Deadbeat ebay buyer: djrichclub90
Sold this guy a laptop on eBay, now he’s pulling the most classic stunts on me…
http://myworld.ebay.com/djrichclub90
Full story coming after I get the full results.
Foxmarks/XMarks for Google Chrome
I LOVE Google Chrome!
It’s sweet. But until Foxmarks (now XMarks) supports Chrome… I’ll never switch. I use more than one computer… and I need my bookmarks to sync. I also like to sync my passwords.
XMarks - please support Google Chrome!
Adobe: where you get to wait in line to pay
A few years ago my Dad said to me: “You should never have to wait in line to pay”
And now that saying has been showing up profoundly in the last couple of months.
Today was a prime example
Adobe CS3 Web Premium. Ever since I started consulting, I always have been in the 20% of people who pay for the other 80%: I actually legally purchase all of my software. My rational is that if I was one of the engineers at Adobe, I’d want people to pay for my software, not steal it.
I’ve spent about $5,000 at Adobe in the past 10 years, and we are a pretty small firm. I’m just about fed up, though, and the only purchase I really value at this point was the one made for Flex Builder.
Here’s the story:
This week both my laptop and my desktop crashed within two days of each other. I reformatted, put o.s. back on, and proceeded to install all of my programs. After waiting about 45 minutes for CS3 to install, I opened up Flash to write a lecture for tonight’s class at UMass Amherst. What do you know! A CS3 activation window.
I proceeed to activate my LEGAL copy of cs3, only to be told that there are “too many activations”, and I must either deactivate it on the computers it is installed on, or purchase additional copies. You know what the issue is? I NO LONGER HAVE ACCESS TO THOSE COMPUTERS! Why didn’t you think of that, Adobe?
SO, in order to solve the issue, you have to call into Adobe, and talk to their overseas phone representatives who you can hardly understand. They have a right to work - but c’mon Adobe - I paid over $500 for the upgrade to CS3!
After 25 minutes of “what is your email address?, that’s c as in charlie, o as in orange, or as in orange”, they gave me an activation code and I’m finally done.
The bottom line
The bottom line is I shouldn’t have to wait in line to “activate” software that I legally paid for. It would have been FASTER to install an ILLEGAL version than to deal with Adobe’s shitty activation system and their incompitant phone representatives. Tell me Adobe, why should I upgrade to CS4? Or why should I even use your products at all?
The solution
If you’re going to impliment this rediculous “two computers” per license rule, then you need to make it easier for your customers. There should be a way for ME to remotely DEACTIVATE a copy ON YOUR WEB SITE. I should not have to call and talk to an overseas reprentative just to update one line in your database.
Furthermore, $2499 for CS4? That’s insane! Why not just charge $99, and get millions of people to pay for it, instead of making 20% of us pay $2499 and deal with your shitty customer service, while the other 80% illegally download bootleg copies! A subscription service for creative suite, and all of your products, just makes more sense. Or a more sensible price - that makes more sense too.
Man, I’ve had alot of rants lately.
Dell’s “ProSupport” is a complete joke
Last year we purchased two T7400 precision workstations, which are basically dell’s top-of-the-line business desktops.
I configured my order online then I called in to see if I could obtain some additional discounts.
The representative at Dell, Keith Moore, seemed like a nice guy. He threw in Dell’s “Pro Support” for 1 year, and also gave us a set of logitech z4 speakers as well.
9 months into owning these systems, we start experiencing issues. One of the hard drives fails. So I decide to track down this “Pro Support” phone number. Supposidely they have a 2-minute guarantee to be on the phone with you.
But you know what the fucking problem is? No where on my receipt, no where on “my account”, and no where on Dell’s entire web site do they list a seperate phone number to call! So you’re stuck calling into the poor man’s phone number - and waiting on hold for hours and hours. Furthermore, their chat system doesn’t recognize that I am a Pro Support customer. So I am literally waiting in line to chat behind 40 other people as we speak.
I pretty much give up on Dell. In just 10 months of owning these $2,000+ systems, two hard drives have failed. That is just unacceptable. And to make matters worse, I have no one to help me with it.
Don’t buy Pro Support - it’s a complete scam and joke!!!!!
The Pi Day Challenge
This last week I had the opportunity to help a friend create www.pidaychallenge.com. That friend is Matt Plummer - he was a teacher of mine in high school who inspired me to learn flash programming. Up until I started working with Matt, I didn’t even own a computer, and now I’m working full-time as a Flex developer and launching all kinds of web startups. Thanks Plum.
It’s amazing what motivated people can do. We put it up online on March 9, and within 4 days:
We’re #1 result in Google for Pi Day Challenge
We’re on 1-2 page for “Pi Day”
We have 800 registered users
We have 2200 unique visitors from 28 countries
Check it out - Take The Challenge!!! www.pidaychallenge.com
Flash and Flex Communication
I assume it’s because I didn’t search for the right terms, but I couldn’t find anything good about communicating between Flash 9/10 and Flex.
I found some posts on LocalConnection, and this post… but the issue with LocalConnection is that you can only have on instance open at once. So, if you build something and a user opens two tabs of it, it will fail to connect to the second instance. Blarg!
The solution is actually simple: good old events. I tried this earlier but failed to add the “.content.add” piece.
iGoogle style component for Flex
Screen shot (CLICK FOR RUNNING SAMPLE AND SOURCE CODE):
This week I needed to build a customizable home/landing page in a web application built in Flex. I wanted to give the user the ability to add, remove, and position different “widgets”. I’ll upload my paper mockups early next week…
I looked all over the web for a solid sample of an iGoogle style example in Flex and really couldn’t find anything that was out-of-the-box usable.
I played around with flex mdi, but the out-of-the-box example was a little too heavy for me. I don’t understand why it only highlights one window. Anyways, I decided to make this sample out of pure laziness to learn flex mdi, plus I thought it would be fun.
Here’s some features to the component:
- Use custom grid sizes - you can specify what the grid layout will be with the GridCountWidth attribute. For example, if you set GridCountWidth to 3, you’ll get a grid that is 3xn. If you have a total of 9 windows, you’ll get a 3×3 grid.
- Automatically sizes and positions the panels - no matter how many things you send over, it sizes them to fit. This is a limitation as well as a feature…
- Margins and Padding
Features I’m working on next:
- Once you delete a widget, the positions all need to be updated and the event needs to be dispatched.
- Minimizing and maximizing might be neat, but for now I’m going to hold off until a user requests that feature.
- The solid click/grid areas look bad… but I’m lazy right now and I don’t want to find a dotted-line canvas example…
Here are some known issues/oddities:
- You have to use the DraggablePanel class as the base class of your component. I had it to you could use any base class that dispatched certain events, but I ran into an issue where I had to do a bunch of math and decided to can it and force the use of the DraggablePanel…
- Because of the automatic sizing, some components don’t look great. I should probably make an automatic sizing or a static sizing version.
- The margins aren’t working correctly… they were but I broke it
- You have to use the DraggablePanel component as your base class when creating new widgets.
swapChildren fix in Flex 3
I’m working on a project right now and swapChildren is just not working as expected. Looked around a bit, and I just decided to remove the two children and add copies of them instead:
var tmpThis:Canvas= EV.target as Canvas;
var tmpHighest:Canvas= highestPanel;
removeChild (highestPanel);
removeChild (EV.target as Canvas);
addChild(tmpHighest);
addChild(tmpThis);
Art
Steve Keene my favorite artist. He’s an entreprenuer in art. Alot of times entreprenurs have to go against what thousands of other people say. They have to go against the norm.
I’m finding that the most successful people in life have one big thing: passion. You can be a painter, a web developer, a musicion or a farmer. The bottom line is that if you are not passionate about your cause then you are not going to be successful.
Steve Keen is passionate about spreading art. He thinks that everyday people are just as entitled to enjoying art as millionares. I admire Steve Keene’e worth ethic. He works long shifts. He must love it. He listens to the radio and listens to music and gets to do what he loves to do: paint.
Please take 15 minutes now to watch one of the most inspriring and artistic videos on the web. Trust me, it’s worth your time.
That’s all. Go Steve.
-Alex
Over 36,000 Sold (1998) from Brett Vapnek on Vimeo.
Blog launch
And… it’s official!
I’ve tried about 10 times to start a blog. Each time I always run out of time to work on it, I get way to many spam messages… ehh whatever.
Now I’m going to do it. This blog is mainly going to be about Flex, Flash, amf-php, and the web. I’m also going to talk about entreprenuership, (dealing with) people, and whatever else is on my mind.
Here’s what’s on the table for my first two blog posts:
1. amf-php authentication sample application
I told some people in the amf-php community that I’d post my sample application online. That was July. Well now I’m really going to do it! Coming by Friday 11/28/08.
2. using svn to auto-publish to your dev server, and backup your database…
This is a neat trick we use in-house to manage multiple-team-member web projects. This trick is thanks to Tom Petr at Schedr (www.schedr.com). I’ll do this in January.