Yep - this is hands-down the hottest Flex-based app I've seen yet.

I came across this article from a link on TUAW. I agree that Apple hired entirely the wrong acting pair for the UK commercial, given the actors's popularity and previous roles. I disagree with just about everything else, although the article is well written and I laughed at many of the witty jabs at Mac users.

Now I'll be a pretentious, British, private-school-educated snob.

Take a look at the comments at the bottom of the article. Notice anything? Compare the writing, grammar, verbiage, number of typos, and even the insults with that of your typical "Mac vs PC" debate on a US web site. Let me know if you see anything interesting.

I'll give you a hint: it took me years of reading emails from my US compadres before I got over the fact that the US just doesn't give a sh** about the correctness of language. I still get embarrassed on their behalf when our senior management sends out company-wide emails with typos and grammatical errors. Don't your admins use spell check, for Christ's sake? It's built in to every word processing program known to man.

I read US ads that have spelling errors in them, see newspaper articles with terrible grammar - things that literally NEVER HAPPEN in England. If they do, it's a huge deal. People are expected to know what the hell they are doing with their words, especially if they work in print.

That being said, I've also spent a lot of time thinking this over (yes, my life is that boring) and come to the conclusion that correctness in the written word really doesn't amount to much; people still know what you're saying regardless of whether or not you conjugated your verbs properly. I don't know why the Brits are so anal about language. And if you were to give English speakers another two hundred years, no doubt we'll have moved on to a new dialect that's sure to have little in common with the English spoken today. Perhaps like the movie Idiocracy we'll have moved on to a mix of redneck, valley girl, and ebonics.

And for the record, I'm no wonder when it comes to writing, so don't take this post as me saying I'm better than everybody. I just found the cultural comparison interesting and thought you might, too.

There was a time when my job consisted mainly of coming in to work and cranking out code until I went home (usually late). That was six years ago. Since then (even while I was managing development teams), I still wrote a lot of code. It was fun.

Unfortunately, over the last six years my job has consisted of writing less and less code. Instead, these days, most of my coding takes place outside of work. Most programmers will understand me when I say that programming is an addiction that must be fed constantly, much to the chagrin of friends, relatives, and especially girlfriends/spouses. Not being exempt from this rule, I have a deep-rooted need to write code that pervades my life (if not every minute of my workday).

At the present time, my job consists mainly of coming in to work and making it possible for other people to crank out code until they go home (hopefully not too late, unless they really want to).

Am I pissed off about this? No. I find my job satisfying for a number of reasons.

1) I've been able to push our corporate IT environment pretty far toward being academic and putting the technology first. This has allowed others to come in and really take our code to the next level.

2) Order is beginning to emerge from the chaos. It actually looks like there is hope of us getting our jumbled legacy systems in to a place where we can rocket them in to the future with cutting-edge practices and technologies.

3) There is an expectation in my mind that one day (hopefully sooner than later) my job of bringing order from the chaos will subside, and I'll be able to go back to spending more of my day cranking out code and less dealing with departmental management, strategy, and corporate politics. Honestly, if this expectation wasn't there I'd already be out consulting independently or working for a small startup or large tech firm on the West-coast.

Sometimes, I have wild fantasies about breaking off a chunk of our IT department and establishing a whole new breed of corporate IT response. Imagine a set of small, focused development groups working directly on specific business problems in close quarters with the people receiving the software, with minimal corporate drudgery/needless managerial involvement. I also imagine bonus programs for the development staff, tied to core business metrics based upon the initial success of the technology solution.

I get shudders just thinking about it. Anybody with half a brain and even minimal experience in the world of corporate IT would see how the "startup" model would work in a wonderfully more efficient way than traditional "command and conquer" IT.

Funnily enough, I've been having discussions along these lines with my boss and some other senior management at CFI. They are pie-in-the-sky "what if" discussions at present, but we have a few projects ticking along that work with some (not all) elements of the structure I'm imagining, and they are going swimmingly.

If only we could connect the rest of the dots, I think we'd be in great shape to revolutionize our business with technology - something it desperately requires. I'm hopeful, and the discussions are under way - so let's see what happens.

I remember once thinking that CDs were such an awesome medium for music: instantaneous random access, high sound quality, shiny and cool looking.

Well, I just ripped my last CD in to iTunes. It's taken me the best part of three weeks to get my entire catalog of 300+ CDs ripped in the highest AAC quality available, and the CDs and their jewel cases will be going in to the closet under the stairs - probably forever. Leopard has secured my digital collection to my Time Machine backup, and I can take my entire 40 GB collection on my iPod with room to spare for my favorite ripped DVDs and TV shows.

I can't remember the last time I bought a CD. I get most of my stuff either directly off of iTunes, only going to other sites when I can't find the track I want on iTunes. I also hit up Play It Tonight and Juno pretty frequently for digital downloads and/or vinyl, but the vinyl only stays around long enough for me to rip it to digital with my iMic before it gets put away.

Digital distribution has changed everything. I can't wait until my TV shows and movies are all 100% digital on-demand and pay-per-view. Cable is such a waste of money, and the forced advertising model of TV is from a bygone era. I won't miss it when it's gone. Apple is almost there with the latest AppleTV, but I think it will take one or two more revisions (plus plenty more content) before the 100% digital distribution thing really takes off the way DVD and other consumer formats have.

I bought the collector's edition set of the Family Guy Blue Harvest episode, and my lord is it funny as balls. I enjoyed this as much as the two seasons of Sunny that my sister got me for Xmas.

The collector's set comes with a bunch of special features, a t-shirt, a digital copy for iTunes/iPod, and trading cards. Highly recommended for all Family Guy fans.

Wow, we had a great event this evening. I snapped a few photos - these are the best out of the bunch.

Thanks to Ben, Adobe, and everybody who came out. We were the first event of the USA Flex 3/AIR preview tour, so hopefully we set it off with a bang. We had about 70 people in attendance from as far away as Jacksonville and Ft. Lauderdale.

Dan won the Flex 3 license in the raffle. Bastard.

We're considering running a Flex Camp in May (around 75% of the attendees tonight said they would come if we set one up). Watch this space.

Looking forward to the event tomorrow. The car is all packed up with PA equipment, extension cords, projector, and other goodies essential for pulling off the event.

I checked in with some friends in the industry (Sean Corfield and Simeon Bateman) and they also hosted Flex 3/AIR events in their localities. Apparently, both of these informal events were over 100 people also, so interest in Flex must be on the rise.

Hope to see you there tomorrow!

Of the two things I found at a reasonable price during my trip to a CompUSA closing down sale, David Allen's book "Getting Things Done" was one of them (a steal at $6).

I'm relatively well-organized (if it's in iCal, it'll get done usually), but since taking on more responsibility in the last year I have started to feel more "fragmented". Hopefully between some insight in to David's program for organizing one's self and letting go mentally of all the stuff you have in your head by organizing it effectively, I will find myself feeling as together as a hard drive formatted in HFS+ on Leopard.

I haven't gotten far enough in to the books to get to David's techniques, but so far I have done a few things based upon the direction I see him going in. Here are some of them.

1) Ditched using Mail for personal email and Thunderbird for work. I'm now on OS X Mail completely, with multiple inboxes in al their glory. Cleaned them all out this weekend (took me three days). I've got smart mailboxes setup in Mail to automatically sort items based upon whether or not they are unread (i.e. organize now), flagged (i.e. deal with later), and flagged but older than one week (i.e. maybe I'll never get to this or need to delegate it).

2) Offloaded all my software downloads, music, and photos to my Quicksilver G4 tower. It's got the Time Machine backup, and I need less crud on my MacBook Pro so I can stay focused. I'll be continuing to prune my laptop over the coming weeks.

3) Centralized iCal as my "what to work on next" organizer. I used to use a combination tactic of reminders of leaving important emails as "unread" in Thunderbird as well as creating "to dos" in iCal. Now I'm just using iCal for all reminders, with flagged items in Mail pertaining to those items.

4) Didn't get to clear off my MacBook Pro's desktop yet, but I will this week. Two things contribute to my messy desktop: Thunderbird is too stupid to save files that need opening in to a temp directory (i.e. Word and Excel files that are set to open in their respective programs get saved to the desktop regardless where you tell Thunderbird to save attachments), and as I get busy my desktop seems to get cluttered. Moving to Mail should help a little, since it saves all attachments and opened files to a temp directory. I'm also considering upgrading the MBP to Leopard soon since CheckPoint just released their early access version of their VPN client for Leopard; assuming it works passably on my Quicksilver, I'll be making the jump to Leopard on the MBP. Leopard has the nice Downloads folder that works in conjunction with Stacks, which should make my desktop of the future even cleaner.

I already feel a little better, and look forward to getting in to the details of David's program. I'll post anything interesting that I find, as well as reviews of any GTD software for the Mac (of which there are several options) that I decide are viable.

If there is one thing I really hate about having so many computers and so many hard drives, it's that I have to keep plugging and unplugging them.

This is a similar problem faced by many recording studios with audio gear, in that you have lots of kit that can all talk to each other (i.e. they all produce and consume audio) but often need to wire it up in new and unforeseen ways.

The solution to this problem is the patchbay. Hook all your gear up to the back of the patchbay, and the connections are presented to you on the front of the patchbay as unterminated connections. You can then use small leads on the front of the unit to terminate the output of one device to the input of another, and vice versa.

So, there had to be a product on the market that did a similar thing for USB and FireWire. After all, there are so many hubs available.

Turns out there's nothing - at least outside the pro video realm. Sure, you can drop $140 odd on an 8 in, 8 out FireWire patchbay that fits in a 1U chassis. What I want fits on a desktop on top of my USB/FireWire hard drives and offers a set of both USB and FireWire ports. That product simply doesn't exist.

So, I started looking at making my own. All a patchbay really is is a box with a bunch of female-to-female cables (one port on the back, passing through to a corresponding port on the front). Even an electronics dunce like myself could stitch that together given a free Saturday and a soldering iron. Of course, FireWire ports are horribly expensive (about $5-$10 a piece), so by the time I ordered all the components I'd need, I might as well have bought the $140 one that doesn't meet my needs.

So, I'm still on the search for affordable FireWire components. Maybe I'll just build one myself for the fun of it. I just find myself disappointed in the marketplace of available options for a device I was sure already existed.

IMO, this is not the way the MBA is going to be perceived nor affect its success.

If I were in the market for a new laptop for work, the MBA would definitely be on my list as a replacement for my MacBook Pro. I don't want a sub-notebook's toy screen, and I don't need a massively capable video card to write code. Nobody using Photoshop professionally is doing any serious work on a laptop, and the only time I use an optical drive is when I install new software (rarely, and usually all at once), watch DVDs on my Mac (almost never), or back up files in bulk (probably once a quarter, since most of my work is document based and can be "backed up" via email). A single USB 2.0 port is clearly not an issue from either a portability or expandability perspective.

As I stated earlier I'll be closer to buying as the performance ratio increases. For now, I'll look forward to the early adopters making that possible for me.

I agree mostly with Shipley (thanks to Sica for the link).

Apple files a patent.

Read that? Good. Now read this: Microsoft files a patent.

'nuff said.

We spent last week training on HP's Quality Center product (previously of Mercury Interactive), which is a web-based server product allowing QA teams to collaborate and store test requirements, test cases, test sets, perform defect tracking, manage releases and test cycles, perform predictive time estimation, and so many other features that I can't list them all here.

What a polished product. In about eight hours of total work, we've got the thing almost completely configured for our environment. The only items left to go are for us to VB-script it to the point where it meets our needs perfectly. The APIs available in the product and the out-of-box customization are both very impressive and simple to do.

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised to see a product in its 9.2 release being so polished, but (as many of you know) most enterprise software sold by big vendors is pure overpriced garbage, with horrible and inefficient UIs and cumbersome customization (if any at all). It's really been a breath of fresh air to pick up a product that does the job very well out of the box, and makes it so easy to tweak for our needs.

Well, that's how the setup has gone, anyway. Let's see what I think of it in a few months after we've been using it. Expect to hear more on our experiences right here.

Of course, you all expected me to blog Apple's keynote today. What else could I possibly do?

Time Capsule
Pretty damn cool. Wish I'd known this was coming before I bought my Airport Extreme. I won't be upgrading to this any time soon; I'm going to wait and see if they fold and offer the Time Capsule software as a paid update for Airport Extreme (which I would buy). I can't imagine the technology for connecting the hard drive couldn't support the existing USB 2.0 interface.

AppleTV
I would cancel my cable service and buy one of these bad boys in a second if they just added advertising-free TV show rentals for between $0.49 - $0.99 a shot. With the six or seven TV shows I actually watch each week, I could get away with paying on a per-view basis and not having to deal with cable. In the interim, I'll keep my old PowerBook G4 for TV duty.

New iPhone and iPod Touch Software
Very cool software updates - love the wiggling icons and the web clips especially. I'm still not buying an iPhone until they go 3G and up the download speed to broadband. I now have a legitimate reason to get an iPhone since everybody in the office just got Blackberries and they all seem to have the same ring tone as me.

MacBook Air
Good lord, that SSD hard drive is a killer option at $999; a bit of a show stopper for me. The rest of this product looks simply amazing.

Will I be upgrading to the Air? Well, I was considering going to a faster processor MacBook Pro if they unveiled them today, but I still can't fault my current one in terms of performance. I may only have an original Core Duo in it at 2.16 Ghz, but it's snappy as all getup as it stands.

Clearly, the performance of the Air would be a drop from where I am today, but the thinness and light weight are very attractive. The price point is about right: with the 1.8 Ghz processor and a USB Ethernet port to get around our dodgy wireless networking setup at the office I think I could handle $1,998.00 (with the education discount).

The CD thing is a total non-issue. I've got enough computers lying around the house to deal with whatever may come, and CD burning duty will be completely relegated to the Quicksilver G4 as soon as I get a new dual-layer Lightscribe burner (~$30 on NewEgg). I'm surrounded by desktop workstations at the office and I'm sure I could throw the software on one of them if I absolutely had to install something. Worst case, I could throw my old DVD burner from the Quicksilver in to a dirt-cheap USB-to-IDE enclosure and keep it in a desk drawer for emergencies.

One feature I consider woefully absent is the FireWire connector. FireWire, quite frankly, kicks the living snot out of USB 2.0 - even in the original FireWire 400 spec. I don't care what the tech specs say, I have always found FireWire to be around 5x faster than USB 2.0, and it handles parallel operations (for example, reading while copying large files) much better with no noticeable degradation in performance. I really hope Apple doesn't drop iEEE 1394 altogether from their product line, and I'd especially like to see FireWire in the Air. Then again, there is only so much they can do with 0.76" clearance, so I guess they chucked the electronics for the interface least likely to be seen in the wild (where the Air will undoubtedly spend most of its time).

The only other thing I really wish I had in my MBP was a larger hard drive, and the 80 GB standard in the Air (with no upgrade option) is just too small for me once I've dropped a 15 GB Windows installation in to VMWare (gotta have my Dawn of War and software suite for work). A new laptop drive for my MBP would cost a pittance, and would handily last me for the interim.

Apple traditionally works out bugs in their first releases of new hardware, so that's another deterrent. I think I'll just hold off for Otellini's wizards to squeeze out a little more juice from that tiny chip, and for the hard drive size to increase in the standard model (or for a larger paid-for option to surface).

Summary
Overall - nice work, Apple. It's a very sexy product line and a great way to start 2008. I think a lot of people will pick up the Air and Time Capsule just to be on the latest and greatest, and I imagine that the frenzy will mount (iPhone style) as people start seeing wicked-thin laptops and get the bug to buy. Time to swoop in and pick up some more AAPL while the market is getting hammered...

And here's an idea - why not make that Remote Disk feature available so I can still rip CDs and install software when this happens? :)

We've owned seven Apple laptops in my immediate family, and I have only had this happen twice - but it happened again tonight.

I've been importing all of my CD collection in to iTunes so that I can put it away in to storage once and for all, and to speed things up I'm doing half on my MacBook Pro and the other half on my old Quicksilver G4 tower. I got through about 120 CDs, and then came back to my MBP to find it had a CD stuck in the drive.

Those of you who have experienced this before know how annoying this is. The drive basically just makes a noise like it's ejecting, struggles a bit, and then remounts the disk. Last time this happened, it was with the CFUNITED 2006 CD, and all I had to do was hold my MBP upside down with the CD drive pointing at a slight downward angle to get it out (although it took me a few days to figure it out). Sean Corfield had the exact same problem with the exact same computer and CD media from CFUNITED.

This time, that trick wasn't working. I dug around in Google a bit and found that some people had had success by holding the CD drive pointing toward you at a 45 degree angle (facing you as if you were going to type on the keyboard). I tried that, but the CD was still stuck. I tried sliding a business card through the slot to "guide" the CD out, but that didn't work either.

Finally, I tried the 45 degree angle thing again, but holding the computer somewhere between 30 degrees and 45 degrees. Finally, the CD popped out - actually, my Mac spat it out at speed like it had really wanted to get it out, which was kind of amusing.

One of the articles I found suggests that CDs or DVDs that are warped are likely to get stuck. This makes perfect sense, of course. I took the offending CD and laid it on my glass desk, and sure enough, it was bowed upwards so that the center of the disk was about 2-3mm above the flat surface. So, once again, this problem was media-related rather than a hardware issue per se.

Even so, it's a pretty stupid problem to have. There is no manual method for ejecting the discs if they get stuck on my MBP model, so I'm basically rolling the dice every time I stick a CD in there. It would be nice if Apple provided drives that either had slightly higher clearance, or some way to force eject manually if something gets stuck. Again, this has happened twice in seven Macs over the course of three years, so it's an edge case, but a very annoying one nonetheless.

Couldn't agree more with Eckel here. Java's had some strange feature bloat in recent years. I really like Java 5, but I think if they keep throwing stuff in to the language it will get worse, not better. LeGros would probably argue that Groovy is our sanctity.

Eckel's post made me think of something that I believe is a true death-knell to all technologies: backwards compatibility. I've argued strongly and consistently over the years that I believe a big key to Apple's success and some of Microsoft's failings have been due to Apple's willingness to break backwards compatibility to move forward.

At CFI, we have consistently "wasted" three to six months per year of development effort on "upgrading" our Oracle database and application servers. In most cases, the databases have become slower and the new features added between releases have made very little impact to our environment; we're basically just upgrading to stay PCI compliant and guarantee Oracle's support. Each time we've gone through this rigmarole, we've had to modify our apps in slight ways to make them compatible. This would be an example in my mind of trying to make a technology backwards compatible with a software application.

This "waste" has been a fixture of mine as we set up our new software architecture. I don't ever want to be held back from a new technology or have to rewrite anything at any point in time. Of course, we'll make decisions on upgrades and changes, but I'm fine with that so long as our hand is never forced the way it has been in the past. Oracle's Forms technology has a horrible coupling between the application server and the database, and this was something I knew we had to avoid as we move forward.

Luckily, the ESB and SOA principles seem to offer real hope here. All of our current services and apps are being written in Java and Flex, and but it won't be long before we add Ruby, and maybe even some .NET for really tight integration with some Windows-only functionality. Because everything speaks XML and SOAP (and those technologies that don't can provide something we can transform in to one of those two) it's going to be pretty simple to make switches as we see fit. Sure, there is always an overhead to adopting a technology, but that will just be another element we factor in to the decision. The choice will always be ours to upgrade or not, and in the interim I can run Flex 1.5 alongside Flex 3 talking to a mix of services written in Java, Ruby, or access our legacy apps via messaging over Oracle's AQ (an example of 100% painless backwards compatibility, with no constraints imposed). They can all run on different OSs for all I care; that's the beauty of the service architecture.

So, I say this: make things evolve, or watch them die. I'm already convinced that CF is on its way out, and I think Java is destined to be dethroned in the coming years (although I bet it has five to ten really good years left in it before that happens). Either way, it will be fun to watch.

My mum (English spelling) got me a Cocoa book for Xmas off my Amazon wishlist (donations gratefully accepted). I already had another Cocoa book, but this one seems far more immediate.

I'm on Chapter 5, learning about Delegates. It's interesting because we decided to call the primary remote Java object in our Flex apps at CFI Delegates, too, and they fulfill very similar responsibilities (although in entirely different ways due to the technology differences).

I've now grasped the concept that, unlike the Internet, Cocoa is a series of tubes. Messages can go from anywhere, to anything. One object declares itself responsible for handling events for another (as its delegate) and Cocoa doesn't complain. Objects pass themselves to each other with no regard for type or compile-time checking. There's an element of trust involved that I simply don't count on myself to be able to provide to XCode. Sorry, XCode.

For a Java developer, it's both liberating and intensely terrifying at the same time. Of course, this isn't my first experience with dynamic languages so I knew what I was getting in to, but I find it interesting that such a beautiful and stable OS as OS X would be written largely in such a strange (read: trusting and uncompiled) beast of a language.

I look forward to later chapters in this book and the next (also provided by mum) where I will learn just why this kind of flexibility is what Cocoa developers are always gushing about on mailing lists.

Man, I'm really psyched about this. I love the original Leopard Stacks behavior for folders like the Downloads folder, and I love the old Tiger behavior for folders in the Dock. I knew Apple was going to address this, but was worried that they'd give you an all-or-nothing option.

Nope. You can have your cake and eat it too. Stacks for stackable stuff and folders for lists of icons, all presented in glorious Stacks-style animation, and with a sort order preference so you don't have to order your directories in Finder to control their behavior in the Dock.

Love it.