Certified crazy

Met Pradeepto and Missus, and Anurag at our usual hangout place - Pizzeria - to get the update on their Akademy visit. Need to try out the Bachelor’s ice cream next time, now that I know the location.

I went down South last weekend for the Bangalore Flex User Group meet that Mrinal tweeted about. I reached halfway through Vandana’s OpenLaszlo talk. (Thanks to Bangalore’s famed traffic jams). The part that I attended went well, with flex users trying to grasp laszlo’s components and comparing similar alternatives available in Flex. Quite a few new people joined in too, I was told. The meet ended well with discussions on how should laszlo save its backside As always, coffee time is the best time to get a feel of the group. Met some people with brilliant ideas and trying to get them into action. Nice!

Headed to some shopping and thought of picking up something to eat at MG Road. Wasn’t hungry, so headed back with some coffee instead.

Next day was spent trying to figure out what OS to install on the new laptop, at Parthan’s place, after an awesome Thali at Nandhinee. A few hours later, I ended up buying two waitlisted tickets (both of which got confirmed btw - separate trains ofcourse) to Chennai for the next day, all the while having a confirmed KSRTC bus ticket. More has been blogged about this meet (and the goofups) by Parthan, Aanjhan and Onkar.

Next day was spent in Chennai. The flight out was delayed by almost two hours. Landed up at home at 1.45 am with Mom yelling. All attempts at breaking in quietly failed terribly.

Note to self: Next time, plan things out! (but unplanned trips like this one are awesome fun too! :D)

I head out to France to pursue a Masters degree next this month. Now, for the first time in my life, shopping seems like a daunting task.

Checked out Flex 4 from http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/trunk/

Setup instructions are precise. No major hassles at all. The part where the `detailed steps’ for setting up on linux reads:

“Come on… if you’re a Linux geek you don’t need any handholding!

That said, if you would like to contribute instructions for those without your prowess, please post them on the Developers list and we will incorporate them.”

Heh!

Reading swf files from the local machine caused a Security sandbox error. Fixed this by adding the FlexSDK.cfg file under ~/.macromedia/#Security/FlashPlayerTrust/ folder. Abdul Qabiz has a detailed post on flash player trust on GNU/Linux.

Too bad couldn’t go down to BLR for initRia’07.

It was the first community driven, community organized event for RIA in India afaik. Bangalore flex user group guys were the ones organized it. I’ll hopefully attend some other conference, if one comes up soon, else, will have to wait for Max 2008 I guess.

Akshay told me about the CodeCampMumbai a couple of days ago. It is like a barcamp, but you actually sit down and *write* code - by the end of the day, you have some cool hack / app. Isn’t that cool? (especially for lazy ones like me who keep putting things off weekend after weekend :P)

So, if you think you’d like to team up with someone or hack on that idea that has been in your head since ages, go ahead, register and have fun!

P.S. I’d probably hack on something Flex.. May be, use the Flex builder Linux Alpha and cook something up.

Tom Bray and Robert Cadena came up with this cool Flex Chat app - Like a chat room or an IRC channel, but only more easier to connect to. Quite a few flex coders from around the world log in. You can even download the widget and run it as an air app or put up a widget on your blog.

They run searchcoders, an portal where you can contact employers if you are a flex coder, or get in touch with coders, if you are an employer.

I came across #air on freenode on Mike Chamber’s blog. I visited the #flex on efnet a couple of months ago, and it was deserted. Then stopped lurking around there.

Now, its time to start a #flex or a #flex-india on freenode, if there isn’t one registered already. But lets see if there is a #flex on one of the other networks. I will have to hunt down flexcoders archives to see if there is one. IAC, as mrinal says, mxna is the morning newspaper to read anyway.

For now, I go back to slacking. No hacking this weekend.

[UPDATE]

Registered #flex-india on freenode. Time to put up a bot there?

I came across this cute little AIR app called AirTalkr.

Nice. Needs a bit of fine-tuning-love. Can’t sign out of just one of the IMs, Y! and other IMs logged in automatically when one logs in on Talkr and such. Good eye candy though

Know of any c00l AIR / Flex apps? Leave a linky here!

But that doesn’t make any more sense than it did earlier. Or does it?

The second Mumbai FUG meet happened at Grey Matter Technologies today. As it always is, it was good to put faces to names and email IDs. A lot of crisp tech talk happened for over 3 hours, which was good for a sunday well spent.

Adobe has a promotional tour on .. promoting Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). The tour has a bunch of geeks / Adobe Evangelists going around in 18 cities around North America, in a bus. Sounds cool, eh?

Ted Patrick writes about the latest hack put together - AIRChat. Should check it out soon.