RIA Grande

SpaceSniffer: Italian for "Ridiculously Good Freeware Disk Analyzer"

2010-02-21T21:09:16Z

Like many other people, I suspect, no matter how big my hard drive is, I somehow find a way to fill it up. Even if you have enough space, with the ridiculously large hard drives on the market these days, it can quickly become difficult for a human brain to recall everything that's on there.

In recent months, I've been slowly squeezed out of disk space by Torrent downloads and various installs (all of them necessary, of course.) On a number of occasions, I've tried going manually through my disk, deleting/uninstalling things as I go, but it really hasn't freed up much space. I needed help to find out what was leeching so much of my precious Gigs.

Enter SpaceSniffer

This weekend, I finally finished Half Life 2 (awesome!) after a long hiatus (my latest saved game was from April 2009.) I have had that game and the separate Episode Pack for well over a year but with the move to 4Point and all the exciting things going on I haven't had much time to sit at my PC for anything else than work.

Well, long story short, I finished off Half Life 2 this afternoon but had no room left to install the Episode Pack. Enter SpaceSniffer, a little Java-based freeware app that analyzes the used space on your Hard Drive and presents it in a visual way, in real-time no less. Now I finally know where all my Gigs have gone.

Intuitive and -- dare I say -- Kinda Fun

SpaceSniffer crawls through your directories, one at a time, doing an analysis of the directory tree and presenting its findings as it goes. It's a little difficult to describe how it looks, but the UI is slowly sub-divided into boxes representing the folders on the drive, from the top-level and on down. As the process crawls deeper into the tree and the visual boxes get smaller, SpaceSniffer begins to hide the overwhelming details, allowing you to concentrate on what's relevant. If you ever want to see those hidden details, you can just click on a box and it will be divided into sub-boxes representing it's contents. très cool.

So, if you are running out of disk space, or would just like to do a little disk clean-up, this is the program you've been looking for. SpaceSniffer runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and WIndows 7.

Thumbs up from here to Uderzo Umberto for creating such a polished, useful and focused piece of software. Grazie mille!

iPad: Plenty of Shine... but No Flash

2010-01-27T21:07:24Z

[Updated a few hours later to add a couple details I left out in the first draft.]

I just followed the live step-by-step blogging of the iPad release over at Engadget. The device looks pretty much like what I expected and its functionality is pretty much what I expected. It's basically... a giant iPod Touch. (I had expected a camera, though.)

I must admit, however, that its "low" starting price was a pleasant surprise: between $499 and $829. I had predicted something around $800 and hadn't figured on so many different models (6 in all).

According to the hands-on comments from EnGadget and Gizmodo, the iPad has plenty of power (1GHz "A4" CPU) for browsing the web, etc., but no multi-tasking (grrr) and... if you look closely at screen shots of Steve Jobs' demo, you'll notice... The Blue Lego Cube of Disappointment.

All iPhone/iPod Touch owners will recognize it instantly. What it means is that despite its size, power and (much-hyped) promise, the iPad's Mobile Safari has no Flash plug-in.

In his presentation, Steve Jobs called the device "magical". Well why don't you just whip us up some magic there Steve and get Flash to work on your freaking device? I'll bet you a Silicon Valley latté that Adobe will do it for free.

Anyways, enough from me. With your hopes mercilessly dashed once more, all you Flash Platform developers can now return to your regularly scheduled hand-wringing.

Obscurity is not Security: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

2009-12-17T18:42:18Z

[Update:The security vulnerability has been fixed]

A word of caution to my fellow developers: if you think your software is secure because it's obscure enough that nobody would bother to hack it, then you might be in for an unhappy surprise.

Case In Point

Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile

(source: US Air Force)

According to the Wall Street Journal and a follow-up report from l'Agence France Presse, Department of Defense officials have admitted that video feeds from Predator surveillance drones were routinely intercepted by "Iranian-backed insurgents" in Iraq and Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan.

Perhaps it would all make for a better story if I could tell you that it required a vast conspiracy of ex-KGB agents using supercomputers hidden in bunkers under the Urals to crack the video's NSA-level COSMIC Top Secret encryption, but unfortunately, real life is slightly less dramatic (and much more deadly). The UAVs streamed the video in an unencrypted form, making it possible for a rag-tag assemblage of insurgents often with no access to the Internet to intercept the feeds using a "commercial off the shelf" (COTS) satellite video capture tool, SkyGrabber (MSRP: $25 US) and laptops. The minimal effort it took probably didn't even distract them from their day job manufacturing IEDs and blowing up innocents.

From the WSJ article:

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said. (emphasis added)

The military remained unaware of the practice up until a laptop belonging to an "Iranian-backed Shiite militant" was captured on which Military Intelligence discovered intercepted video footage. (I'm frankly surprised it didn't show up on YouTube.)

The Lesson: Obscurity is not Security

It is supposedly unlikely that the video was of much use to the extremists and while the whole story seems a little ridiculous, it surely is no laughing matter. Here's hoping some heads will roll because "incompetence" isn't strong enough a word.

As software developers, we're usually required to think about security as a key requirement of any system. However, when you're tasked with developing software for a $3+ million unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), you'd better pay attention to these "details" because somebody very dangerous surely is. When that happens, it's a whole lot more than just data you're protecting.

Further reading

The original piece from the Wall Street Journal
Wikipedia article on Security through Obscurity

Cross-Compiling Java/C#/Ruby to iPhone

2009-11-30T15:10:05Z

(This is a posting I started a while back (on my brother's b-day in May) but didn't publish at the time... don't remember why.)

Cross-Compiling C/C++ to Actionscript using Alchemy

As you may well know, Adobe Labs has developed an exciting tool called Alchemy that leverages the LLVM open source project to cross-compile C/C++ code to a common run-time byte code. This byte-code is then cross-compiled to Actionscript code which is then compiled to Actionscript byte code (ABC). The earliest and most striking example of what can be accomplished with Alchemy was the port of Doom to Flash that Dave released on Newgrounds within a week of Alchemy's launch. He has now released the Doom Triple Pack which includes the bad boys Doom, Heretic and Hexen.

The good people of Automata Studios helped Adobe develop one of the first projects for demonstrating how Alchemy works. Here is their write-up on the subject.

Cross-Compiling to Objective-C (and more!) Using XML-VM

Another development that has come down the pipe is some research done by Arno Puder and his colleagues at San Fancisco State University. Their work involves using open-source tools to transform code from one language (e.g. Java, C#) to an intermediate XML format which can then be transformed to another language (in this example, Objective-C). The project is called XMLVM.

Prof. Puder presented how all of this works at the Google offices and the video of this presentation is available on YouTube. It is a very cool idea and demonstrates once again (as all software does, really) the potential aggregate power of using many small, simple constructs. Byte code statements are converted to an XML format which can then be transformed to Objective-C. While the final code might not be as optimal as the original, it will do the same thing. My guess is that the toughest part would probably be handling language elements that don't exist in both the source and target languages (i.e. garbage collection, loose typing/auto-boxing, annotations). Perhaps you'd have to do away with overly "native" parts of a language language when writing the "from" code. The good professor covers part of this challenge in his presentation.

While the target language discussed is Objective-C, as you can see from the diagram above, the XMLVM project allows you to cross-compile to and from a number of different languages.

]]> Enjoy the video. (Hat tip to DiamondTears for bringing this to my attention.)

Compiling Flash Apps to Native iPhone Apps in Flash CS5 (in Windows!)

At AdobeMAX 2009, new functionality for the Flash Professional CS5 was demoed showing that this upcoming version will allow Flash (and Flex) applications to be compiled directly to an iPhone application (i.e. an IPA). In fact, some apps developed using this functionality are already available in the AppStore. Info, video and more can be found here.

From what I've been told, this functionality is implemented using cross-compilation and therefore necessarily leads to somewhat bloated/un-optimal apps. Frankly, I think that should be expected. With time this can surely be improved, but for now, I think we'll take what we can get.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has thought to themselves: Will I finally be able to develop for iPhone/iPod Touch without having to shell out for a Mac!?!

Adobe plans to launch a public Beta of Flash CS5 later this year. Once I get to try it out, I'll let you know what I think.

Final Thoughts

One thing's for sure: watching these videos and reading the documentation gives me flashbacks of the more interesting classes from studying Computer Science in university. The beauty of working in this field is that even the coolest, most complex technology is not only within your grasp to use and understand, but also to implement.

As a developer, I have discussed with my brother what platform is most attractive: iPhone or Android? I own an iPod Touch already, but am unable to develop native apps since I don't have a couple grand to put down on a Mac (much higher priorities: student loan, big screen HDTV, next gen console). Android will support Java and (from what I've been told) Flash, but I don't want or need a cell phone. The jury's still out but it will be fun either way.

As always, I invite you to post any comments you might have on this subject.

Ray Bradbury, Sci-Fi Legend... And Prunes?

2009-06-29T15:14:03Z

I know this isn't RIA-related, but I just have to post this.

I'm currently re-reading Fahrenheit 451, an awesome book where Ray Bradbury (living legend of American litterature) displays his incredible ability to predict the social/political path the world would eventually take. Anyways, the gentleman author deserves every accolade/income-generating opportunity that he can get, which brings me to one of the strangest, off the wall commercials that I've ever seen.

It is like a compilation of an Ad agency list of what not to put into a commercial:

Self-referential humour sticking it to the company that's vying for your money -- CHECK
"Bada-bing" sound-effect after a bad pun is thrown out there -- CHECK
Giant disembodied head of bespectacled sci-fi writer (who isn't in a bikini or ogling someone who is) -- CHECK
Stock footage of NASA geeks turning dials and pushing buttons -- CHECK
Mentioning the wrinkles on prunes -- CHECK

I give an A+ for boldness to the people at SunSweet. It's a wonder they're even still around. I guess those must be some good prunes.

A thought:

Why is it that I sincerely doubt that in this day and age, any modern advertisement agency would waste their time creating a commercial featuring a best-selling author of fiction (other than perhaps Algore, inventor of The Internets).

]]> Back To Mr. Bradbury's Book

I definitely encourage everyone to read Fahrenheit 451. In it (to his credit and our chagrin), writing in the early 50's (that's the nineteen-fifties, folks), Mr. Bradbury describes a society not altogether dissimilar to our own.

In fact, he describes iPods/ear buds, big-screen TVs and interactive multi-media. (In fact, now that I think of it, he even predicts something akin to the O.J. Simpson police chase/shows like as "The World's Wildest Police Chases") This, all written in a time where people used "rabbit ears" to pull in a snowy black and white feed from one of the "Big 3" networks... and this only during "prime-time". Not exactly the 24 hour CNN/FOXNews news-cycle we have today.

On the political side, the author foresees the politics of celebrity where smooth-talking, attractive leaders use the threat of foreign wars to distract from domestic troubles and to constrain individual freedoms. Bradbury predicts political correctness becoming law, assisted largely by the apathy and intellectual illiteracy of an entertainment-sedated public, as well as a malleable intelligentsia. (Say it ain't so!)

Some of this may seem self-evident in today's political atmosphere but keep in mind that Harry S. Truman was president of the U.S. at the time.. not exactly a macchiavellian leader.

All that to say that it's a good read and well worth your time. It had a great impact on me when I first read it as a kid (thanks, Aunt Pat for my copy!). Re-reading it now, well it all makes even more sense.

All Shall Bow to... Steve Mobbs of "Mapple"

2009-06-10T12:40:46Z

An early morning distraction...

Dial down your MyPods for a message from the luminary genius CEO/guru/deity of Mapple: Steve Mobbs.

Dear Mr. Mobbs...

Sir, I implore your excellency to allow MyDobe to release a fully-featured version of Flash Player 10 on the MyPod.

Thank you. You may now return to tending to your narwhal farm.

(By the way: nice turtleneck.)

]]>

Leah Buhley on Being a "UX Team of One"

2009-06-08T18:18:26Z

Here is an excellent presentation (slides with audio) on "Generative UX Design" by Leah Buhley of Adaptive Path. She gave this presentation at the IA Summit 2008 (i.e. the Information Architect Summit). It is entitled "How to Be a UX Team of One" and goes over her personal best practices for Lone Ranger UX professionals.

One of Leah's key points: Business Needs + User Needs = Design Principles. In other words: software needs to be more than purely functional (i.e. business-focused). It also has to be personal (i.e. user-focused). I'd put it this way: "If all food were nutritious but tasteless, people would be no better off because they wouldn't eat enough to stay healthy."

Leah presents her ideas well and with a lot of passion and provides great food for thought. What more can I say, really? Check it out.

My take-aways (e.g. Leah's points mixed with some of my own ideas):

Generate many ideas. The more the better. Sketch a lot. On paper, even. That said, you should still brainstorm within constraints. This is the real world, after all.
Use a continuum (e.g. from beginner to power user), 2X2 or larger grid to organize your mock-ups. Experiment with word association, combine ideas, extract concepts from an idea. Build up, break down, re-organize.
Compile an "Inspiration Library" by taking screen grabs of inspirational sites and applications. It incorporates competitive analysis but also provides mnemonic cues (Rorschach) for things that just plain work.
Assemble an ad-hoc team at which to throw ideas and out of which to draw new ideas. Use sketchboards (i.e. butcher paper) on a wall to post up ideas and display low-fi mock-ups. If your ad-hoc group needs some guidance, use basic templates into which they can draw their own ideas.
Abandon the ideal of the Artiste -- the beret-wearing holder of all design knowledge. Decorate your workspace with mock-ups, ideas, sketches. Get people's input. Be proud of incomplete/in-progress ideas. Share them and get people's impressions.

UX Team Of One @ IA Summit 2008

Worth a Scan, Man: Vids from FlashCamp SanFran

2009-06-08T14:44:51Z

If you want to know what's new and ominously pending in the world of Flash and Flex, you owe it to yourself to check out these videos from Adobe Developer Connection, post haste!

They cover such mouth-watering topics as an intro to Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4 and provide a lot of information about Flex 4 as a language (including advanced CSS, skinning, animations and effects). They also describe the road ahead for AIR on the desktop, which frankly is something I'd like to know more about.

Click on the image below to watch the joint keynote by Kevin Lynch, Adobe's chief technical officer and David Wadhwani, the general manager and vice-president of the Flash Platform Business Unit (i.e. two very important dudes):

I personally am very excited to see the current and upcoming innovations in the Flash/Flex platform. Having been a member of the Java community for a long time, I can see some similarities between the promise of the Sun and Adobe web and desktop technologies. As cynical as I can sometimes be about these things, let's hope that where Java largely failed (e.g. Swing-based applets and desktop apps), Flex/Flash will succeed (e.g. Flex/AIR apps for the web and desktop).

As always, I welcome your comments. I'd love to hear what upcoming Adobe Flash/Flex technology you are most looking forward to using. What's most likely to turn out to be vaporware? Can any of this technology live up to the hype?

Pull up a chair at LiveCycle Café

2009-06-03T21:23:03Z

Adobe recently planted the seed for improved cooperation within the scattered LiveCycle community. In an effort to leverage the social web to combine our collective efforts to get the word out about LiveCycle and build up buzz and a shared base of common knowledge from which we can all benefit.

This "seed", as I call it, is LiveCycle Café, a social AIR app that provides all the tools to start sharing and gaining knowledge on the power of LiveCycle, leveraging Adobe corporate documentation, forums, live chat and various community contributions via a built-in RSS reader. The premise is that beginners and experts alike from across the globe (is that a contradiction?) will use it to connect with each other. LiveCycle is a very powerful but large set of tools, so gaining access to the many experts who are out there toiling in obscurity (some of them are toiling a few cubes away from me, here at 4Point) is a great asset. As we well know, we can only succeed by standing on the shoulders of giants, so having instant access to the cream of the LiveCycle crop can do nothing but make us better at what we do.

Here is the AIR install badge. Check it out. Who knows, maybe you'll find me on there, snooping around.

Take a Spin on the Tour de LiveCycle

2009-05-27T14:54:47Z

After the success of Tour de Flex (which just recently celebrated its 5,000,000th sample viewed) the fine folks at Adobe have released Tour de Livecycle, a one stop shop for discovering the many, many facets of the Livecycle Enterprise Suite. Hopefully this initiative will help put this powerful yet underrated offering from Adobe onto people's radar screens.

There's no point in me going into what Livecycle is, but suffice it to say that any self-respecting enterprise Flex developer owes it to him/herself to seriously consider gaining some Livecycle-related experience. "There be gold in them thar skills."

Hat tip to my man Armaghan here at 4Point for pointing me to Duane's post on this topic (over at Technoracle). Also, check out the original post on the "TDL" launch by Greg.

East Ontario/West Québec Flex/Flash Coders Unite!

2009-05-21T21:16:56Z

You know Ottawa has arrived when the Flash Builder 4 / Flash Catalyst Launch Tour announces a date at Adobe's offices here in Ottawa! Aside from the upcoming Flash Builder and Catalyst (if you haven't seen it yet, slap yourself now), there'll be a tutorial for PixelBender (which is freaking awesome), as well as a show off session for CartoVista (no clue).

The action starts at 5:30PM on June 3rd and runs until everyone goes home satisfied at 9:00PM. There will be prizes and plenty of food. What's not to like, people!?!

Click here for more details.

Quick Question for Adobe: What Logo Will "Flash Builder" Use?

2009-05-21T17:08:32Z

Inquiring (make that "trivial") minds want to know: What logo will Adobe now associate with the re-branded, better than ever, sliced bread tasty "Flash Builder"?

Since Adobe seems to have somewhat linked the underlying technology that their authoring/development tools use to those tools by making both share similar logos (e.g. the red Fl for Flash CS4 to match the red f for the Flash platform proper), what does that mean for the upcoming re-branding of Flex Builder to Flash Builder?

Flex Builder currently has a gray Fx as a logo. Flash also has a red logo... Will the gray Fx therefore be replaced with a red Fx? (Oh but "Fx" still makes me think of Flex and that word is now a no-go as far as Builder is concerned)

Ok, then. Will Builder get a gray Fl, like a Flash CS4 logo only much, much more serious? (But then what about colour-blind people who can't distinguish red from gray?)

Hmmm. It sure does make one ponder. (For about 10 seconds and then you go back to doing actual work.)

[Follow-up edit: I just got my answer: The new logo is a gray "Fb". Boy do I feel better now that that's out of the way!]

Stuff You Missed at 360|Flex While You Were at 360|Flex

2009-05-21T16:35:24Z

[Edits:

Added Jun Heider's materials on run-time resource profiling (Day 3, Session 2)
Added Ryan Phelan's slides on Pixel Bender (Day 3, Session 4)
Added Lafferty and Frishberg's slides and an example on custom ItemRenderers (Day3, Session 4)
Added Sanchez' slides on Degrapha (Day 1, Session 2)
(Über Edit) John from 360 Conferences has uploaded all of the presenter slides from 360|Flex Indy that he could get his hands on here. There are 33 of them, at last count. Thanks a million, John.
Added Laura Arguello's slides from her (excellent) Mate session (Day 2, Session 5)]

As you've probably guessed by now, if you missed 360|Flex by your own choice, you're kind of a... well, a loser. Many of the best presenters, mentors, open-source community leaders and trend-setting Flex developers were there, pouring their knowledge out in exchange for a hotel room and a 360|Flex "speaker" t-shirt. (If the room was in a train car, then just maybe it's a fair trade.)

One of the worst things about 360 (yes, I'm about to complain here, apologies to Tom and John) is that since there are generally 5 session going on at once, you're going to miss something. (I'll give you a second now to get over it.) Some things you'll never, ever get back (look through your high school yearbook for some quick examples). Fortunately, I have compiled a quick list of presenter materials that didn't make it onto the USB key. I will update this in the next few days as more stuff things trickles in.

I've listed these by day and session. (Note that I'm not counting the keynotes in numbering the sessions.)

Day 1

Session 1

Assert Yourself (FlexUnit 4) -- Michael Labriola (ably assisted by Jeff Tapper)
Slides

Session 2

Degrapha Declarative Graphics Framework - Juan Sanchez
Slides

Session 3

Structured Log testing - Renaun Erickson
Missed Points

Another Mapping API...Not! - Mansour Raad
Slides

Session 4

Any Which Array But Loose - Michael Labriola
Slides

Day 2

Session 1

Creating our first i18n (internationalization) Flex application - Oğuz Demirkapı
Slides

Flex Server Lib - Andy Powell
Slides

FLEXperience - Putting the UX in Flex -- Joe Johnston
Slides

Session 3

How Not to Code Flex Applications - Jeff Tapper
Slides

Session 4

Developers are from Mars, Designers are from Venus -- Chad Udell
Slides

Session 5

Building an AIR Video Recording Spy Camera with Motion Detection -- Rich Tretola
Slides

Breaking Down your Application with Mate -- Laura Arguello
Slides

Day 3

Session 2

Flex Profiling by Example - Jun Heider

Slides and source

Session 3

Merapi: What's Next -- Adam Flater
Source announced at 360|Flex

Session 4

Bending and Flexing with PixelBender - Ryan Phelan
Slides

Custom Item Renderers - Lafferty and Frishberg
Slides Example

That's all for now. Check back later in case more stuff pops up (it surely will).

Touch-down in Indianapolis

2009-05-18T12:25:45Z

Well, normally touch-downs in Indy are welcomed with the roar of a crowd of hysterical fan. Strangely, when my plane touched-down last night, no such noise was heard from the fine denizens of Indianapolis.What gives?

So here I am, 2 minutes before the keynote is to begin. The room is huge, cathedral like and brimming with techy talent. Check-in was easy and quick and the people seem friendly enough. They gave us a bag and a USB key. I'll let you know later what the contents of it might be. I suppose I'll have to introduce myself to someone... not exactly a stretch for an extrovert like me.

Anyways, gotta go. I still haven't reviewed the list of presentations for this AM. But first I'm going to scan the room for Brad. He has to be here somewhere... or I'm telling!

Portal: The Flash Version

2009-05-15T16:53:25Z

And now for a quick time out for some fun.

As anyone who has talked to me about PC gaming would know, I hold the Half-Life series dear to my gamer heart. It is (IMHO) one of the best crafted, most originally imagined game universes that I know of. The original Half-Life (developed by Valve and distributed by Sierra) was simply a revelation while the second (which I am currently playing through) is no less innovative.

The series has spawned a number of high quality quasi-sequels and mods (e.g. Day of Defeat, Counterstrike), many of which I have wasted untold hours on. One spin-off that I haven't played is the "cult classic" Portal. It seems very original and visually stunning, but the gaming budget is tight in the Bastien household. Perhaps someone will donate a copy to me someday out of pity .

2D Tribute to 3D Goodness

While digging around Newgrounds, I came across a Flash 2D port/fan tribute to Portal. This little game is very polished and will provide you with a lot of brain-teasing fun for your money (i.e. MSRP of $0.00). Thankfully, Valve hasn't come down hard on the developers for using their intellectual property in making this game. If anything, I'm surprised that Valve hasn't bought it up outright and used it for their own purposes. As with all well-designed software, the interface is intuitive and elegant, regardless of the complexity of the task on hand.

In case you haven't heard of it, the original Portal is a 3D puzzle game where players must attempt to navigate an obstacle course of sorts by using a "Handheld Portal Device". It allows you to project a pair of linked tears in space-time (or portals), one blue and one yellow. They are "linked" in that when you (or another object) pass through one portal, you will come out through the other. The objective is pretty simple: you must find your way to the exit of each section (or room) of the obstacle course without getting squashed, burnt or ventilated. The games physics are meant to be realistic, which leads to some interesting quandaries involving "looping" portals (i.e. picture falling from a portal in the ceiling into one in the floor... over and over again until you reach terminal velocity).

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Just click on the logo and try the game, for crying out loud.

]]> "There's a hole in the sky through which things can fly"

Below you'll see the trailer from the 3D version. The concept is the same and the challenge no less taxing. Welcome to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. I'll just step aside now and let a thousand pictures tell a million words.