing worked the first time, and the little blue light looks like something out of Star Wars.

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Reading through some docs I stopped to wonder for the first time where the ubiquitous identifiers foo and bar come from.

Well check out this RFC for a thoroughly enjoyable etymological trip:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3092.html

foo

I rewarded myself with some hacking last night after finishing my work, and I am really impressed by Hibernate (www.hibernate.org) an open source object-relational mapping layer in Java that has been getting increasing attention in the community. It’s really superb and I think it is going to finally change the way I work with databases after years of hand-coding SQL.

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After struggling with it for way too long, I gave up and sent back the Belkin USB Bluetooth dongle. When it worked (which wasn’t often) it was great until it would stop working (a few minutes later). Tech support hold times exceeded 20 minutes, and email never got a response. Tech support assistance usually consisted of moving the dongle to a different USB port and rebooting a few times. Since my iPAQ 2210 and T610 can see each other on Bluetooth, I knew exactly where the problem was. And now it’s on it’s way back to its manufacturer.

My sense of Bluetooth is that it is promising, but not yet delivering.

After working with Office Pro 2003 for a few weeks now, I have to admit that I like it a lot more than I’d expected. In fact, there are a number of nice qualities to it that significantly improve the overall user experience and put some distance between it and the alternatives I’ve tried (including OpenOffice).

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