April 7th, 2008
So, I waited out my old Verizon contract, and went to AT&T mainly for the iPhone. I was really excited, because I have been a big fan of the user experience offered by the iPhone. However, there was one user experience aspect that I failed to consider - AT&T’s network. My user experience (at least with the calls) has been nothing but negative compared to my previous provider, Verizon. I am sure this is not the case elsewhere, but in Savannah Verizon is simply the best provider. My iPhone doesn’t work at the office. My wife’s Pantech Duo doesn’t work at her school, and neither of our phones consistently work at home (and we don’t have a home phone line - so this is a big deal). Unless something changes in the next few days - our phones are going back to AT&T and I will probably go back to my old XV6700 smartphone with Verizon.
David Tucker |
Uncategorized |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
April 3rd, 2008
Yes, it appears that my Wordpress install was hacked just prior to my upgrade to Wordpress 2.5. Just as before, it wasn’t anything major, but I got a whole host of hidden links added to the end of one of my posts. This was easily fixed. However, because this went for a week or so before I caught it, my frontpage dropped off Google like a rock.
I would certainly recommend that everyone upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 ASAP - and stay updated. This won’t keep you from all of the hacks and exploits, but it helps tremendously. In the mean time, I am going to write some shell scripts on my Nagios install to search for various pharmaceutical terms on my site - so the next one won’t catch me unaware.
Stupid Wordpress Hackers…
David Tucker |
Wordpress |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
April 1st, 2008
I started blogging last year in April. Over the last year I hope that this blog has proved helpful to many of you. I have been amazed at how the readership has grown. The Cairngorm series posts have been the most popular by far over the last year. Here a few statistics to sum up the last year:
- Posts: 100
- Spam Coments: 4,216
- Real Comments: 323
- Pageviews for Cairngorm Tutorials: 43,135
- Most Commented Post (32 Comments): Getting Started with Cairngorm - Part 4
- Top 5 Visitor Countries: US, UK, Canada, China, India
- Top 3 Referrers: MXNA, Google, Wikipedia
Let me know what you want me to cover between now and April 1, 2009! Why April 1st…it’s my birthday…really it is.
David Tucker |
Uncategorized |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
April 1st, 2008
Many people have asked that I make the Cairngorm Series downloadable (the video portions). Since I have gotten a handful of requests this week - I determined to go ahead and post the links:
UPDATE: Many people didn’t realize that there are written tutorials and exercise files that go along with each tutorial. You can find those here.
- Cairngorm Part 1
- Cairngorm Part 2
- Cairngorm Part 3
- Cairngorm Part 4
- Cairngorm Part 5
These videos are in FLV format. You will need an FLV player to view them. Adobe Media Player is the best FLV player, but they have not yet released a version for AIR 1.0. Until they do - you can use the following:
Wimpy Standalone FLV Player
Note: There IS a Part 6 coming soon to the Cairngorm series. I was waiting on another developer to get finished on a specific project, but it doesn’t appear that will happen in the near future - so I won’t hold it up any longer.
David Tucker |
Cairngorm, Flex |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
April 1st, 2008
The Browser API that has been covered in AIR Tip 5 and AIR Tip 6 allows you not only to launch an AIR application from the browser, but also from another AIR application.
This tutorial is current for AIR 1.0
Read the rest of this entry »
David Tucker |
AIR |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
March 31st, 2008
It’s official - my TV viewing habits have drastically changed over the past two years. Let me be clear though - I am not a big TV watcher, so this may be different for others. I now watch virtually all of my TV online through Hulu or ITunes. Because of this, my wife and I are getting rid of cable (we are actually downgrading just to the network channels). Hopefully people like me will help get the attention of the telecoms. If I only watch one or two shows, and I can either watch them free online or purchase them through ITunes - why do I need to pay $60-90 per month for cable. Simple answer: I don’t. If it were less expensive or if I could purchase the channels I want, I would reconsider.
David Tucker |
Uncategorized |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
March 27th, 2008
Amazon EC2 just received two very important updates: Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones.
Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.
This fixes the first major problem that people had with EC2, non-static IP addresses. I have not yet played with this new feature, but I expect to try and give it a demo this week.
Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.
This feature also will have the potential to help many of those high availability sites that use EC2. We recently learned that Amazon Web Services are not perfect (as the S3 system was down for most of a day), but this hopefully should help insulate EC2 customers from such a fate.
Elastic IP Addresses
Availability Zones
David Tucker |
Amazon Webservices |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
March 24th, 2008
I just completed a new article, Adobe AIR and Dreamweaver for JavaScript developers on the Adobe AIR Developer Center. It gives a good look at developing AJAX AIR application with Dreamweaver CS3. This includes: debugging your applications, updating your applications, security in AIR, and configuring Dreamweaver for AIR.
Adobe AIR and Dreamweaver for JavaScript Developers
David Tucker |
AIR |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
March 24th, 2008
Adobe Developer Week kicks off today. There are many great sessions covering topics from ColdFusion 8, Blaze DS, Flash Lite 3, and AIR. You won’t want to miss this chance at free online training sessions. For a complete listing of classes and their times, click below.
Adobe Developer Week
David Tucker |
Uncategorized |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
March 14th, 2008
I just completed a series of two articles at InsideRIA.com where I interviewed Avi Muchnick of the Aviary team. In the first article, I go over my interview, and in the second article, I actually walk you through Phoenix (Aviary’s raster image editor) and Peacock (Aviary’s pattern generator). The other cool thing: I have four invites to Aviary. If you want one - leave a comment on the second article. I will pick some names randomly from this list for those four invites.
David Tucker |
Flex |
|
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
