The Peanut Butter Thoughts

Automated Revisioning (SVN + Ant + Flex)

May 8, 2008 – 1:36 am
Tell me if this has happened to you: Your client wants a simple change to your awesome Flex application. You rock it out and deliver a new .swf with the piece of cake change. But nothing is different for them! The problem is still there! You spend the next four hours trying to figure out why the fix works for you and not for them. Only to find out that the file was put on the wrong server. Or that their .swf was still cached. Or any number of reasons as to why the newest build isn't seen. Wouldn't it be great to know that the .swf they're seeing is the .swf they're supposed to see? Maybe some number in there that shows what revision their .swf is? There are some great tools that handle that stuff for us. CruiseControll ...

Posted in Flex | 1 Comment »

Forced Invites and Unwelcome Communications

February 19, 2008 – 4:38 pm
A recent post on the Facebook Developer's Blog tells us: ...as part of our ongoing efforts to improve Platform through policy and technology changes, applications are prohibited from dead-ending users at an invite-friends page, and must never again prompt for invites after the user has declined. ... please be aware of the reach of your application to those who haven’t sought it out. While we embrace the diversity of tastes expressed by apps, content sent through Facebook’s API communication channels may be encountered by people who don’t share your application’s sensibilities or are otherwise unsuited to it. I have to tell you I am excited. I'm a Facebook developer, but before that I'm a Facebook user. I'm a pretty "bare bones" user too. I use only a handful of applications, mostly those created by the Facebook staff, and that's about it. I'll try some of the other ...

Posted in facebook | 1 Comment »

What I do isn’t production; It’s a craft.

February 18, 2008 – 10:34 pm
It seems that the mindset of most modern technical companies (at least those that I have worked for) has been that of production. The idea is that they produce something and the less money they can put into the building of the product the more money can be made in return. Management, in fact, has been structured to deliver exactly that. Knowledge workers (I do like that term) are usually treated with the same top-down hierarchy that was born of the industrial revolution. Their superiors have orders to wring the most productivity possible out of a worker; time is ALWAYS running short and a worker must be pressed to reach his quota before the time period has ended. "Quotas" of bugs filled and features implemented are treated very much the same as hems sewn or parts welded. But what a lot of companies (and ...

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Facebook JavaScript API: I want that!

February 8, 2008 – 9:02 am
For the past couple of weeks the Facebook team has been rolling out a JavaScript API. This is the first client-side API to be officially released by Facebook. They've had something they call "FBJS" for a while now, and it's a great tool when you're working on embedded pages using FBML (which can be an awesome time saver and styling tool). But if you know me well enough you know that JavaScript sucks! Ok, it's better than not having JavaScript but one of the reasons I left the browser arena is because of the frustrations of that language. I can't deny its popularity and I don't think that Facebook is doing a bad thing by introducing the API, but I want the same thing in MY language. I've been working on my FB AS3 API for a while now. It's getting pretty close to being ...

Posted in facebook | 2 Comments »

Is my socal network info private? Of course not.

February 7, 2008 – 6:04 pm
It seems that Facebook is in the headlines again, and not in a positive way. They made the front of Slashdot again with an article from News.com about the "Next Facebook Privacy Scandal". When I put information about myself online I know it's not private anymore. The reason WHY I put stuff online is because I don't want it to be private. The article essentially states that when you install a Facebook application, you must agree to let that application have access to your account information. Well DUH!! C'mon people. This isn't news. If you really want your information to be private, then it shouldn't be on the Internet. The belief of the author of the article is that the applications that I create don't NEED access to a users "private" data; that I am "unnecessarily" given access to it. But as a developer, ...

Posted in facebook | No Comments »

Moving on . . . Flash isn’t for everything?!

February 5, 2008 – 9:29 am
Well if you've been to pbking.com in the past year or so you'll have seen that it's been in a pretty gnarly state of development. I've always got a project or three in the fire and my personal web space has usually been one of them. This has resulted in a publicly facing pile of poo as other things tend to pull my attention from it very easily. I'm a Flash developer; have been for well over a decade now and my natural instinct for my website was to build it completely in Flash/Flex. I'm not saying it couldn't have been done. Of course I could have eventually written enough code to make pbking.com do what I wanted/needed it to do. But I wanted my website to focus around my blog, and to do that I had to have a pretty robust blogging piece ...

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »