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I've noticed a lot of articles recently about the future of application development and there's a lot of talk about Flex in there. It could just be synchronicity - ie. because Flex is basically my new job I suddenly notice Flex everywhere - or it could just be Year of the Flex. The people at my new employer believe so.
After six and a half years at my current employer, and 8 years doing Domino development, in 3 weeks I say goodbye to the platform. I started on R4.5 doing Intranet development as a graduate out of uni, having never used or seen Notes / Domino before. This was pretty much right on 8 years ago, January 1999. Since then I have moved through R5 and R6, doing web applications and web content management systems in Notes / Domino as my primary work. It's been fun, but it's also been frustrating being stuck with such a crappy development environment.
So this isn't an original idea, but I'm learning Flex stuff and it was a fun little project. I saw that Mike Shaw of Webqem had done this webcam barcode reading demo, so I thought I'd see how hard it was. It's not as accurate as Mike's, but it's not bad for a few hours work.
I am always amazed by the brain power that would be required to understand and design a CPU. Obviously it's not done by one person, but still I'm sure there are people that understand how it all works. I was looking at the Unofficial 4004 Website recently, which contains recently released schematics and a simulator for the Intel 4004 processor. This processor is a predecessor of the 8086 processor, the basic idea of which (arguably) still lives on today in the latest Intel CPUs - even though they dropped the 80#86 naming convention awhile back.
Given how relatively complex the schematic and functioning of the 4004 is, at least to someone who doesn't know much about Electrical Engineering like me, imagine what the circuit diagram (if you can call it that) for the Intel Core 2 Duo must look like.
So yeah, that's my bit for the day - my occasional reminder that all these bits of technology we take for granted every day were actually conceived, designed and built by actual people. It's not just CPUs, but things that use them, like mobile phones, microwaves and music players.
Adobe Flex (formerly Macromedia) is a tool for writing "Rich Internet Applications" (or RIAs). This is a buzzword that means a normal application like interface but via the web - kind of like AJAX stuff. The difference is that Flex applications compile down to a Flash (SWF) file. The advantage of this is that the performance is much better than that of a pure Javascript/HTML app, and the Flash Player is very ubiquitous, so chances are your users will have no problem using your Flex front end. The only negative is that Flex 2 requires Flash Player 9, which doesn't quite have the penetration that Flash 7 and 8 do at this stage.
Being a Domino developer, the first thing I had to try was how hard it would be to get at Domino data using Flex. Short answer: not too hard!
Okay, so this is technically Show-n-tell Tuesday (Australian time), but I was working out some kinks.
Continue reading Domino: Accessing Domino Views from Adobe Flex applications
This is a cry for help, not a HOWTO. Here's what I want to do:
I can find plenty of references to hosting a shared iTunes library on Linux (eg. daapd), or even software that can talk to a shared iTunes library (eg. Rhythmbox), but seemingly nothing that will let Linux pretend to be an Airport Express.
Yes there are things I could do like run rhythmbox on the linux box and remote control it from the Powerbook, but I don't want to do that. I want my Powerbook to be the source, streaming the music to the media box which is acting as a remote speaker.
If I work it out, I'll write it up!
We had a discussion at work recently about whether it is faster to stampAll for multiple fields, or to update the fields and then save. The short answer? If you're updating fewer than 5 fields it is faster to stampAll rather than update the document and save. For the long answer, read on for some comparisons and ugly standard Excel graphs due to lack of time.
Continue reading Domino: "stampAll" vs "replaceItemValue and save" speed comparison
Here is another attempt at doing some more technical blogging, but since all the other content isn't that exciting anyway it's not like this will be much different. Eventually I will set it up such that tech.junkheap.net will display only the tech posts, and I can have posts that don't show up on the "front page" but just on the tech page. I can do this for other tags too, like bushwalking or cooking.
But on with the nerd talk..
I was having a look at how hard it is to encrypt something using asymmetric encryption (that is, public key / private key encryption) using Java. Turns out that it's not too hard at all, but as with all Java stuff it's a whole load of Factories and abstractions to get there. I also discuss how this stuff can be used with Domino, just so I can make this my first "Show and Tell Thursday" article!
I sat the exam for the Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform 1.4 on Wednesday, and came away with a 96% score (2 wrong out of 61 questions). Considering the pass mark is only 52% I think that's pretty good, given the general agreement that it is a difficult test.
Read on for how I prepared and how I found the exam itself.
Continue reading Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 Platform 1.4