The Rantings of the barely human.
In these day of firefox’s built in spell checker, why do we need an extra spell checker, well frankly for me its because Flex does not have one built in, enter
Spelling Plus by http://gskinner.com
Its the best spell checker i have found for flex, you do have to remember to manually ‘refresh’ the checker with code if you change text boxes via back end code (not the apps fault), but otherwise an excellent checker, and one I’m very happy with (be warned its not free)
At first sight this is just 3 cool games that run in flash silvergames games doom triple pack, for the young uns out there, the three games it lets you play “DOOM, Hexen and Heretic” were once top flight games (in the land of the 386/486), but now the are free bees that compress into a 10meg swf file (just download the page, then run the doom-triple-pack.swf on the stand alone flash player if you want to play off line), all very nice but after a few mins playing you start to think, “how the hell did one bloke do this as a hobby project” the answer lies with Adobe Alchemy a beta adobe project “that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2).” ie reuse lots and lots of existing C and C++ code, HOW COOL IS THAT!!!!
A top book to read/listen to is “the Graveyard book” by Neal Gaimen, recommended by me by my far better half, not only is Mr Gaimen his usual inventivate self but as normal his books manage to be exciting and interesting without being socially stressful, to top this Mr Gaimen does is own narration on audio books, this sets him apart from a lot of modern authors ( Douglas Adams and Spike Milligan both did there own narration) it also helps that he is very very good at it.
There seems to be the chance that i might be a’traveling to the fair US for one of my clients (a most exciting prospect), but how to act like a native in any given city: NY, Chicago or Detroit, anyone got any tips?
In return i offer 9 beginner tips for the joy that is London town.
1) Please stand on the right on escalators, the left is the fast lane (it is very defiantly not the “I have huge luggage and like to block peoples way” lane)
2) Public transport is the norm, both buses and trains/tube are used by ‘suits’, there’s no shame in it.
3) Its impossible to walk round anywhere without being given at least 3 free newspapers, they are mostly drivel.
4) You WILL get badly drunk (its the countries fav pastime), and it WILL cost you a fortune
5) Teenagers are the most dangerous thing in London (and that would include velociraptors if they had a colony in Trafalgar square) I’m not joking
6) All late nights will end up at a curry house (its a strange gravitation effect)
7) The only cabs to trust are the oddly shaped black ones.
8) Any inclement weather of any description with bring the city to a standstill for example “the wrong sort of sunshine”
9) If you get your self injured in our fair city, don’t worry, you don’t need any money or insurance, we got it covered as a freebie 🙂
Its been over a month since i last blogged, but I have a good reason, I have been given an amazing opportunity (given the current financial climate), and my working skill set has taken a amazing leap, I am now working on FLEX 3, Proper Java (with Spring, Hibernate and very serious web services) in addition to Domino, and all with those tight times that make a project fun, its been disturbing my sleep but i wake keen to be at work (always the best way to be), but time to get some useful blog entries out.