Labels are dangerous when used improperly regardless if they were created in good intentions. The present day world is filled with named factions that rage verbal or physical war on each other for nothing more than self affirming the dominance of their party. This is somehow deeply ingrained in our human nature… to provide loyalty to our clan and subvert others to establish dominance. If you’re not quite sure where I’m going with this, I am hinting at the fruitless debate between the American political parties.

Democrats and republicans have evolved to hated enemies of each other… no longer remembering that they were formed to work in harmony over national issues. In my opinion, there is one major entity to blame for this downfall and social dysfunction of the parties. That would be the American media. Regardless of the national media network you watch, you are being spoon-fed DAILY about the ‘evils’ of the other party that that media network is associated with. I can’t watch any of the big three news networks for more than an hour without being told why one party is better than the other. This is a shame that they choose to demonize and point fingers rather than focusing on the core of the issues at hand.

Should matters like health care regulation be shunned because it ’sounds’ like a certain party’s agenda? On another separate issue, I heard from one news network that a certain bill wasn’t worth looking into because the originator happened to be from the other party so the bill could be linked to promoting that party’s cause “somehow”. This is the kind of blind hatred that has caused our political degradation. So what do I propose? I would merge all political divisions… democrats, republicans, and the other 3^rd parties. Why can’t a person have a mixture of beliefs instead of being forced to conform to only the stances their party supports? The fact that someone who tends to be liberal is only going to feel at home in a democrat party versus someone who is more conservative in their views will have few options but go republican is a sad commentary on how the parties have outlived their usefulness.

The only person who benefits from this segregation is not the voter but the news networks. Controversy sells and the media has turned our political system into a kind of dark entertainment art form. Let’s spend less time worrying about if new policies fit the agenda of our party… and instead focus on what is “right” and benefits people the most. I normally don’t blog about political matters, but I find this dilemma in need of more attention than what it currently gets. Anyone else feel the same way?

One of major benefits of working with computers and internet-based technologies are the massive communities behind them. Such communities offer feedback on ideas, technical help, and tutoring. In addition, standards begin to arise on their own because developers want to be able to integrate with other existing services to ease transition to and from their software. To allow other developers to embrace a new standard, an author of the standard usually releases it free-to-use, creates simple documentation, and provides support usually in the form of a open forum.

However, from my observations, the physical engineering world seems to completely lack such concepts as a whole. Almost every device you can buy has parts that are completely non-interchangeable with one-another. About the only thing that is standard is the screw type that the product gets put together with. Why can’t products be made with interchangeable plug-n-play modules? If the radio brakes in one stereo, why can’t I just pull out the ‘radio receiver module’ and replace it with another?

You can sorta do that by un-soldering several circuit board parts, look at the model numbers (if they have one), and hope that some foreign warehouse has them for sale for consumers. It makes it even more difficult because there are hundreds of thousands variations on parts and warehouses can’t inventory that many effectively… as opposed to carrying components that encapsulate functionality that devices share in common. This is just one example of engineering evolving.

What would Engineering 2.0 look like? Perhaps, if someone had an idea to build their own radio, they could:

• Create a blueprint of the radio case using a web application
• Upload the blueprint to a company that can cost-effectively make custom cases
• Order a radio and power ‘module’
• Order device buttons that are easily mountable to custom cases
• Radio module has a ‘USB’-esk port for the button interface to plug into

In a weekend, someone who knows little about the engineering world could literally build their own home device that fits their exact needs. Maybe this is all far-fetched, but I am convinced that traditional everyday engineering as we know it will change based on the need for a new level of global standardization and maintenance tasks that are client friendly.

Newsweek offers an interesting article that touches on the issue as well:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/55776

Here are just a couple more enhancements to FlashMVC I was able to add over the weekend. These will not only automate a few things, but it makes room for additional addons in the future. There are two new features that have been added to SuperAction:

bindVars(… REST):void
This method looks at the SuperEvent fired from a completed action class, and copies properties to the SuperModel from the SuperEvent.

lastSuperEvent : SuperEvent
[read-only] Returns the last SuperEvent fired after completing an action. (This is useful for reading a property from a SuperEvent after the event has fired and you didn’t have a listner for it yet in your view)

Check out the documentation for more info:
http://www.flashmvc.com/documentation/

FlashMVC overview: www.FlashMVC.com

This week has been pretty slow, but I recently had a reader email me his answer to my twitter critter riddle and thought it was a funny yet cheesy ripoff of the woodchuck riddle answer…

Riddle: How many tweets could a critter twitter if a critter could twitter tweets?

Answer: A critter would twitter as much tweets as a critter could twitter if a critter could twitter tweets.

What do you think? Do you have a better answer?

I have been tinkering with haXe a bit more lately trying to get a good handle on how it works on a lower level and seeing just how much faster I can get it to go versus AS3. I hit a couple strange haXe syntax issues like why the heck I can’t declare local class properties with default values. Aside from this, I’m getting used to the language. I implemented the below particle system using a perlinNoise technique to generate motion paths, implemented color sorting with bitwise operators, and used some advaced features like inlining and generics. On my machine, the final SWF uses less than 10% of my processor which is about 4-5% faster than a similar AS3 counterpart. This is not much to write home about, but Flash is always lacking in the performance area so any speed improvements are welcome!

In case you missed it, there was recently an excellent article posted that poses the question if philosophers lived today and had to choose a programming language- what would it be? I found this article rather profound, and it does illustrate that programming styles are more than just syntax differences but whole philosophy shifts. http://developeronline.blogspot.com/2009/04/if-philosophers-were-programmers.html

Scarygirl is now live! This Flash game has same amazing illustration art going on (also on the website) and is filled with creative concepts. This is very much worth your time to come check out!
http://scarygirl.com/

Below are a couple good articles on why listening to negativity or causing it even when you are in the right has little benefits and is usually a waste of time. Thinking positive even when you are wronged will have the best long term results.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/ignore-your-critics.html
http://onflash.org/ted/2009/03/positives-and-negatives.php

How many tweets could a critter twitter if a critter could twitter tweets?

…these are the things I come up with when I have too much time.

In case you missed the news over the holidays, a new version of FlashDevelop was released. FlashDevelop has evolved over a number of years and has proven itself as an invaluable tool to Actionscript development. There is so much polish on this application that it outperforms Flex Builder when it comes to many of the basic tasks of code writing and navigation in my opinion.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=4041

Changes:

* Live syntax errors highlighting (AS3).
* The editor font can now be defined in the settings.
* Automatic type selection after “new” with typed vars.
* Explorer shell menu has been added to “Files” and “Project” panels.
* Smart contextual event type completion, if declared with Event() directive.
* You can double-click on a class when exploring a library SWC to see the class model.
* Completion automatically adapts to the project’s Flash Player target version (FP9, FP10, AIR).
* External SWC’s (outside of the project tree) now appear like external classpaths.
* Updated MXML completion, now with effects attributes.

+ Lots of bug fixes and other small improvements.

If you look closely, the order of the color are the same except for the bottom-right blue that is used instead for the center color of the Chrome logo. This begs the questions… was this truly coincidental or is there a subliminal message in the reasoning Google decided to use a reminiscent design from the Siman game.

Source: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/gacl