I was going to have some lame poll about Science Fiction movies but John Wilker - jokingly - suggested that I poll to see where the next international 360Flex conference should be held. Vote over in the sidebar ->>>

NOTE: If you don’t have a vested interest in the poll - like if you live in the US - but you want to see the results then vote for Other.

The country choices are in order of visitors/month to polyGeek.com. Go ahead and comment if you have other suggestions. You might even want to suggest cities within your country of choice. I’m going to sell the results to Tom & John to pay for my next 360Flex conference. Oh, wait, it’s all public. Damn, foiled again! :-)

Give me your links, your comments, your huddled trackbacks yearning to breathe free. - Engraved on Statue of PageRank.

Ryan Stewart got this Flex SEO contest “Fleximagically Searchable” kick-started. Now I’m going to toss in my own little contest to help me win and do research on what works and doesn’t work with Flash SEO.

I have created a Wordpress blog - Fleximagically.com. It may look like a regular Wordpress blog - with my polyGeek theme. It may behave, mostly, like a regular Wordpress blog. It may even have the same Wordpress Dashboard that all the others have. But it ain’t no regular Wordpress blog.

That’s because the client side is all Flex, all the time.

So here’s the very simple contest:

Who ever sends me the most incoming traffic to Fleximagically.com wins $100! The contest ends on August 31st, 2008.

I have Google Analytics hooked up and giving me data on incoming traffic. So whoever tops the list gets the $$$.

There will be an ancillary contest for those who are attending the 360Flex conference in San Jose, August 18-20, 2008. I’ll post my incoming traffic data at Fleximagically.com. You’ll have to go and check it yourself to see where you rank and then let me know via comment, or in person at the conference, what your rank is. Who ever is the highest will get a 1 GIG thumbdrive with 360Conferences logo on it - courtesy of Tom and John. I’ll hand over the drive after the keynote on Wednesday.

It would be appreciated if the link text to Fleximagically.com read “Fleximagically Searchable” but it isn’t a requirement.

So, get those blog posts written. The sooner you link the more traffic you can drum up.

I’m counting down the days until 360Flex. No, really, I have a Firefox extension that displays the number of days left until 360Flex - San Jose, August 18-20, 2008 - down in the lower-right of my browser. ( Currently at T-25 days. )

There are many great reasons to go to 360Flex. I can hardly cover them in this poll here, which isn’t really a serious poll anyway. But if I had to say what the best reason is for going to 360Flex I’d say it’s the amazing lineup of session topics/speakers. There are so many must see sessions that many of them overlap. I’ve even talked to some of the speakers who said that they would skip their own session to go see another one at the same time, if they could.

Here are my must see sessions:

• Ben Clinkinbeard - Strategies for Creating Reusable Components
• Jacob Wright - Advanced ActionScript APIs
• Jeff Houser - How to Build Flex Components
• Josh Tynjala - Polishing Components for the Masses or Mike Potter - Promoting your Flex and AIR applications
• Ben Stucki - How to build a Framework
• Jim Cheng - Advanced Analytics for Flex and Flash RIAs
• Tony Hillerson/Juan Sanchez - See the Data, Be the Data
• Jun Heider - Using the Flex Builder 3 Profiler

There are lots of sessions that cover Flex and name your AMF backend integration. Fortunately I’m pretty much engaged to AMFPHP for database integration so I’ll probably blow off all the BlazeDS/ColdFusion/RubyAMF sessions, probably.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there. And don’t forget to ask me about RunPee.com. I’ll be giving out beta invites.

If you’re new to Twitter let me suggest that the only people you want to follow right at the start are people that you know. People that you can email and say, “I have a Twitter account so follow me.” Because if you follow someone that you don’t know, like me for instance, I’ll get an email that says, “So-in-so is following you …”

I’ll go to your Twitter homepage and find, a twit or two, and a bunch of people that you’re following. But that doesn’t help me decide if I want to follow you. My rule for following someone at twitter is pretty simple: if you have any twits that have to do with coding, especially about Flex/Flash/AIR, then I’ll follow you. Secondarily, if you have lots of geeky twits then it’s likely that I’ll follow you. But I need a body of twits to determine if you’re going to be twittering anything I’m interested in.

So spend a week, or more, just writing twits. Maybe no one will see them, yet. But when you start following people, then we’ll read them.

Oh, one more thing, if most of your twits start with an @ sign then I probably wont follow you and I’m sure most people wouldn’t. I do my own share of twitter-replys but that’s not all I twitter. No one wants to hear one side of a conversation.

There is a beautiful relationship between the Mandelbrot set and Julia sets. Namely, when creating a Julia set with a point that is contained inside the Mandelbrot set you end up with a Julia set that is contiguous. But pick a point outside of the Mandelbrot set and your Julia set will start to form islands and will no longer be contiguous. ( I’m sure there are really cool mathematical terms for that but I don’t know them. )

Move your mouse over the Mandelbrot set ( top ) and watch the Julia set ( bottom ) change form.

Back in college in the mid 80s I saw a video about the Mandelbrot set that illustrated just this relationship that you see here. A large Mandelbrot set was displayed on screen and in one corner was a display of a Julia set. A point floating over the Mandelbrot set moved around - like you do with your mouse above - and the Julia set would be created with the points corresponding to the ( a + ib ) point of the Mandelbrot set. As the point moved near the center of the Mandelbrot set the Julia set became nearly circular. Moving out toward the edge of the Mandelbrot set caused the Julia set to become more complex. And finally the Julia set became wildly dispersed as the point moved far away from the edge of the Mandelbrot set.

What the video showed was a rendering of the Julia sets changing because few if any computers at the time has the power to crunch out Julia sets that fast in real time. Since then I’ve always wanted to recreate that visual but in an interactive way, not something that is pre-rendered.

My wife and I went on a camping trip this weekend and I took the opportunity to hammer it out. I had created a class to display the Mandelbrot set months ago. So all I had to do was handle the Julia set and interactions. Turns out it is very easy to create a Julia set and the caculations do not requrie recursion so it renders much faster than the Mandelbrot set which does require recursion.

About the code
Of course the source code is available in case you would like to poke around with this yourself. I got the pseudo code from ThinkQuest.com. In the JuliaSet class I left the pseudo code comments around the Actionscript translation so it should be very easy to follow.

Every time the mouse moves across the Mandelbrot set a listener fires and passes the current ( a + ib ) coordinates to the JuliaSet class. If the JuliaSet class is still calculating from a previous call it will just return the BitmapData of the last rendered Julia set. Otherwise it will create a new Julia set with the new coordinates and return that. So it’s best to move your mouse around somewhat slowly. Mileage may vary depending on various factors. It seems to zip along pretty well on my laptop running Ubuntu on a 2.2Ghz processor.

The colors are calculated based on the number of iterations it takes to create the Julia set, or Mandelbrot set. For instance, points inside the Mandelbrot set are always black. But points very near the edge vary in color depending on the number of recursive loops it took before the breakout condition was met: x^2 + y^2 > 4.

The color assignment is found by simply multiplying ‘white’ 0xFFFFFF times iterations/max_iterations. It isn’t the best method of assigning colors but it is quick and easy to impliment. The colors for the Julia set are assigned in a similar manner.

When I strike it rich with one of my crazy startup ideas I’m going to retire to an island somewhere and just explore mathematical algorithms like this one. :-)

On September 12, 2008 the LHC ( Large Hadron Collider ) will be done with tests and the first high-intensity particle beam can be injected and circulated throughout the entire ringed system.

What do you think will happen?
See poll in right-sidebar –>

Links: FAQs, stunning photos, and why it won’t destroy the Earth - I hope they’re right.

And Wired magazine has some nice charts on the data it, and other experiments, gather.

What would you do without Facebook? Or, twitter, LinkedIn, etc.? Well, suppose you could use only one of them. Which would it be? ( vote over in the right sidebar )

There’s a good argument to be made for FriendFeed since it aggregates many of the most popular social sites. But it pretty much just gives you a snapshot of each so maybe it wouldn’t be the best option.

My choice would be twitter because I work from home and it’s pretty much all I have to replace water-cooler talk.

But my RSS reader - Google Reader - would be a close second. It’s not just a way for me to keep up with the latest news in the Adobe Flex/Actionscript world. It’s also a great way to keep tabs of my friends who blog.

Why don’t you vote and then comment your thoughts below?

Unless you’ve been hiding under a MSN search box you’ve heard the news that Adobe has worked with Google and Yahoo to make SWF files truly indexable by search engine spiders.

I’ve put together a quick Flex application this morning to take this new feature for a test drive. It’s just a TabNavigator displaying a few tabs of content about Greek gods. My goal isn’t to become the number one result for zeus. I just want to see the content get indexed and see what the search results look like.

If you would like to help out with this little experiment then try linking to the application so that it might get crawled sooner. Wouldn’t it be cool if this little experiment ended up being on Google’s first page for “greek gods zeus”? I’ll do a site-search every few days to see when it gets indexed and report back in another post when it does.

I pulled the content off of the Wikipedia.org site and dropped it into a database here at polyGeek.com. Then I used AMFPHP to grab the data and create as many tabs in the TabNavigator as there are results. And I added toolTips to the images if you mouse over them.

The nice thing about the TabNavigator is that the BrowserManager is automatically engaged. And I wrote 3 lines of code to enable the deepLinking in the app so you can land directly on a specific tab depending on the URL. And as always, mi coda, su coda.

In the code I’ve added the SQL, images, and my GoRemote.mxml to help you recreate this if you want. You’ll just need to get AMFPHP going yourself and add my AMFdata.php file to the ../services/amfphp/ folder. I might cover all the more in depth in a later post, someday.

Addendum: I just read the blog post at Google and it mentions that

Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file…

I’m using the default Javascript/HTML code that FlexBuilder creates. So I’ll see if it gets indexed. And if you’re wondering why I use the default FB code it’s because I’m too lazy to take the additional step of using SWFobject, most of the time. :-)