Flex tutorials without the pain

March 7, 2009 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

For those of us looking at Adobe flex as an additional arrow in our quiver, you might have seen that adobe does an excellent 44 part video training called “Flex in a week”, the training is excellent, the fact they say you have to use their windows only “Adobe media player” is less so, im not going to go into the many things that vex me about this bit of software but it is definitely not “S.S.C.” {you’ll have to ask me if you want to know what i mean by that}, however it turns out you don’t need it, just open up http://sessions.adobe.com/FlexInAWeek/feed.xml and down load all the reasonably named .FLV files, and watch them using VLC or what ever media player rocks your boat

….why do people try to ruin a good idea by telling you how to use it.

Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf Books

March 5, 2009 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

After a chance meeting in a second hand book store, I’m suffering from a return to childhood on Fighting Fantasy books (ah the joys of ebay), and while rolling in this happy and cheap glut of thrills (although some of the ‘supposed’ rare ones are proving tricky to get hold of), I remembered their main competitor the lone wolf series, after a quick search it turns out that the author Joe Denver has given them all away to the Aon Project so that we can all enjoy them for free (a very nice act on his behalf), but even better is the fact that these books are now back in print at mongoose publishing but instead of the scabby paperback form we remember (and even the new reprints of the fighting fantasy are in) they are amazing stitched hardbacks with colour and all mod cons (sort of like what the folio society does but for role play books) mine arrived last night and the are beautiful …only one problem, i could not bring my self to write in the old ones (you were supposed to), and to even consider to do so in these ones is quite frankly a sin

….some how i need to get a set of these to my son (my own fantasy adventure!!)

An example of a perfect article

February 28, 2009 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

To my shame I do useless articles, however this one by Stephan H Wissel is just perfect, it has everything a good article could want

1) Informative
2) Excellently presented and clear
3) Something for everyone in the target audience
4) Needs no re-formatting to show to other people

To prove the point, i just forwarded on the link to one of my managers, and got the response “Looks ideal, how long to implement”

Perfect.

A Small World

February 26, 2009 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Sometimes i subscribe to the whole “x degrees of separation”, “only 100,000 people in the world kind of thing”, for example I’m doing Steve’s my fencing instructor’s web site and going through his portfolio, when i find the following image

The fact that a fencer (not a common sport) who has advertised a piece of IBM software on Unix, is having a website built on IBM software on a UNIX derivative (Linux), is quite frankly more than a little freaky to me.

enough of the random gibbering, back to work

London Developer Co-op update

February 26, 2009 by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Now that the London Developer Co-op has been up for a few months, I cant believe that i did not try and get into something like it before, admittedly its got big guns like Matt White , Ben Poole in it so I’m at the bottom of the heap, but to be able to point to a “support crew” and have proper branding and such when you are surprised with the chance of a big job or a posh client for whom you being a “single contractor” will just not cut the mustard, is amazing, you attract attention from areas you would not have had access to before, also you meet people like Andrew Magerman who is trying to do the same thing with http://www.notesnet.ch in Switzerland (pop over to see them), hopefully we can do some work together.

All in all, well worth the effort.