Using Flashdevelop on a limited user account in Windows

I've been using flashdevelop for writing my AS these days, and its a pretty nice editor, I'd say. This new work place that I joined a few days back, everyone-except the Flash developers-(the C++ devs and Java devs, that is) use Linux for their development. And when I was given a user account for this windows machine, I ended up getting a limited access user account. Now that meant that I have to go through all those 'request for software installation-get sysadmin to install software' process. After a few unsuccessful attempts to get a local admin access - or a power user access, I had to accept the limited user account.

Now as I was getting started with coding, I started missing FlashDevelop. And went on to raise a request for installation of the same. And the sysadmin was kind enough to install it for me - from his admin account. But when I logged in from my account, I wasn't able to use it. FlashDevelop saves (and loads) the panel settings and stuff in xmls in the settings folder inside the flashdevelop program files folder. Now when I was logging in from the other user account, the folder was becoming unaccessible for my account. Doh!

We tried adding access to that particular folder for my user, and all that, and nothing seemed to help. And I had almost given up. Thought of going back to Eclipse + ASDT combo, and got it up and running. But at the back of my heart, I was still missing flashDevelop. Thats when this sysadmin came up with a idea. He temporarily added me to the powerusers user group, and then installed flashdevelop from my own account. Then removed me from the poweruser group, and hurray! It works now!!

MAX 2006 - Singapore

Two days after the MAX here in Singapore, am still high from the feeling of having been there. Having read a whole lot of things about the Las Vegas MAX conference on various blogs, this one was more of a selective re-run of a few sessions. So there wasn't something that made me go 'wow', but ya, you always get to learn a lot, when people are talking.

My agenda for this MAX was to go meet the people behind FSUG of Singapore. But it looked like the community isn't very active in here. I met Timothée Groleau and Arul Kumaran, and that was it. Tried to look around for Ryan but didn't get to see him. He was more in the creative track sessions I believe.

Robin and Ted and flexDaddy were pretty impressive. I did want to attend a few sessions on the Mobile track and a few in the creative track, but the sessions on the 'application development' track were pretty impressive that I couldn't switch to the other halls. Missed sessions from
Jeremy Clark and Bill Perry and Eric Natzke.

And as an aftermath of MAX, I've taken up evangelising Apollo this year. At work we are discussing about building a desktop client of a Flash app we are building, and I've already started 'selling' the idea of making it an apollo app. For now, looks like it might go wrapped in mProjector though.

A few pictures I took on the first day are in here. Haven't uploaded pics from the second day. After the second day at MAX, I came back to work- to spend the next 23 hrs straight at work! And went back home and slept abt 12 hrs in one go. Need to tune back to a normal 24 hr day schedule now!

So a few new things I learnt in there:
1. There will be a workflow that will suppport Apollo development in CS3 version of Flash, Dreamweaver and a future version of FlexBuilder.
2. Guys have started thinking/designing a 2-and-half D support in a upcoming version of flash player.
3.

Project BlackBox from Sun

Probably a lot of people have by now heard about the project blackBox, from Sun Microsystems. For those who haven't heard yet, BlackBox is a prototype of the "world's first virtualized data center". Its a complete datacenter system packed into a standard shipment container! Check out the video tour here.

I read it through Tim Bray's weblog . He describes the blackBox to be 'just totally drop-dead fucking cool'. And thats more or less the same I felt after going through their videos! ( he seems to have gone through some bashing for using the f-word in there, but thats out-of-scope of this post ;o)

Btw, I also came across this advertisement from Sun for Java - Java is everywhere: Pretty neat and appealing. Probably we should have some TV commercials for Flash as well :) What say?