Category: Archive

I ‘ve read an interesting article by Felipe Gaucho called “Good Java developers deserve better salaries “, where he states that employers have to increase salaries for Java developers. Unfortunately, in the market economies such demands won ‘t work.

In enterprise IT no one just raises salary if there is a way to hire someone else for less money. It ‘s just not in the corporate culture where people are treated as nameless resources. Have you ever wondered why policemen get lower salaries than Java developers even though people in the uniform risk their lives on daily basis? It ‘s because there are many people who apply for jobs in the police. Preparing a mediocre policemen takes about the same time as preparing a mediocre Java programmer. The same holds true for good policemen and Java developers. Market rules. If no one will want to go to police, their salaries and perks will increase.

Today ‘s trend is to move software development to India, where potentially 1.2 billion of people can become Java developers (they ‘ll outsource all other trades to Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand). Not all of them will be good Java developers, but applying 20/80 rule, 240 million will, and they will lower the prevailing wage for sure.

Luckily, things are different in small companies and startups where GOOD Java developers are still treated nicely. So, if you need better pay and are ready to work harder, leave the corporate world and find a mom and pop software shop (make sure they have stable and positive cash flow).

After teaching our popular advanced Flex master class in New York, Boston, Toronto, London, and Moscow, we are hitting the beer capital of the world: Brussels, Belgium. This class is scheduled for the first days of March, and we hope that Flex 4 will be officially released by this date. Our book Enterprise Development with Flex should hit the book stores by then too.

To take advantage of the early bird prices register early at http://bit.ly/59DdIU.

If you can ‘t make it to Brussells, I ‘ll be glad to meet with you at 360 Flex in San Jose, CA on March 7-10, where I ‘ll be presenting on one of the topic from this master class.

If you can ‘t make it to San Jose, I ‘ll be very happy to meet you at Flash and the City conference in May in New York City. Most likely I ‘ll show you a really cool way of embedding a Flex application into a PDF file to be played by Acrobat Reader.

If none of these dates/locations work for you, you can always invite us to teach this class privately on site in your organization almost anywhere on the planet Earth.

Recorded a new episode for the No BS IT audio podcast: “Whores, pimps, and other IT resources “: http://nobsit.libsyn.com

Happy New Year!

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 80 460 Farata 3 1 564 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:&”Table Normal&”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:&”&”; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:&”Times New Roman&”; mso-fareast-font-family:&”Times New Roman&”; mso-bidi-font-family:&”Times New Roman&”;} Yeah, it ‘s this time of the year. Again. Making predictions is so tempting… This year I ‘ll cover just the iPhone.

1. Apple will let Flash Player on iPhone no later than October “10. They don “t have a choice, if they want to stay competitive. Enough of a crippled Web browser already.

2. ActionScript won “t kill, but will seriously damage Objective-C as the language of choice for development of iPhone applications. The programs written in ActionScript will be a lot more entertaining and engaging than today ‘s iPhone applications.

3. The next version of the Droid phone will be so cool, that I “ll switch from iPhone/AT amp;T to Droid/Verizon. Verizon “s phone service is clearly better. I just need a modern device. Lots of people in the USA will do the same. Should I put the money where my mouth is and purchase some VZ stocks?

OK. Two more. Not exactly about iPhone.

4. I ‘ll still have to work for living in 2010.

5. I ‘ll convince myself to get a new MacBook Pro. This time I ‘ll try a large one cause it goes with 7-hour battery.

When I told a friend that I ‘m going to Moscow to teach a master class on programming with Adobe Flex , he said that I was crazy. Normal people don ‘t go to Russia in December. This reminded me an old Russian joke:

A boss asks an engineer, “Do you like sweaty women and warm vodka? ”

“No, both are disgusting! ”

“OK, then I ‘ll schedule your next vacation in winter ”

I ‘ll be going there next week and, guess what, the Delta plane I ‘ll be on has electric outlets! On a 11-hour flight this is called happiness!

There are about 250K developers working with Flex and AIR. If you add an army of ActionScript developers, this number will grow substantially. Where do you go if you have a technical issue while developing RIA? As of today, there no one place to ask questions and get answers. A respected forum flexcoders uses the outdated and hard to follow Yahoo! groups. Some people try to find answers visiting blogs they trust. Some developers post their questions on Twitter.

About a year ago Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood released a well designed and easy to follow knowledge exchange stackoverflow.com, where people earn reputation by suggesting the right solutions to people “s problems. Flex/Flash/Air developers started to post their questions there among the plethora of questions on other technologies and programming languages.

Joel and Jeff went one step further and are offering the engine (stackexchange) for creation of similar knowledge exchanges for discussion any kinds of subjects. Using this engine is not free, but our company, Farata Systems continues contributing to Flex community and will pick up the cost involved with running the knowledge dedicated to RIA technologies that produce applications to be deployed with Flash Player.

We are just starting and created a an exchange Built4Flash on stackexchange engine and would like to invite Flex, Flash, AIR, and Coldfusion developers to post questions there and provide answers to others. The URL of the Web site is http://built4flash.stackexchange.com.

Your questions and answers not only will help others in solving their issues, but you “ll also have a chance to become visible and reputable person in this lively and Flashy community.

I really hope you “ll support this initiative.

Sometime ago I bought Adobe SoundBooth 2.0 to improve my user experience in the field of recording and editing audio podcasts. I played with nice and free Audacity, and then decided to give some business to a company I like. There “s a version of SoundBooth for Mac OS, and I “ve easily installed it on my MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and 320GB hard disk.

My first podcast was recorded fine, but then I noticed that all of a sudden I started getting a background fuzzy noise which was so loud that I couldn “t hear my own voice on the recording. Back than I was using not too fancy, but pretty decent USB microphone called Rode Podcaster. After going crazy on Google trying to find what can go wrong with it (I went all the way down to the voltage the USB ports are expecting to get from a mike) I simply gave up on SoundBooth as a recording program.

Audacity has been recording the signal from the same mike/usb combo just fine. Being a nice guy, I said to myself, “What “s the heck, I can still use SoundBooth for editing and mixing sounds rdquo;. In this department SoundBooth beats Audacity hands down.

I got peace of mind, and my podcaster “s life became smooth again.

I use a lot of software on my MacBook Pro ndash; Flex Java and Java SDK, Eclipse IDE, Web servers, DBMS, VMWare with Windows OS, MS Office, e.t.c. I started to be a little nervous when I noticed a couple of months ago that the free space on my hard disk is slowly disappearing, and I was routinely deleting unneeded files maintaining about 10Gb of free space.

I said to myself, “Yakov, don “t be cheap. Get yourself 500GB hard disk and stop counting free kilobytes on your disk rdquo;. Actually, it was not about the money, I just didn “t want to spend several hours backing up and recovering my existing soft.

Yesterday, after recording a podcast with two co-hosts, I was mixing three audio tracks. The size of each was from anywhere from 40MB to 80MB. After working for a couple minutes, SoundBooth failed giving me a very informative error “Unknown Error Occurred rdquo;. No worries. I “m smarter than a piece of software. I knew my little secret problem – lack of disk space. Sure enough, I had zero bytes of free space even though I could “ve sworn that I had 10GB free before I started my audio mixing exercise.

Moved about a gigabyte to an external drive and tried to do my SoundBooth mixing again. Same old unknown error had occurred. The free space was zero bytes again. I was going nuts. I couldn “t believe that a program may need so many GB for storing temp files while mixing about 150Mb of audio.

I knew that I had to find some other stuff to remove from my disk. My goal was to find the largest unneeded files on my disk and move them to an external drive. This is what you do in Mac OS:

1. Open the terminal window and create a function there by typing the following at the command prompt:



find_larger() { find . -type f -size +${1}c ; }

2. Run this function specifying the minimum size in bytes of files that should be displayed. For example, I ran it as follows:

find_larger 10000000

It listed a bunch of big guys, and most of them were sitting in the directory ./Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files/

I started to realize that I was about to make the greatest discovery of my life! Some of these files were larger than one GB. The names of the files were recognizable too ndash; I made all these audio recording over the last several months.

3. I went to this directory and removed all these temp files.

Here comes the first quiz. How many free space on my HD I got after removing all these temp files? Ready? No, I mean are you ready for the answer? 190GB were freed!

Now comes an easy question. What program quietly loitered my disk with all these .cfa and .pek files? Adobe SoundBooth.

And the easiest question comes next? Do you think I “ll be buying a 500GB any time soon? No way Jose!

After seeing all this battlefield of dead files, a quick check of the SoundBooth Preference | Media menu revealed an obnoxious checkbox:
 “Save media cache files next to originals when possible rdquo;

Of course I want it hellip;if possible(!?). If I “ve seen all these gigabytes of temp files in the first place, I wouldn “t come to a situation when having 320GB hard disk is not enough!

You may say, “RTFM rdquo;. Yes, I didn “t do it. But does it mean that a program shouldn “t at least periodically clean after itself?

Anyway, the mystery is solved, and even if you don “t use SoundBooth, run this find_larger() function on your Mac and swipe away some old poop from your disk.

At this point I “m working on a couple of new presentations for a bunch of upcoming conferences and seminars and that will take place in Flex community world wide.While in the past, I was trying to create cool presentations, now I wantbe even cooler and… deliver a booring one.

This upcoming Monday, I “ll be speaking at the Flash Camp Wall Street in New York City. It has great speakers and the best part is that there “s only has one track so attendees will have nowhere to hide from my talk described below:

A boring presentation on Flex libraries and modules

Everyone have heard of RSLs and “Merged into code ” link options. But do you really see the connection between the library linkage and your enterprise application performance? Do you know what and when goes over the wire to your users? Do you really understand the difference between the RSL and External linking of Flex libraries? Do you know when to use libraries and when to use modules? Do you know the difference between modules and sub-applications? Do you know how to arrange for a smarter RSL downloads? If you answered “Yes ” to most of these questions, don ‘t waste your time attending this presentation cause it “ll be so boooring for you.

In two weeks my colleague Victor and I will be teaching our advanced Flex 2-day workshop that becomes more and more popular. Moscow, Russia becomes our next destination after New York, Boston, Toronto and London. If you can read Russian, here “s the link for you. In the first quarter of 2010 we are planning to run it in Warsaw, Poland and Kiev, Ukraine.

One person told me that it “s stupid to go to freezing Moscow in December. No biggies. We like cold vodka.

In March, I “ll be presenting at 360 Flex in San Jose . I love this conference for developers and by developers. If I “d be sentenced to spend the rest of my life in a desert island and was allowed to take only one Flex conference with me, I “d take 360 Flex. During this event I “ll show a cool little Flex application that lives inside the PDF and is played by Acrobat Reader.

Flash and the City is the new kid on the block. Check it out: http://www.flashandthecity.com/#page=AllSpeakers . Excellent faculty and aggressive pricing will bring several hundreds of Flex and Flash developers to New York City. If everything goes as planned, I “ll be able to demo something that “s slowly brewing at Farata Systems under the working title “Fluid PDF Forms rdquo;. Duane Nickull “s band 22nd Century will be on stage helping attendees to forget everything they “ve learned in the classrooms.

I “ve mentioned just the conferences where I “m involved as a speaker. But there will be plenty of other gatherings of Flex developers during the same period of time. Be there.

Many years ago, while applying for a college, I ‘ve selected Applied Math as my major. I made this decision after seeing a computer printout on the wall of the admission office. This was an ASCII representation of cartoon characters.

After college, I ‘ve started working as a computer programmer in a data center that was processing payroll on mainframes. During the third shift, when no bosses were around, we were printing images of Mona Liza that were manually created by some geeks from ASCII characters.

I was able to find a similar image at http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/ASCII/Mona.jpg

These days anyone could do it using so-called ascii-art generator programs, and you can find lots of them by following this link.

But no matter how far technology goes, there ‘s always a place for creativity. Today, I ran into an amazing image of Steve Jobs made out of the images of Apple ‘s paraphernalia. This is a creation of the Flikr user tsevis. Here ‘s the URL. To really appreciate this piece of art, select the original size on top. My hat off to you, tsevis!

Great Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA is available for free in the Community Edition flavor. This is good news, but IMO, it ‘s a little too late.

I ‘ve recorded the episode #14 of my No BS IT podcast where I explain my point of view: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/ .