Adobe AIR Camp

I'm currently sitting in (and posting from) the first Adobe AIR Camp in Australia... there's not much going on yet, but the day is young! :)

Currently, Andrew Spaulding is introducing Flex Builder 3... since I've been using it for some time now, this part's a little slow ;)

Okay, now he's talking about using transparent images for application chrome... getting interesting... better go now :)

Six degrees of separation?

In light of the estimated world population passing 6,666,666,666 a couple of days ago, and partially inspired by the inter-character linkages in the movie Love Actually, which I just happened to watch again last night, I got to thinking about the mathematical possibility of the six degrees of separation concept.

LinuxMCE 0704 Demo Video

Lately I've been starting to feel the deficiencies of my old TViX M3000U media player... particularly its narrow folder-based navigation model. So, I've been looking around at some possible Linux-based replacements. The obvious ones being:

• LinuxMCE
• Entertainer
• My Media System

Licensing the Adobe AIR command line compiler

The Adobe AIR command line compiler (axmlc) adds a "Flex Data Visualization Trial" watermark to the background of chart and AdvancedDataGrid controls. If you are licensed to use Flex Builder 3 Professional, then you can fix this quite easily...

Ixnay on the oggerBlay

I've just finished importing all of the blog entries from my old Blogger site... turned out to be quite easy. It was great to see that Drupal allows posts to be back-dated... oh, and it also helped that I only had seven entries on the old blog ;)

So, my old Blogger blog is no longer :)

Internet Explorer's window title

Ok, so I found the registry key responsible for Telstra Bigpond's irritating branding of Internet Explorer's window title:

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-682003330-789336058-839522115-1004\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Window Title -> "Telstra BigPond Home Internet Explorer"

I hate Telstra software

Completely typical! I've just installed Telstra's BigPond Wireless Broadband client (unavoidable I'm afraid), and the installer has violated my PC in two ways (so far):

1. the installer changed my browser's home page to some useless BigPond page; and
2. the installer changed my browers's title from "Internet Explorer" to "Telstra BigPond Home Intenet Explorer"... that's right, viewing this site, my browser's window title actually reads "PC Thoughts - Telstra BigPond Home Internet Explorer"... arghh!!

Stealing from the (Steel)Vine

First some background: The Asus P5W-DH Deluxe includes a Silicon Image SiI4723 hardware RAID controller. Yes, that's hardware RAID - not fakeraid. And since the controller presents the OS with just one logical disk (as it should), Silicon Image provide a utility called SteelVine Configuration Manager (SVCM) that can be used to view the current state of the controller and attached disks / arrays.

Seeding db2's RAND function

Most computers cannot generate truly random numbers. For this reason, many computer programming languages include pseudo-random number generators. These pseudo-random generators usually need to be seeded so that they don't always reproduce the same sequence of numbers.

textRollOverColor in Flex DataGrid part 2

In my last post I presented a simple way to customise the DataGridItemRenderer class so the Flex DataGrid control would use the textRollOverColor and textSelectedColor styles correctly. But I also noted that the solution would not fix the DataGrid header items... well, here's my solution to that problem.

First of all, it's worth noting that there are two main reasons why a custom DataGridItemRender is not adequate for the DataGrid header items. The first reason is that the renderer's validateNow() method is almost never called for header items, even though it also called correctly, and often, for the data items. And the second reason is this: the validateNow() method (both the original version, and my custom version) depends on two DataGrid methods in order to determine which text style to use. Those methods are isItemHighlighted() and isItemSelected(). However, neither of those methods work for header items - they both always return false, making them of no use in determining text color for header items.