Downtime
Whoops. With being so busy lately I haven't had a chance to check my site and hadn't noticed the error page people were receiving. I'm now looking into site monitoring services which I should have done a couple of months ago.
Finite State-Machine Engine
Whilst I was working at Massive I was introduced to the idea of applying finite state-machines to the management of an RIA's application model or state. The idea whilst not new was being used by James Mc Parlane in a project of his called ThumbWhere. James had written a JavaScript based finite state-machine engine to control the application state of his HTML based RIA.
Free Flex - Update
I just got my serial number. How quick was that.
Thanks Adobe.
Free Flex
"Adobe Flex Builder 3 software is currently available for free for software developers who are affected by the current economic condition and are currently unemployed."
EAN 13 Barcode Scanner
Several years ago, when Adobe was getting ready to release Flex 2.0 they held a developer derby to entice people to play with their new toys. Unfortunately the competition was restricted to US citizens. The kind folks at www.rocketboots.com.au started their own competition for those outside of the US. As luck would have it my entry of a barcode scanner won and I scored myself an ipod nano.
Flash Mp4 Encoder Script
I spent a couple of hours tidying up a batch file I had started for encoding video to Mp4. The output can be used for progressive downloads (Should work for FMS etc. hosted videos as well) in the later versions of Flash player that support H264 and AAC encoded videos.
New Beginnings
After spending all of my professional web development career in fulltime permanent employment, I have now taken the opportunity of recent events to venture out on my own and try my hand at being my own boss.