Colin was a great presenter and quite amusing. Even after letting us know that he couldn’t go to sleep after 3am in the morning, he still stayed a bit more after the event to answer more questions.

He gave away some free books and I was lucky enough to get one by debugging some of the code. Some people got free books for answering some Star Trek and infocom related questions, and others for travelling a long distance to the event. There was a girl who came all the way from New Zealand just for the event. I reckon around 200 people attended the event.

Colin has sworn never to use powerpoint, so he built his own presentation software. Here is a link to the same system he uses during the presentation: http://moock.org/lectures/presentationviewer/
Select AS3.0 from the ground up and then click on open presentation. Then use j,k,l to navigate through the items.

Here is a full html page with all the lecture notes: http://moock.org/lectures/groundUpAS3/

And a 2mb pdf with the code used: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/as3_tour/colin_moock_f6.pdf

The colour on the projector screen was more yellowish instead of olive, but it still felt much better than a cheesy powerpoint.

The presentation was a bit too basic for someone who already had read his AS20 Cookbook but I new that beforehand. When registering you receive a confirmation email and here is a quote:

“Remember, this course is for beginner-to-intermediate level programmers and runs for a grueling 9 hours, so get a good night sleep and be ready for a heavy onslaught of ActionScript 3.0 info!”

Though I do a lot of advance work with AS2.0,  I decided to go because I had never done anything with AS3 yet. I got to see some details on AS3 like: how the display list works and also a bit on how the ASVM2 does garbage collection.

The application that Colin builds, while explaining key concepts of OOP with AS3 is a Virtual Pet game. Like the Tamagochi game. He uses the MVC design pattern and explains the concept very well.

At the end of the presentation he asks if it’s worth going down that path of OOP for just a simple game like the Virtual Zoo. The answer: It depends.

This app could have been built on the Flash IDE timeline in less than an hour. But when you think about extending it, or implementing any changes, that’s when the timeline will probably fail. In a real life example when a client starts asking you to do updates you would have wanted to opt for the OOP design instead of the procedural way.

Overall: It was a great event and I thank Adobe, O’Reilly and Colin for making this happen. I’m looking forward for more to come.

The Fooies rock big time!

Saturday 03 May 2008 - highlights:
They started the show with Let it die.
They played for almost 3 hours.
Pat Smear was invited
A special guest guitarist performed the Ballad of the Beaconsfield miners with Dave Grohl.
Everlong started acoustic and solo by Dave, and the rest of the band joined at the end.
The crowd was full-on! I almost lost my voice cheering
They did all their classic songs, even Big Me.
Dave Grohl was really funny. It looks like he likes playing in Sydney.

My favourites (videos on youtube) :

DANIAL

Go here for the Adobe Certification Expert kit

Anyways if you try searching the net, there are several threads that ask about this proxy error but no answers. I finally found a blog post that had a solution in one of the comments. From Coding Cowboys.

Add to your .htaccess file:

SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

or:

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

Beware that this will disable the Apache ModSecurity module for that folder.

I just saw that the Adobe livedocs upload reference also has a comment by: log2e, regarding the 403 and 406 errors.

To begin you need to download the uCertify PrepEngine. It’s ‘kind of’ like a framework that you install once, and then can simply download different prepKits to use with. You can also download a free evaluation version with 30 practice questions.

Once you install the engine and run the program the main window appears:

The look and feel is quite nice and modern. I started by taking the first Diagnostic test. The questions are like a quiz, and are multiple choice. Some are select the correct answer, some are drag and drop. The questions are a range of  simple actionscript questions as well as Flash IDE questions. Eg: Name the tools from the toolbar. I failed the first time, and I was amused to get a score of 666.

In addition of having a quiz style test simulator. You also have a set of tools to help you study and prepare for the test.

There is a lot of content to go through and help you out on your certification quest. The flash cards is good way to memorise and practice the different type of questions. There are several basic flash tutorials in the “how to” section.

Overall
If you want to get a certification I would definitely recommend you try this out.  uCertify has a money-back guarantee policy, that will return your money back if you fail the exam the first time.

Geoff Bowers did a presentation about “Setting Fire To Your Community”

The presentation was really good and I left the user group meeting with a nice feeling to try and help the opensource communities I daily use.

He gave really good (and a bit funny and disturbing) analogies comparing opensource communities with japanese mummies. Geoff also got into explaining some details about different opensource licensing schemes, and made us aware of the great difference between gpl and lgpl.

Even though most of us might just click next, next, next when downloading most of the software we use… If you are going to use that code in your commercial projects, you should really know what you are getting into and learn about the implications you will have when you distribute your project.

We also learnt that the extjs framework is changing its licensing from lgpl to gpl. This means that if you include that library in your code, you will have to opensource your project.

It was a great meeting and I’m looking forward to the next one. Chris informed us that the meetings will be held on every last Monday of the month, so the next meeting will be on May 26.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?p=13082

He modified the HaXeContext plugin and now you can see your php class methods and variables in the outline pane. It was a bit buggy, and then Philippe managed to get to get a basic PHP context working overnight!

Philippe’s version is the Flashdevelop SVN. If you would like to know how to compile the source code and get started with FD development go here: Participation [Getting started with FD Development]

If you want to try out the initial HAxe Context by kuzya, you can download the plugin: http://spbgu.ru/upload/kuzya/HTMLContext.dll

Copy that dll in your Flashdevelop plugins folder:

Usually: C:\Program Files\FlashDevelop\Plugins
Open a PHP file in FlashDevelop then select Haxe from the Syntax Menu.

Here’s a screenshot:

View Larger Map

With the advent of a number of open source initiatives from Adobe, Geoff Bowers of Daemon will speak on:

A tale of Japanese mummies, karmic balance and benevolent dictators.
Your guide to putting a torch to your open source community. Learn how to set up a flourishing developer community or just help to ignite your favourite.

Please RSVP on http://apugs2008april.eventbrite.com

Note: This is the inaugural meeting of the new Adobe Platform Users Group, Sydney which combines the Sydney Flash Platform Developers Group and the NSW Coldfusion Users Group.

You might find some funny results like an Euro symbol appearing throughout your text. Uncomment this line in your amfphp gateway:

$gateway->setCharsetHandler("utf8_decode", "ISO-8859-1", "ISO-8859-1");

Here are some examples of text you might find:
‘ = This is the open double quote
’ = This is the close double quote

Here is a good resource if you’re having issues with strange characters and PHP / MySQL: ByteFlex - Fun with utf8, PHP and mysql

Click here to see the Flex 3 new features.

After seeing what AIR is capable of I’m feeling sorry for Multidmedia Zinc.

I got really excited with AIR, though I have been using some apps, like twhirl… I’m actually writing this blog post with an AIR app, it’s an Adobe AIR Sample “Bee” on labs and it includes the source code.

** UPDATE **
I couldn’t manage to publish with BEE, I was getting a malformed XML error from the publish XML-RPC command. Anyway, the BEE App looks a quite good considering it’s a labs sample. I reckon mixing it up with buzzword would be awesome and also adding drag and drop functionality to publish images. I might look into the source code and give it a try.

Here’s a small video that I took with my mobile at the beginning of Danny’s preso (automatically converted from mobile .3gp to flv by flashCMS):

** UPDATE **
Thanks Joshua for pointing out the slides from the tour by Ben Forta.

ALTER TABLE table_one
ADD CONSTRAINT name_fk FOREIGN KEY (iTable1ID)
EFERENCES table_two(iTable2ID) ON DELETE CASCADE;

And HeidiSQL was spitting out this error msg:

SQL Error: Can’t create table ‘.\database_name\#sql-72c_fb.frm’ (errno: 150)

How to resolve this error:
Make sure your fields datatype match.
They both should have exactly the same datatype and length.
Eg. INT(4) Unsigned isn’t the same as INT(11)

Also make sure if you have data in the table, the foreign keys will not fail.
Eg. If you have an value in one table and not in the other table, it will fail.

This may be common knowledge to most of you but it might come in handy to someone else.

Thursday, 24th January. 6pm

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, each event will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability) and a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium!

Details and RSVP on http://sydneyflashdev2008prelaunchtour.eventbrite.com

You can also joing the Google Group: FlashAussie

Update: WebDU dates are: 12-13 June 2008. (Thanks Geoff)

Register here: http://www.adobeas3tour.com/

Advanced programmers please note:
This course does not cover expert-level topics. You are unlikely to encounter new concepts in this course, but are welcome to attend for a refresher on ActionScript programming fundamentals.

For a complete list of topics covered, see the Course Outline below and the course lecture notes, available at: http://moock.org/lectures/groundUpAS3/

According to the program we were going to view: Cairngorm 2.2 framework with Flex 3 and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime - formerly known as Apollo). We’ll be building a small/simple application to demonstrate the use of the Cairngorm 2.2 framework with Flex 3 beta and AIR Beta.

Due to time constraints, we didn’t finish the AIR integration and we all managed to debug Chris’ cairngorm timer.
We also talked a little about Singletons. Here is the link I mentioned about Grant Skinners AS3 implementation.

After that we had a “conference/presentation” by Grant Straker, that showed how to build quick applications using Zoom Flex
It was interesting to see the admin interface actually be targeted to developers, and how you generate your objects and classes by using regular forms. It also spits out all the source code of the flex app. I will definitely give it a try.

Then the lucky winner of the Adobe Software package was Robert. Congratulations mate!

Looking forward to having more meetings. Looks like then next one will be in February and the guys from infomedia might be showing us some of their flex stuff.

Here is a 16 second video that I took while Grant was presenting ShadoCMS:

I’ve created my mobile video blog here (you can see the link at the top of my blog), using the free widget from the DDX Website.

What is a Mobile Video Blog Widget?
It’s a Flash Component that you can put on any web page.When you create the widget a unique email is generated for you and you can send videos with your mobile phone to that email. The server will automatically convert the videos to FLV and publish them on your server. It’s pretty cool! Give it a try here: http://www.ddx.com.au/#/widgets/mobile-video-blog/

If you have a blog and are willing to write a review of a book you could get a free book. Here are more details on how to get a free book.

I will be writing a review on the book as soon as I finish reading it. I also recommend you visit their site and have a look at the collection of books.

After this review I’ve also got PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects. So I’ll be reviewing that too in the following weeks.

It was a very fast paced game, they were defending quite well and we weren’t connecting. We had a lucky goal almost near the end of the match, and they managed to score on the last second.

Soundtrack of video is: The Offspring. The kids aren’t alright.
Video edition: I added each of our players names, and did a couple of slow-motions and repeats. And played a bit with the Flashback transition.

Then came SEPY and I got hooked straight-away. Just last year I transitioned to FlashDevelop and have been using that since. I convinced my fellow workmates and now we are all using it.

I knew there were other tools put there, but one that I really wanted to try was FDT. Check out there cool site and view the demos they have.
A couple of months back I won a license at Sydney’s Flash User Group (thanks Chris!) and I have started using it for tests. I currently haven’t fully switched yet, because I find FlashDevelop quite fast and very easy to use compared to FDT. Though FDT has on the fly syntax checking. It means I don’t have to press F7 each time before compiling.

Then talking about my PHP development environment. It was trusty old Textpad through-out all these years. Adding different syntax libraries, macros and all kind of clip extensions. But it was never an IDE. It was missing syntax checking and the famous “intellisense”

Now I have started to move towards Eclipse, and I’ve tried PHPEclipse and PDT. I had troubles with PDT but I didn’t have much time on my hands to see why it wasn’t working as expected. I will try to consolidate my both main languages (Flash and PHP) under one IDE.

My next step is to use them both on a production project. Then I will be able to assess if it’s worth switching from FlashDevelop.

It would be great to here what others are using for their own PHP and Flash development.
Please add a comment below.

Some extra resources:
http://www.blog.lessrain.com/?p=381

Features include: Fully Flash website, SEO indexable, Deep linking functionality and Content Managed. There’s also a mini Flash Game (pie throwing) in the fool about section.

Please let me know what you think.