Jay Dutta, Experience Design Manager and Luanne Seymour, Sr. Instructional Designer at Adobe presented a Social Study on how to connect content and community in the cloud at Adobe MAX 2011.
Today at MAX 2011, Adobe released the latest version of their Flash platform SDKs - Flash Player 11 and AIR 3.0. The most noticeable and exciting amongst new features of AIR 3.0 is the introduction of Native Extensions. Native Extensions allow a developer to extend the capabilities of the AIR platform by running native code directly from their AIR applications. Quoting from Adobe’s site,
We all know that function overloading, or for that matter Constructor overloading, is not supported in ActionScript. This is not a big deterrent till what you are writing your own code, but becomes a major blocker when you plan to port some code from a code piece written in another language. Recently, I have started migrating one of the de-facto open-source Java software to ActionScript. And the piece is huge. Giving different names to each overloaded method and then making sure that you call the right one tends to get complicated.
Free Rice is a site that helps one improve their English vocabulary (the first feature/section they rolled). Quite Simple, huh? No - for every word one gets right they donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme to help end hunger. The cause itself along with the methodology they employ makes it a huge attraction. I am addicted to the game myself, but the professional commitments do not let me make the most of it.
Many numbers can be expressed as the sum of a square and a cube. Some of them in more than one way.
Consider the palindromic numbers that can be expressed as the sum of a square and a cube, both greater than 1, in exactly 4 different ways. For example, 5229225 is a palindromic number and it can be expressed in exactly 4 different ways:
One of the hidden treasures in the Flash Player is the flash.trace.Trace class. It was
meant to be hidden, but in open-source nothing can be treasured without the world knowing it.
The actual class implementation is available in the
tamarin-central codebase.
An excerpt of the class implementation is as under (copyright notices etc removed),
I recently had the chance of attending my first Adobe Flash Platform Summit. The whole experience was just awesome, and this I say not because I am currently with Adobe, but for the wealth of information, tips and tricks, demos and tutorials, the evangelist team shared. The sessions had packed a lot of information, which to grasp in the given time frame was difficult. Add to it the magical Bangalore weather and the tasty south indian dishes for lunch, my experience enhances many a folds.
Yesterday a very dear friend of mine, Rajat Ahuja suggested me to add a Facebook Like or a Google +1 button to the blog so that sharing becomes easy. As this was something I had turned off a while back, bringing it in was not so tough. Hence, from just now all over my blog the following 3 buttons will appear along with the usual ReTweet button,
As far as I know, Java never updated the syntax for defining integral constants since JDK 1.2, which seems like ages before. To end that drought, Java 7 defines enhanced syntax for the following,
Most of the Java web projects (and desktop projects as well) use the well known Spring and Hibernate frameworks. I myself have been using them for over 6 years now, and must say, the benefits they have provided have been immense, both in terms of rapid application development, testing and of course, maintenance. With good amount of experience in using the both I rarely find it difficult debugging a bug, but sometimes, I have come across issues that have been both time-consuming and have thrown open unleashed areas of the frameworks. Recently, I happened to land debugging one such issue.
They say,
Change is the only constant.
How true this is, we realize as we keep walking down the lane of our life.
Today, I started my journey into the world of Java 7. Quite late I know, but as they better late than never. So I now have a build of Java 7 SDK on my desktop, and spent some time fiddling with the new features in. One of the most striking features of Java 7, specially after working in ActionScript 3, is the ability to switch on strings.
Consider a list of lottery tickets where the only information available is the ticket number, and the contact/verification details of the purchaser. The tickets are sold as per 4 regions, East/West/North/South, and have the same as the first letter of the ticket number. Given that one has to traverse through all ticket numbers only once, design a lottery system to pick a winner.
They say necessity is the mother of all invention. That’s right! As per my previous post ISBN Book Renaming, I had coded a small command line tool that helps in renaming books as per their ISBN number. As my father lay hands on the tools, and started using it, he found it useful but also complained that it lagged features, and yes, was buggy in a way ;)
Being a lazy Saturday morning, on breakfast table my father told me that how he was
spending his time. He downloaded some books from the internet where in the file was
named using the ISBN number of the book, say as, 1590595262.pdf for the The Robosapien
Companion, and that he was spending time renaming these books by searching Google
and giving the file a proper name. I felt bad that me being a developer, still my dad
was wasting time on something futile.
Project Euler, is a wonderful site dedicated to fun around mathematical puzzles and problems. In their own words,
Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.