OT - Bangalore's first Gay pride parade

Read about it here: http://tinyurl.com/67mude

Glad to see India opening up to such issues.

Don’t forget to be part of Firefox’s Download Day!

Updated: Thanks to prakaz, for bringing it up to me that I had the date wrong in here. Its June 17th, not July!!

Firefox 3 is set to be released on June 17th.

Go add yourself to the list of people who have pledged to download FF3 on that day, and you'll be notified on the release day, by Mozilla.

Greenbox - from the godfathers of Flash

Greenbox™ enables households to save money on their energy bills and reduce their carbon footprint.

Greenbox is the domestic energy saving utility product from SoftwareAsArt Inc, the company that Jon Gay, Robert Tatsumi, Gary Grossman, and Pete Santangeli (- in short, the founders of Adobe Flash & Actionscript) founded a while ago.

They are 'currently in the process of conducting in-home trials' and the product is expected end of 2008/ early 2009.

Oh, and Jonathan Gay is listed as one of the 25 people who ditched InfoTech to CleanTech. Congrats Jon!

CNN Money knows how Apple is gonna end the standoff with Adobe-By putting Flash memory on iphone!

A couple of weeks ago, John Dowdell, Peter Elst, Mrinal Wadhwa, and Brajeshwar Oinam posted about how 'geek' bloggers are writing silly posts about Silverlight vs AIR.

Today, someone passed me a link to this post on CNN Money, which beats every other blogger hands down:

" Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple's standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that's kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos."

Now this dude thinks that Flash memory and Adobe's Flash media player are the same. Beat that people!

The entire post is a joke. Check it out!

Apple store browser - Be the first to know ;)

I know a lot of you out there are constantly refreshing ur browser windows pointing at apple.com, in an attempt to see when the new set of pages go up with the new products.

At the time of writing this post, the store displays a note saying that the store is being updated. So go on apple fans, start hitting the page, and be the first to see the new page!

So I just put up this mini apple store browser, which keeps doing the refresh page, for you. And thought I'd as well pass it out to others who want to do the same :P

If you already have the AIR runtime installed, just download the appleStoreBrowser.air file and install.
If you don't have AIR runtime installed, get it here

Go, go!

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.