Blog-O-Bozo

An Actionscript 3 Flow Based Programming Framework

So today (it was Sunday like 15 minutes ago!) I sat down and decided to hell with it and just started trying to whip out some sort of a simple Actionscript 3 flow based programming framework (hereon called AS3 FBP framework for short!). The good news is I do have a framework that is extremely similar to FBP (more…)

Tags: Air, AS3, FBP, Flex

13.Jul.08 Adobe Flex/AIR, Coding, Developer's Diary Comments (0)

Markov Chain in Python

This is my first markov chain! I was very excited to see it producing odd english. Here’s a quote from it:


i felt only for i can be swept through to tone. all the language between professional gentlemen, the disparition

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Tags: Algorithms, Python

12.Jun.08 Coding, Developer's Diary, Fun, Python Comments (0)

Is Disposable Software Coming Soon?

Why Would Anyone Want to Throw Away Code?

One word: maintenance.

It would seem as though maintenance has become one of the most expensive tasks in modern software development. By expensive, I mean low ROI. It’s a cost that’s incurred just by doing anything that requires understanding the code (rewriting, hiring new programmers, auditing, etc.). Why not just throw the component away and start over? Re-architect at a micro scale.

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Tags: Design Principles, FBP

28.May.08 Coding Comments (0)

My First Snowflake

Sometimes your first snowflake is a snowball

So I’m a one year plan to be credit card debt free. To help speed that along I’ve been organizing myself and trying different budgeting techniques. I moved all of our credit card debt to interest free cards and I’ve been stuffing a given amount into an ING Direct savings account to accrue. On top of this, I read this blog post about snowflaking and got the idea in my head to speed things along.

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Tags: Budgeting, Finance, Snowflakes

24.May.08 Finance, Personal Comments (0)

Flow Based Programming- Some Notes…

A Curer of My Ills

I discovered Flow Based Programming last week as I worked on getting an elegant solution to a complex set of asynchronous calls that I needed to make for an integrations project. Ultimately, it led me to a quasi-flow based software architecture wherein a chunk of data was passed from processor to processor to be… processed. The grrreat (a lil Tony the Tiger for ya) thing about that is that essentially all of these processors started to look a lot like steps in a sequential workflow. Basically, for each action I have a class that identifies how that action will affect the data it is passed. Suddenly I have a large amount of asynchronous code that is extremely maintainable.

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Tags: Asynchronous Programming, FBP, Flow Based Programming

23.May.08 Coding, Coding Education, Developer's Diary Comments (0)

Handling Nested Asynchronous Calls Elegantly

What do you do when you have to get the data for a set of objects with the following relationship: Grandparent > Parents > Children? Now imagine that to get a list of grandparents that you have to make an asynchronous call to a web service. To get the parents you’ll need to make an asynchronous call using information about the grandparent. To get children you’ll need to make a call using the parent. This article is geared towards ActionScript 3 and Flex 3 but the general principles can be used in any language.

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Tags: Actionscript 3, Asynchronous Methods, FBP, Flow Based Programming

15.May.08 Adobe Flex/AIR, Coding, Developer's Diary, General Comments (0)

Passing Arguments to Delegates from Events in Flex/AS3

The challenge: In Flex/AS3 you can add event listeners to events and have them call any function as a delegate. What about when you need to pass a parameter to the other function though? Aside from making global variables there isn’t much of a good way to do that.

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Tags: Adobe Flex, AS3

13.May.08 Adobe Flex/AIR, Coding Comments (0)

Alt.NET Seattle May 24th!

I am proud to be a part of organizing the inaugural Alt.NET Seattle meeting. Alan Buck took the initiative to call outor a meeting, Dave Foley created the group/came up with our group name (AltNetSeattle), and for my part, I talked my VP into letting us host it at LexisNexis… Imagine how hard that convo must’ve been?

Me: “Yeah so there’s like 20 or so passionate engineers who want to talk about how they can work more productively and discuss how to change their individual organizations/companies for the better.”

VP: “Ummm… why do you ask me questions when the answer is obviously yes? Make it happen.”

Yeah it’s not really one of those requests you can say no too, but I gotta give my hats off to the company. They’re providing a few conference rooms and even lunch. You can’t beat that.

Tags: Alt.NET

25.Apr.08 Dev Community Comments (0)

Alt.NET Take Aways

So Alt.NET is over and I’d like to discuss a couple of items that were big wins for me at this conference.Domain Specific Languages

• What is a Domain Specific Language (DSL)?
  • A language written for a specific set of problems. (ex. most mocking frameworks use a DSL in the way of fluent interfaces) DSLs have a heavily constrained grammar which makes them simpler to implement than a full language and much more productive to use in their given problem domain.

• Why?
  • Can be used to get new team members up and running incredibly quickly.
  • Can sometimes be used as a tool by the business to ensure that the code does what was originally asked for.
  • Helps to constrain the problem domain. It is much easier to see what can be done with what.

Javascript Best Practices Community

• Where is it? There isn’t any clear community for providing guidance on best practices in Javascript. We’re going to be trying to correct that.
• Why is it needed? Most people who discuss Javascript seem to think that using object oriented techniques in a more functional language is just wrong. Due to there not really being a real Javascript RIA framework, most RIA devs end up trying to develop Javascript the way they developed it when the server was handling the majority of the UI tasks. Ultimately, they discover that these techniques simply produce spaghetti code. Javascript will be with us for quite some time, especially since it has been adopted by Flex so these discussions will be pivotal across more than just the Alt.NET community.

(UPDATE: The community has been started and it’s at: http://groups.google.com/group/altdotjs)

Tags: Alt.NET, DSLs, javascript

20.Apr.08 Coding, Dev Community Comments (2)

Google AppEngine Rocks!

What is AppEngine? Essentially, it’s free web hosting that utilizes Google’s infrastructure. Currently you’ll need to know Python and having experience with a web framework (ala Django or Pylons) wouldn’t hurt.

I completed the tutorial HelloWorld app which I’ll post below. Notice that this is all the code I had to write and it supports the following:

1. Scalable
2. Utilizes DB access
3. Integrates with Google’s user authentication system.

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Tags: AppEngine, Django, Python

08.Apr.08 Coding, Fun, Python Comments (0)