Sichuan, China - earthquake - do your part, help people rebuild their lives

Details of the quake available on wikipedia.

By now, reports say that over 65,080 people have lost their lives and over 23,150 are reported missing.

Came across this video yesterday. Real cute ones, those panda babies:



The description of the video says it was shot in Chengdu, which happens to be about 80 kms away from the epi-centre of the quake. It would be a miracle if those pandas are still around...

Saw a CNN report today stating that a lake (that was formed by a landslide blocking a river) is about to overflow sometime today/tomorrow, and that's gonna bring in more havoc. NYT report on that here.

Sandy, a friend made this post today collecting various videos from chinese websites. This particular video, I think is is gonna haunt me for a long time to come..



The man was stuck under that big pile of concrete for 73 hrs and still held on, and died when after he was rescued. Thats really sickening!

Reports say that more than 5 million people have been rendered homeless. I can't imagine what a humongous task rebuilding their lives and homes is gonna be. And even after more than a week since it hit, the aftershocks still keep killing people and bringing down buildings.

If you'd like to contribute money to supporting the victims, look for some options

If you are in Singapore, and would like to contribute via red cross, check out the details here

Actionscript 3.0 coding conventions and best practices

Read about this first at Keith Peters blog.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Coding+Conventions

Looks like the document has been put up by adobe for Flex SDK contributors' reference. Nevertheless, it can be adopted by any Flash/Flex developer writing Actionscript code.

Singapore Flex UserGroup - February meet

With Flex 3.0 ( and AIR1.0 and BlazeDS source, and flex source and, and...) being released this morning, this month's FUG meetup is time to celebrate! We have a couple of sessions this time around. The agenda as per Shunjie's UG invite mail is as below:

What:
7.00pm - 8.05pm : Session 1 - Test Driven Development by Thye Yeow Bok
BREAK
8.25pm - 9.30pm : Session 2 - Flex 3 / AIR 1.0 Live! by Hu Shunjie

When and Where:

27th February 2008, Wednesday, between 7.00pm to 9.30pm

at

Adobe Singapore,
PageMaker Room,
8 Temasek Boulevard,
#06-02, Suntec Tower Three,
Singapore 038988

You can register for the event by responding to the thread here:
Registering will help us make sure we have enough seats available in the meeting Room at adobe ;)

If anyone's willing to go for a beer after the sessions, I'd be game. See you all there!

We'll miss you, MWilliams

Last night a friend informed me of the demise of Michael Williams. I had to spend a few hours trying to getting in terms with it. No one seems to know what happened yet, and that makes it even more harder to believe that he's gone. He was just 31 yrs old!

I remember meeting him only once while i was there in SFO. He was a very friendly person. After I went back to India, we had a few exchanges over Flickr, and most recently on facebook. I've admired his people photography a lot, and his pictures have always been a great source of inspiration.

He was recently involved with the open source SWFObject 2.0 project, besides his contribution to the Flash player team.

Like a friend of his said, he just made me realize how short life can be.
May his soul rest in peace.

Kevin Lynch promoted as CTO of Adobe

Adobe Systems today announced the promotion of Kevin Lynch to chief technology officer (CTO).

From Adobe's press release:

"In this new position, Lynch will oversee Adobe’s experience design and core technology across business units. As part of this role Lynch will continue to drive Adobe’s technology platform for designers and developers, which includes Adobe® Flash® Player, Adobe Flex®, and Adobe AIR™, the new cross-operating system application runtime that bridges the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop with the real-time dynamic capabilities of the Web."

Read the complete press release here.

Congrats to Kevin Lynch!

Image, courtesy adobe systems.

Use en_gb locale to download Flash Media Server - Dev Edition

I saw a twitter log from someone mentioning that he couldn't download Flash Media Interactive Server 3- Developer Edition, that was released yesterday. I tried it this morning, and happened to have the same problem.

The 'Download Adobe Flash Media Development Server 3' page shows up, and and it doesn't show Flash Media Server download bar, but lists Flash and Coldfusion as related downloads.

I went to the downloads homepage and tried it again, and this time the page reloaded, with 'ADobe United Kingdom on the titlebar'. And I noticed that the locale in the URL changed to en_gb now, and the download was available! Looks like, Adobe doesn't want US developers to download FMIS yet ;o)

Here is the url that works: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flashmediaserver&loc=en_gb

This, am sure is a temporary issue. Hopefully Adobe will get this fixed in by the time you read this post ;o)

Cheers!

Sun microsystem acquires MySQL AB for $1 billion

Sun Microsystems is taking the plunge into the database market with the purchase of open source database developer MySQL for $1 billion

With the move, announced Wednesday, Sun takes a big leap into the $15 billion database market and pits it against the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle

via ZDNet

Sun CEO Jonathan Shwartz has a detailed writeup on his blog here

apple rumours site 'thinksecret.com' dies

Apple had sued thinksecret.com back in Jan 2005, alleging that recent postings on the site contain "Apple trade secrets"

And today thinksecret posted an announcement stating they have reached a settlement with apple and as a result, thinksecret would no longer be published!

Thinksecret.com has been around since since 1999.

R.I.P

Bangalore FUG organizes a nationwide RIA conference - initRIA - 1 seat left

"initRIA is the first of its kind Rich Internet Applications developer conference in India. I, along with some other members of the Bangalore Flex User Group, am organizing this conference with the hope of providing a platform for RIA enthusiasts around the country to interact and learn. You can know more about the conference at our FAQs page." , says organizer Mrinal Wadhwa.

At the time of writing this post, there is just 1 more seat left!
If you are in Bangalore area, and haven't registered yet, GO REGISTER!

Singapore FUG meet - 14th nov 2007

This post has been overdue for a longtime now, blame it on my laziness.

We had the first FUG meet in Singapore on Wednesday evening. It was a great start, I should say. We had more attendees than we expected. Finally looks like the UG meetings here are starting to become more interactive! And to top it up, we had a good bunch of adobe folks joining in!!

Unlike last year (and before) this year Adobe decided not to 'MAX' in Singapore.

Marianne Young, our contact point for the UG activities in Singapore had attended the MAX conference at Europe. And for this UG meet she agreed to do a presentation about things she saw and liked at MAX. Sorta like a highlight. To be honest, I was expecting just a simple presentation with pics she probably snapped during live presentations. Boy! She went ahead and collected real demo material that was used in the actual MAX presentations. A whole bunch of them!! And did a great session to kick start the meeting.

Her session included demos for Flash player 10 - hydra, text improvements etc, thermo, etc. Thanks Marianne, you are awesome!

And during the presentation we had a surprise guest peeking in. Prayank Swaroop, the Flex Evangelist for Asia Pacific is in Singapore for some internal projects and he dropped by at the meet as well. And so did Jack Lim, the BD manager for Enterprise BU from adobe. Suddenly our small little user group meet looked so filled up with celebs ;o)

The second session was from our own homeboy, Lionel/Flashmech. He presented about the PV3D based Effects classes that Tink has put through. Like his session before in the FSUG meet, he did a very impressive job here too!





We also had Stefano Virgilli of AdobeSoftwares.com join us in the meet! Its great to have you Stefano in Singapore!.
He did a brief intro about the upcoming Flex camp and other events. Check out the event pages here:

http://flexcamp-singapore.eventbrite.com/
http://cs3-mobile-workflow.eventbrite.com/
http://flash-lite-integration.eventbrite.com/

I'll be attending the FlexCamp for sure. Haven't decided about the rest yet.


And ArulKumaran mentioned that he will be in India for the next couple months. You'll be missed in the upcoming UG events!

I got a few more pics of the event on my picasaweb album

Thanks everyone for coming. And thanks to Shunjie for putting things together to make the event happen :)

See you all at the next month's event! Go ahead and post your thoughts about what sessions you'd like to see next month here