Friday, July 25, 2008

The lowest form of life just left the planet

I saw a story on Slashdot today that made me ill. The Spam King apparently escaped from a prison then killed himself, his wife and child. At the same time, I got a report of bombs going off in Bangalore, India where I have been.

Harmony and Peace please! Both of these stories evoked strong feelings.

The Spam King was the lowest form of life on the planet. He collectively hurt our global economy more than most other criminals and deserved to go to jail. He took some of my life away and probably some of yours. SPAM is a crime. Make no mistake about it. The selfishness of this individual has now cost others their lives. This confirms my belief that spammers are in fact the lowest form of life and he probably would have been lower on the prison hierarchy than any other inmate.

The second story really worries me as I have good friends in Bangalore. When I last visited it, I found Bangalore to be alive and thriving. I wonder who would do this and why?

Killing of innocents can never be justified. I have to go speak at OSCON now.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

OSCON 2008 and New Flex/AIR Course for GeoWeb

James Ward and I are heading down to OSCON today to speak and hang out. OSCON is a great conference but I haven't been in a few years. Looking really forward to it.

Yesterday we delivered a new 3+ hour course on Flex and AIR map based RIA development at GeoWeb 2008 (one of the best conferences in the world!). After completing the writing of the course and giving it once, we really want to offer it up to the community. It takes attendees through 9 projects with lots of coding to demonstrate concepts related to Geo-spatial mashups/RIAs in Flex and AIR.

Directories:

~/AttendeeProjects - the starter projects with the code completed and comments where students have to add code
~/CompleteProjects – the solutions source code
~/TeachersDocument (PDF and DOCX) – the manual for anyone wanting to teach this course. It has a lot of cut and paste code in it to speed up solutions.
~/Presentation (PPT and PDF) - the presentation slides

It is fairly well documented to allow anyone to present but if you find anything missing, please feel free to contribute. If you want the course, contact me at dnickull at adobe dot com. We'll send it out for anyone to use.

UPDATE:  I have uploaded the ZIP file here.  This is not a Flex archive but contains Flex Archives.  Unzip the course first then you can import the project and use the assets.