Adobe announced the final release and availability of Flex 2 today.

There's a new web site, flex.org, a new blog from the team, a final release of Flex Builder, the Eclipse based IDE ($499 US), and of course the free SDK available for download.

A new version of the Adobe Flash player is needed to use Flex content, version 9 is available here. (They're bundling the Yahoo toolbar in with the download by default, so uncheck that if you don't want it -- Adobe! Make it an OPT-IN, not OPT-OUT installation).

I'd heard rumors about the IDE being around $1000 US, so it's great that they priced it more reasonable. I'm sure it's a competitive price to other IDEs, but with hobbyist interests in Flex, I'd like a $49 edition ... (or free like Microsoft has done with Visual Studio Express editions).

Posted by Aaron at 1:06 PM | Permalink

Wow -- now this is a small Bluetooth headset, the Motorola H5 Miniblue:

Introducing a revolutionary Bluetooth headset that really works with you. Designed around the way your body works, the in-ear microphone and speaker of the Motorola H5 MINIBLUE pick up your voice through the ear canal so conversations come in loud and clear - even in a noisy environment. And measuring only 33 x4 1millimeters this barely-there headset fits perfectly inside your ear for pristine, unobtrusive communication. This petite powerhouse packs in battery power so powerful - you can chat wire free for up to approximately 7.5 hours using the included portable charging base. It's amazing how empowering and freeing this device can be!

Posted by Aaron at 8:24 PM | Permalink

A hotfix for a common error that occurs when trying to hibernate your Windows XP based PC, "Insufficient system resources exists to complete the API" has been released. I've been plagued by this error since upgrading to my new PC with 2GB of RAM.

Unfortunately, you need to contact Microsoft Product Support Services to obtain the hotfix.

Anyone else try this?

Posted by Aaron at 7:35 AM | Permalink

Check out bumptop -- the video is available on lifehacker, here. It's a virtual desktop that emulates many characteristics of real desktops -- adding many techniques/features that only a computer could do. It's clearly in a demo stage, and a handful of people are quick to criticize, but what they (the dynamic graphics project from the university of Toronto Canada) have is very impressive.

Posted by Aaron at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Short but sweet. The ATC Avalon Team blog with it's first post on May 25 2006, just posted today that they wouldn't be posting anymore. It was fun while it lasted. Too bad.

Posted by Aaron at 4:59 PM | Permalink

Opera 9 was released. Download it here.

There's a flash video of a "party" currently on the Opera home page. I don't understand it really but I just had to grab this image which is part of the party:

There are others, such as:

They just aren't so ... well ... nevermind.

You'll definitely need a broadband connection to experience the party.

Posted by Aaron at 7:48 AM | Permalink

In the spirit of the Yahoo event that I just posted recently ...

RailsDay at WeBreakStuff. It's a nice testament to the ability of a sharp fast 'agile' team and the ability to produce good stuff in a short amount of time. Of course, the reality of not having an installed set of customers almost always makes development easier (for so many reasons).

Posted by Aaron at 5:14 PM | Permalink

If Visual Studio 2005 seems sluggish or slow while editing C# source code, try turning off the Navigation bar (Tools / Options / Text Editor / C#). In a reasonably sized project, I went from being able to type 1 or 2 characters a second to full speed. Intellisense was just as sluggish. You might miss the Navigation bar though. I certainly hope Microsoft will vastly improve the speed and performance of VS 2005 in SP1. The quality of VS 2005 just isn't where it needs to be.

Posted by Aaron at 7:40 AM | Permalink

I apologize if you post a legitmate comment and it doesn't get published. It's not because I don't want to publish it (generally speaking), it's more likely it's gotten tagged as junk and lost in the madness. I just deleted 4 days worth of blog comment spam: 740 comments. I caught two posts -- and didn't spot any others, but I admittedly was scrolling pretty fast.

Bill, Hillary, Britney, and Bush, can you please stop posting comment spam?

(HOLY SPAM! -- in the 2 minutes of scanning through the comments and hitting delete, 2 new spam posts were just created!)

Posted by Aaron at 8:19 PM | Permalink

Scott posted in a comment today that if you're suffering from the Outlook 2003 error: "The messaging interface has returned an unknown error. If the problem persists, restart Outlook" consistently and a restart doesn't help, he found that deleting the Outlook user profile/account and recreating it solved the problem (at least his form of the problem).

Posted by Aaron at 8:15 PM | Permalink

I've experimented with Adobe's most recent Lightroom beta (3) and all I can say right now is ... interesting. I'll reserve judgement and comment until later. Here are some nice screen grabs though if you hadn't see it. Word from Adobe is to expect a Windows version (at some point). It's a very attractive/sharp application ... (all the screen grabs below are thumbnails ... click on the image to see a larger version).

Posted by Aaron at 7:53 AM | Permalink

Before you run out and buy a new Apple laptop (or notebook), you might want to at least consider some of the currently documented problems with the new models. More information on AppleDefects' wiki.

Here's an interesting problem with their fancy power cord.

Posted by Aaron at 5:04 PM | Permalink

Wow -- there are a lot of steps involved in making paper and plastic bags. The environmental impact of both is certainly higher than I ever imagined. According to someone (), the average American uses 3-7 gallons of crude oil to make the plastic bags they use every year (using an average of 300-700 plastic bags). I know my wife and I don't use that many ... we alwasy recycle ours at a local grocery store and there's no way we have ever turned in even close to 300 bags in a single year.

Although this web page, on GreetFeet may be somewhat biased as they sell alternatives, the information may help you make a better choice the next time someone asks if you want paper or plastic. The right answer might be neither!

Next time you head to the local geek store, you might consider saying no when they offer you a plastic bag to hold the DVD you just bought.

Posted by Aaron at 7:45 AM | Permalink

A neat idea. Other companies should do something like this -- anyone know of any?

Yahoo is giving their engineers a day (24 hours) to build something they think is cool and demo it. (I'm not sure if non-engineers get to participate?).

Some more specific information here.

Posted by Aaron at 8:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The pure genius of the post and comments at 37signals about Bill Gates next plans are amazingly insightful and carefully analyzed ...

Yeah. NOT! For a good laugh, check it out. There are a couple of reasonable posts, but the overall discussion is so mind-numingly dumb, I decided to link to it tonight out of frustration and a bit of head-slappingly stupid grumbles that I directed at the screen/computer this evening (thinking someone else might want to share in my pain).

As someone who has actually worked at Microsoft (unlike any of the posters from what I could tell) -- Microsoft is CONSTANTLY trimming the fat. In fact, I was on a team that was cut. It wasn't predicted to make enough money (we hadn't even released the product yet to the market!). We were cut, right before the holidays! [SLAP!]. It happens. It doesn't make news.

And no, you aren't just guaranteed a job because you work there. You need to go through the same grueling interview process all over again to switch teams in that situation!

Blogged with Flock

Posted by Aaron at 8:21 PM | Permalink

It's all the latest ... and I'm sure if you're keeping track of things better than me, you'll have heard that the latest "everything" browser, Flock, is now available for download at www.flock.com.

It has a mini-blogging tool built in. Nothing too fancy though. No cool auto uploading of images which is a feature I need or I'll stop including any images ... :)

In any case, I'm using Flock to blog this post. For some reason, the font is italic, although I never set it. I like the browser -- it's using the same Gecko engine used by Firefox, but with an arguably more refined shell than is used in Firefox. I like the tabs better -- as the close 'x' is right on the tab! (On my 24" wide screen monitor, it makes a big difference that the Firefox close button is only on the right side of the browser.

Flock is in beta, and only for Windows. It's still rough, but has good promise.

Blogged with Flock

Posted by Aaron at 10:01 PM | Permalink

I've not explored Technorati much before and so I was mildly interested in the fact that they'll permit use of their charts on other sites. So, for example, here are the number of posts which mention WPF in the last 30 days:

Posts that contain WPF per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Might be useful to put on your own web site to track topics you're interest in. Or then again, maybe not.

Posted by Aaron at 10:00 PM | Permalink

Announcing the new name for Avalon, I mean WinFX, .NET 3.0.

Not that I'm too surprised. Microsoft has made some awful product naming decisions. Most recently bone-headed naming by marketing and legal:

Sparkle becomes Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. Huh? Rolls off the tounge, doesn't it?

Here's my humorous speculation as what Microsoft would do if they released a pro-photographer software application.

Compare/contrast this first though to Apple's Aperature, and Adobe's still in beta Lightroom.

June 12, 2006. Microsoft is proud to announce the beta release of dLens, a new professional and amateur photography application, aimed to ....

Six months pass while excitement builds, web sites are excited, forums created, etc. and a new press release is distributed:

Dec 15, 2006. Microsoft announces the release of a new generation of professional and amateur photography applications available in two versions: The Microsoft Expression Still Photo Management and Editing Tool, Professional Edition, or MESPMETPE for short, and the Microsoft Expression Still Photo Management and Some Editing Tool Functionality, Basic Edition, or MESPMSETFBE ....

In any case, back to my lack of surprise. The WinFX downloads always were versioned 3.0 and some beta number (most recently 2). So, they've headed off the typical criticism of releasing a 1.0 product and skipped ahead right to 3.0! Excellent!

I can see the download options now for .NET 3.0:

.NET 3.0, for computers running Microsoft Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. Includes the .NET framework 2.0, WPF, WWF, and all other meaningless product names we could think of. If it hasn't been branded .NET, you don't need it.

.NET 3.0 for computers running Microsoft Windows 2000. Most of the above, but we had to leave out some of the acryonymed products and functionality as we didn't get around to making them run on Windows 2000. Sucks huh?

.NET 3.0 for computer running really old unsupported operating systems. Includes an installer that suggests you upgrade to a newer version of Windows. It would have been terribly slow even if it had installed and run anyway!

Posted by Aaron at 3:24 PM | Permalink

If MIT scientists can bring a nano-enhanced capacitor based battery to market, they will revolutionize the battery industry.

Posted by Aaron at 2:53 PM | Permalink

Are you someone who'd rather buy a stereo from a big chain (Best Buy?), or from a small town dealer who remembers your name? If the price isn't the same, would you sway? Why?

Posted by Aaron at 2:29 PM | Permalink

I see that Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft after 3 short years. Here are some corrections to the announcement.

My reaction: Yawn.

He asked if people will unsubscribe. You betcha. I will.

IMHO, he wrote too much for me to keep up with to begin with (high noise level) and the only reason I had subscribed in the first place was Microsoft news.

I personally don't have time for podcasting, nor am I interested in it. I can get tons more information delivered and processed much more quickly by reading and scanning through blog posts, news articles, etc. I can't do that by listening to someone for 45 minutes about who knows what.

Although he certainly was a 'blog-champion' at Microsoft, the real stars are the day-to-day 'do-ers' at Microsoft, the programmers, the program managers, the designers, etc. that jumped into blogging (and continue to blog) day to day about their products, etc. In the end, the evangelists job is to tell you something you don't already know at a reasonbly high level. Once they've done their job, it's up to the individuals to keep you hooked. I challenge each and everyone of them to step up and not forget that. Additionally, I challenge their managers to allow them to have some dedicated time every week to blog (or communicate -- I don't care what forum they use) about their products, roles, etc.

Of course, this is directed to not just inside of Microsoft, but in any company (technology focused or not!).

I personally care more about the a product when I can see and interact with the actual maker/designer/etc: personal rather than anonymous.

Posted by Aaron at 2:29 PM | Permalink

I can't believe that it has taken Macromedia, I mean Adobe, so long to announce this product. It should have been released by now. In any case, I missed seeing this news last month: Flash to jump beyond the browser (CNET). A code-named project, Apollo, will let applications written for the Flash platform run without a browser. According to reports though, it won't be available until early 2007.

In doing a bit more research, this wasn't news. The announcement was made last year at Macromedia's MAX 2005 conference. It was referred to as the "Universal Client."

Looking at the feature list shown on the screen shot of the slide from the original MAX 2005 announcement, it looks like WPF/.NET to me.

Apollo/Flash, however, has hundreds of thousands of more people who know that platform today than WPF/XAML.

I'd definitely be interested in checking it out--I'm always interested in looking at the possibilities of non-Microsoft solutions. (Although the fact that they mention it along with the PDF / Acrobat platform is a bit worrisome from a stability standpoint -- Adobe releases far too many patches/updates to their reader software!).

Posted by Aaron at 7:43 AM | Permalink

I have 25 Farecast invites available to anyone who is interested. Just drop me a note. I'll need your e-mail address to send the invite, so e-mail me at coder at wiredprairie.us. It's an airfare pricing comparison tool that uses a predictive algorithm of some sort to try to determine when the best time to buy airline tickets would be.

There's some more information at TechCrunch about Farecast.

Posted by Aaron at 8:55 PM | Permalink

I wanted a tiny RSS feed icon for my web site (not one that says "RSS" or "Feed"). I suppose somewhere one exists that is free and at the right size ... (anyone know? without stealing?). In any case, I created an rss feed image in Adobe Illustrator instead. It was quick and simple.

Attached is the Illustrator file I used (in CS format). rssfeed.ai (256 KB)

Enjoy, or ignore.

Posted by Aaron at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)