Month: January 2009

Writing this blog after the second day of training at NASA Johnson Space Center . If this sounds like I “m getting ready to board the next shuttle ndash; my apologies. I was teaching a class on programming with Adobe Flex. Still, it was a very interesting business trip for me.

What would you do if you were to visit NASA for the first time? I decided to arrive one day earlier and spend a day visiting the Space Center as a tourist. This was a smart decision. To say that I was impressed by what I “ve seen would be a huge understatement. I “m speechless! Seriously.

I “m not going to repeat stuff that you can read in brochures, but let me tell you ndash; if you are thinking where to take your kid during the Spring break ndash; come here for a day.

From the very beginning the tour guide announced ndash; “This is not an amusement park ndash; this is the real thing rdquo;. And it was. Mission control room hellip;astronauts training facilities hellip;The second rocket Saturn V that stayed on Earth while another one took Neil Armstrong to the Moon back in 1969 hellip;a huge-screen movie about the international space station hellip;

I “m not an easy person to impress. I visited Taj Mahal ndash; OK, it “s nice. I “ve been to Brazil and have seen Christ the Redeemer ndash; yeah it “s cool. But after learning about the international space station and all these missions sending people there, I “m wondering why the heck it “s not one of the seven world wonders? There is nothing even close to a complexity of this thingy.

Speaking of Armstrong hellip; I “m not sure if everyone knows what were the first words of Neil Armstrong when he made his first step on the Moon. Some pathetic sources state that he said “That ‘s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. ” But I “ve heard (from several sources) that he actually said “Good luck Mr. Gorsky! rdquo;, and here “s why .

The next shuttle (STS-119) will be launched on Feb 12, which is the most important event here. I “m taking my hat off to NASA scientists and to all people who ‘ve BEEN THERE and to those who made it possible.

Here I am at the training center.

I ‘ll be delivering an advanced preso on use of some design patterns in Flex at the meetings of New Jersey Flex User Group (Jan 28), New York Flex UG (Feb 19), and Chicago Flex UG on March 18. Please stop by if you ‘re in the area.

Here ‘s a short description of the talk:

Design patterns suggest approach to common problems that arise during software development regardless of what programming language. But implementation of these patterns is specific to the language. The main goal of this presentation is to highlight selected patterns as they may be implemented taking advantages of Flex framework. You ‘ll see a not so obvious implementation of a Singleton, how a Proxy can dramatically change the behavior of an object, why a Mediator is a must-have in each Flex application. Do you know how to write Data Transfer Objects that are so important in Flex remoting? If time permits, we ‘ll review the Class Factory pattern too.

This talk is based on some materials from the upcoming O ‘Reilly book “Enterprise Development with Flex “.

Will be glad to see you at one of these meetings,

Yakov Fain

twitter.com/yfain

A twitter with a nickname gnat posted an interesting statement, which I didn ‘t understand. I don ‘t recall when was the last time I could not understand English. Here ‘s what he posted:

Normally MacWorld is like fish spawning: single synchronised gush of geek spoo into the Internet. This year more of a sad wank.

I didn ‘t get it and ask a couple of native speakers to explain what this means. I got two different interpretations:

1. the sentence is saying that usually mac world is a flood of people blogging on the internet about the events taking place at mac world but this year it was rather sad because of how little people blogged baout it.

2. clearly this guy isn ‘t american…he seems british or australian…cause spawning is breeding…..but no one in this country uses that word. and a wanker is a “jerk-off ” and wank is to masturbate…which is also English….so if i had to take a guess, “normally MacWorld is like fish screwing…synchronised ejaculation into the internet….this year is more of a sad jerking off session.

How would you translate this phrase into American English?

twitter.com/yfain

A blogger and a software developer from United Kingdom posted the following:

“Having just received some photos from a source I will not name, it is truly horrific to actually see what is going on there, I mean this is the sort of stuff that European amp; American TV Censors and is not allowed to show you.

To see children being killed and people being decapitated in this manner is truly horrific, why on earth is the US government handing over somewhere in the region of 3 Billion US dollars a year to Israel is beyond me.

I could go on and on but these images I have speak a thousand words but I am not sure if I should post them on my Blog or not, I “d appreciate some opinions before I make a decision. ”

Here ‘s my answer to his post:

You can certainly post any photos. But before you do this, I “d love you to comment this scenario.

Every day you put your kids to bed or send them to school hellip; and your town gets 50-100 bombs from a neighbor country. No, they don “t attack solders of your country, they don “t ask for anything specific, they just want your country cease to exist. Again, don “t think of some remote land with unknown people, think about the town YOU live in and about YOUR kids. What would you do in this case?

From day one, Israel states that it ‘ll stop the offensive as soon as Hamas will stop firing rockets at Israeli cities. Hamas does not give a fuck about these requests. They don ‘t give a fuck about their own people. Blinded by religious hatred and encouraged by Iran, they want to remove the state of Israel from the world map. As simple as that.

It ‘s a real tragedy that peaceful citizen of Gaza die, but there is one reason for this – Hamas. Here ‘s a good example of how they encourage further rocket attacks on Israel. They don ‘t give a shit about their own killed children – they need them for PR. Watch these Youtube videos by Israeli army: http://www.youtube.com/user/idfnadesk

A couple of years ago I published a blog supporting Israel during their war with Hezbollah, it ‘s time to speak up again.

Update. Wall Street Journal published this photo in an article about how Israeli spectators gather on a hill and watch bombing of Gaza. This is really disgusting seeing how Orthodox Jews enjoy “the show ” knowing that they won ‘t serve in the army and risk their lives.

Unfortunately, it seems that Israel is losing this war too – every day at least a couple of dozen of rockets are being fired from Gaza regardless of all the damage cased by their air and ground forces. Most likely, after another couple of weeks of these military actions, Israel will be forced by the international pressure to stop, and Hamas will declare their victory over Zion aggressors. And the rockets will keep falling on Ashqelon, Beer Sheva, Sderot, and Ashdod…

Yakov Fain, US citizen

My Twitter: http://twitter.com/yfain