Who’s going to 360Flex in San Jose this August? I know I am. Tom and John opened up registration and I jumped. Last time around in San Jose was great. I went to the next 360Flex in, my then hometown, Seattle and it was even better. From the feedback I’ve gotten each 360Flex is better than the last

Here’s what I love about the 360Flex conferences: even if you didn’t attend a single session it’s worth the time and money to attend. The conversations with other developers in the hallways, at lunch/dinner, at the bars in the evenings is just as educational and of course more fun. With the exception of Jessy Warden’s session which is more fun than going to a bar.

So run, don’t walk, over to 360conferences.com and sign up. I look forward to seeing you there!

Things to look forward to at the conference:

• Adobe will announce a public beta of Thermo
• Doug and Deepa will have copies of their book to sign
• The ultra secret site RunPee.com will announce that it’s open to private betas
• We’ll get a hands on with Flash 10 IDE
• Adobe Cocomo will announce it’s open to private beta
• John and Tom will announce that the next 360Flex conference is going to be held on a cruise ship
• FlexBuilder for Linux will be released
• AIR 1.5 with support for Linux will be released
• We’ll get hints of the soon to come Adobe online application suite but it won’t be officially announced until MAX
• and many of the developers of that cool Database app built with Flex will be there. sort of like the guys from VirtualUbiquity were there last year. But we’ll have to wait for MAX for the announcement that they’ve been bought.
• …did I miss anything?

I love prognosticating. :-)

Author C. Clark has passed. He was probably . . . no, he was the most influential man during my adolescence and early adulthood. He’s the main reason I began college as an astronomy major at the University of Arizona - later to get sidetracked into mathematics, history, philosophy, etc.

I read nearly all of his books, both science fiction and science. Along with the 2001 and 2010 Odysseys I love his books Songs of Distant Earth, Childhoods End, and Fountains of Paradise. And it boggles my mind that A Fall of Moondust hasn’t been made into a movie yet.

One of my favorite quotes comes in the acknowledgment of one of his books, “In accordance to the Clark/Asimov treaty the second best science writer dedicates this book to the second best science fiction writer.”

I read his bio a few years ago and it really stuck me that he wrote the screenplay for 2001 from Sri Lanka. He would fax the changes to Stanly Kubrik, they would talk on the phone and then he would go back to editing again. And this is in the late 60s that he was doing this. Sending a fax on a daily basis from Sri Lanka, in the 60s. That’s bleeding edge!

In watching 2010 the sceen that really sticks out for me is where Floyd is talking to Bowman as Bowman transforms through various ages. The old man version of Bowman says, “You see, it’s all very clear to me now. The whole thing. It’s wonderful.”

I hope AC is with the Star Child, and it’s wonderful.

A bit about the code
There’s not much to see in the code of my tribute. It’s a poor rendition of the most popular screen saver of all time. ( I wonder what AC Clark’s screen saver was. ) It’s just something I knocked together while watching 2010 again tonight. ( The movie still holds up very well.) I used the TweenLite tweening engine for the first time. I played around with a fullScreen version but I can’t get the Kimili plugin to accept the allowfullscreen attrubute. ( Yes, I have the most recent version of Kimili. )

Oh, don’t hang out on this page too long. There is a memory leak in the FullStars.swf. When a tween completes it calls to a callback function and that callback simply creates another star in a random position and then tweens it to the center. I looked through the TweenLite code and it seems to try and clean up a reference when a tween completes. But something isn’t going right. It’s probably something I overlooked. Anyway, if you’re computer is slowing down you might want to browse on from this page. :-)

Right now I’m relaxing, much needed, with my wife in an ocean side resort in Newport, Oregon listening to the waves of the Pacific crash on the beach below us. We are slowly making our way down the coast toward our new home in Crestline, California - near Big Bear outside of Los Angeles.

I left my job at Xbox back in September to work for a startup called Smilebox. And I left Smilebox on the last day of 2007 to begin a career - I hope - as a freelance Actionscript developer. Right now I only have two clients to speak of. Some would call it a leap of faith. Others might call it a fool’s hope.

2007 was pretty busy. I went to three conferences: 360 Flex in San Jose and Seattle and Adobe MAX. Like many out there I started working with Flex and loving it. My OOP skills have improved dramatically. video.Maru has really taken off and now has its own site. And I have a lot of half finished projects that I’ll soon have time to wrap up.

Obviously my primary goal for 2008 is to become a successful freelance developer. I’m fairly confident that will work out since I only need to work about 8 hours a week to make ends meet. However I’m scheduling 20 hours a week for freelance projects so hopefully I’ll do a lot better than get by.

With only 20 hours devoted to freelance I’ll have a lot of spare time to work on various projects. First and foremost is a site that will launch late Spring 2008 called RunPee.com. It’s a Flex/ColdFusion/wiki. You’ll be hearing a lot about it. It’s going to be a blast.

Besides that I plan on doing lots of video tutorials on polyGeek.com. My goal is to do one tutorial per week for the year, minimum.

I’d like to do some speaking this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to do a presentation on video.Maru at one of the Flash User Groups in the Los Angeles area. And I’d love to do a session at a conference like 360 Flex. I’ll just have to come up with something worth speaking about first. :-)

Technical goals for the year:

• Papervision3D: I have lots of projects in mind
• Webcam interactions/BitmapData class
• Mathematical modeling
• MySQL/SQL-lite
• I’m sure I’ll come up with a dozen more things.

A few weeks ago I got an email from a woman who lives in Ontario Canada. She told me that she had a problem with a program she had purchased and asked if I could help her. Here is what she wrote:

Hi Dan.I found your site and am hoping someone can help with a problem.I have bought the full version of SmileBox. I loved making scrapbooks and emailed them to my friends. Now I have a problem. When I try to send a smile card I get a message that says problem sending creation. I wrote to the company who then sent me three pages of instructions. I am a senior and not that great on computers. I did install the program Flash like they said. They said to uninstall Flash but I couldn’t find it anywhere on my computer. I have cable internet and have no problem with it except with SmileBox. I love the program and have paid for one year. Can you help with this ? I would really appreciate it. Nicole from Ontario canada.

What baffled me about this email is that I didn’t recall making any public announcements that I was going to work at SmileBox.com. I had accepted an offer and was about to start working there one week later.

I did a Google site-search on my blog wondering if I had made mention of it somewhere unknowingly. But no. Searching my site for SmileBox returned no results.

I did a site-search at SmileBox to see if they had already added me to their contact page or something. But no results there either.

So I replied and told her that I had not started working at SmileBox yet but that I would help her get everything working for her again. And then I asked her how it was that she knew to contact me.

In her reply she told me that she found my site after searching for uninstalling Flash. She made no connection between me and SmileBox.com. It was just a coincidence. A very big one.

I did a Google search for uninstalling Flash smilebox and sure enough. Polygeek.com pops up on page two of the results.

One of my favorite quotes is, “Million to one odds happen 5 times a day in New York City.”

I guess billion to one odds must happen once a day on the web.

I think I’ll create polyGeek test. In Flex of course. ;-)

Hey Sim: my nerd-fu is greater than your nerd-fu!

I just got word that I was accepted to speak at the Ignite event at MAX, Sunday, September 30th. I’ll be speaking about how video.Maru works and how that can be applied to other UI interfaces.

In case you haven’t heard: an Ignite presentation is a slide presentation that lasts for 5 minutes. You get 20 slides, each displayed for 15 seconds. And the speaker has no control over the slideshow. It’s quite a rush to do one of these. I think maybe I’ll practice a bit.

I did an Ignite talk here in Seattle at the AIR Bus tour event. So I have some experience with the pace. Wish me luck.

Oh, and two of the Ignite speakers, out of the 16, will be selected by the audience to give their presentation again at the MAX Keynote. No pressure. :-)

Personal news here. I’m moving on from my job at Xbox to go to work for a small startup in Redmond called SmileBox - or sBox as I like to call them. ;-)

SmileBox provides a service for creating interactive photo/video scrapbooks. They are located in downtown Redmond, WA. You may have seen a bit about them in a video tour/interview that Schoble did about them back in the Spring of ‘07.

I’m very excited about the change. At Microsoft/Xbox I was a contractor/vendor and so not considered a real employee. At SmileBox I will be an employee of the company, complete with stock options, so I’ll have a vested interest in the welfare of the company.

The main reason I decided to move over to SmileBox is because of the work that I will be doing and the opportunity to learn. They have a team of developers who know more about developing applications than I probably ever will.

And SmileBox has a very talented team of designers - two of them are former teammates of mine from Xbox. I’ll be assisting the design team by developing visual effects components that they can use in their designs.

I can’t wait to get in there and start contributing to the team. I have a lot to learn and I’ll be blogging about most of the things that I pick up.

Here’s a SmileBox creation with pictures of me and some of my co-workers. Enjoy, Dan.

Click to play | Make your own Smilebox

If you are a developer or designer, or both, you should have a blog. It’s too easy and cheap not to do.

Here is a short list of the benefits of having a blog:

1. It’s the easiest way to create an online portfolio that you can update quickly. No more editing HTML and redesigning pages every time you want to update your portfolio. It’s as easy as writing an email.
2. It’s a great way to create your own database of solutions to problems, tips, useful websites, etc. If you’re like me then you have a hard drive full of code and designs scattered all over the place.
3. It’s a fantastic way for employees to find you.
4. You get to interact with your community of developers or designers.
5. It makes you money.

If you are mainly a designer then a blog really isn’t suitable for showcasing your talents. But it is a nice add on. You can still have your site - myPortfolioSite.com - as your creative front. And then you can have myPortfolioSite.com/blog/ as your blog to help draw attention to the creative stuff you have done.

What you need

You’ll need a host that runs PHP scripts. They usually run in the neighborhood of $7 a month. I use one of the hosts recommended by Wordpress.org called Lunarpages.com. I’ve helped five of my friends set up Wordpress blogs with Lunarpages.com and haven’t encountered any problems.

Download and configure Wordpress - it’s all free - and install it on your host. That’s pretty simple and here are a few links to help get you started.

• Download Wordpress files.
• Installing Wordpress instructions: This really isn’t all that hard but if you get stuck you can always use the Install Wordpress for free team. If you signed up with one of the recommended Wordpress hosts then they shouldn’t have any trouble getting up set up.

You can go with free hosting from Wordpress.org but you won’t get total control over the customization options that are available if you self host. Plus your domain name would be something like: myPortfolioSite.wordpress.com. I’m sure you’d rather have your own personal domain name. Most hosts will give you a domain name for free as long as you host with them.

$dollars$

There are numerous ways to make money off your site. I use Text Link Ads here at polyGeek and pull in over a $100 a month for just a few little text links in my side bar. You can also go with Google Ads or others depending on how unobtrusive you want your ads to be.

Stats

Your host will probably have many built in applications for checking your site statistics. I look at those every now and then but my favorite is Google Analytics. You just need to sign up for an account and drop a little code snippet in the footer of your website. Then you’ll be able to see really cool graphs of the traffic coming to your site. I love looking at the Map Overlay to see people from around the world visiting my site.

Plugins

There are a vast number of plugins for Wordpress. Here are a few that I use:

• Akismet: this comes pre installed with your Wordpress files but must be activated. You’ll absolutely want to do that so that you don’t get overwhelmed by comment spam.
• Feedburner/Feedsmith: this is a service and plugin that help you track subscriptions to your RSS feed.
• Google Sitemaps: automatically creates a sitemap for you that Google can use to better index your content.
• Kimili Flash Embed: if you need to display Flash content - SWF files - you’ll need this plugin.
• Math Comment Spam Protection: Akismet won’t get all those pesky comment bots. This will help reduce the load even more.
• WordPress Database Backup: easy and essential and hopefully you’ll never need it.

There are many others that you’ll probably end up using but this is a good start.

One last thing: if you sign up then please post a comment below with a link to your blog. I’d love to keep track of what you publish.

I’m jazzed about going to the 360Flex conference starting tomorrow morning.  How jazzed? Well, I went to the original 360Flex down in San Jose and I’m going to it again here in Seattle even though I haven’t even looked at the schedule, yet. No idea what’s on tap. I think they’ll talk about Actionscript a little bit here and there. That’s just a feeling. :-)

I think it says a lot for the show that John Wilker and Tom Ortega put on. I don’t know what the sessions are but I know they’ll be good. I’m there.

Humm, maybe that says that I’m an idiot for signing up for a conference without knowing what the sessions are. Nahh, I prefer  to go with the former option. :-)
I’ll be sure to take copious notes and do a brain dump when it’s all over. Or maybe I’ll be able to get to it each night since I’m staying at home. We’ll see.

Speaking of conferences: I just signed up last week to go to MAX07 in Chicago. That will make three conferences this year! I doubt if I’ll be able to keep up that pace for ‘08 but it would be nice.

I’m sure you’re all thinking: that’s just what the world needs: another geek blogging about Flash. Well, I wouldn’t argue with you but here I am anyway.

I’m currently working deep within the belly of the beast - Microsoft. I work for the Xbox team and let me tell you it’s really hard getting anything done in a place like this because my coworkers are often product testing games like Gears of War or Big Bumpin‘ right next to me. Oh the distractions.

You can see some of my handywork here and there on Xbox.com and Zune.net. If it’s done with Actionscript then I either coded it myself or supervised. When I’m not working on the web sites I’m usually prototyping future designs for the Xbox360. Hey, did you know that the GUI for the next version of the Xbox is going to be built with Adobe Apollo? . . . It isn’t, but I had you going there for a second didn’t I? :-)

If I were the type of person who liked to show off - which I am - then I’d suggest that you take a look at LiquidText. I can’t wait to rewrite this for AS3 and see how much faster it runs.

I feel that it’s a real privilege to be added to MXNA. The best feature of Flash/Flex/Apollo will always be the community.