Entries from December 2005 ↓

I wrote earlier about the creativity workshops that we are carrying out in Magnet. I want to share them with you all and wanted to try out podcasting rather than writing them out. I felt audio would be more effective and at the same time, will take less time to prepare!

So I started out with my audio recording program and did some test recordings. Got the microphone volume adjusted, pulled my notes from the session up and got ready for recording the session.

When I started recording, I couldn’t find ideas to speak about. I just spoke about the points I had in front of me! Now this was a surprise! I have been public speaking for years, faced large and small audiences and I don’t have any stage fear.

I believe two things contributed to this. One, there was nobody in the audience. As a speaker, I am very interactive. I invite audience to participate. I constantly observe their facial reactions and shape my talk accordingly. I think I get much of my public speaking effectiveness from my audience. They give me the power!

The second reason would be that it’s been quite some time to the first session of the creativity workshop. I have probably forgotten some of the finer points I discussed in the first session. Moreover, these sessions are heavily customized for Magnet. Making it meaningful for a larger audience requires a few changes in the script.

But I am determined to get this to you! I will adjust the content and record again. Keep watching!

If somebody has a simple solution to this, do let me know!

My head is currently spinning trying to figure out how to make an editable datagrid in Flex 2 Alpha 1. All the examples of this show a datagrid, a collection of text boxes and a few buttons. Selecting an item in the DataGrid will bind the value with the TextInput. (Which happens via the cellEditor routine I believe). You change the value in Text box, and click Update and it goes to the DataGrid.

I don’t want such round trips. Can’t we simply do inline editing and update the dataProvider right there? And, how about sending this to the backend for an actual update? Flash’s RDBMSResolver was a great thing, is there anything like that on Flex yet?

If I write my on cellEndEdit event handler, I get some strange errors of 0 being out of bound.
RangeError: Index '0' specified is out of bounds
at mx.collections::ListCollectionView/getItemAt()
at mx.collections::ListCollectionView/
http://www.macromedia.com/2005/actionscript/flash/
proxy::getProperty()

I couldn’t find many answers to these questions, and am hoping I get something soon!

Excellent pictures, moments captured really well! The Reuters’ Pictures of the Year 2005 show cases 40 photos taken around the world throughout the year. A must see!

What’s happening at Apple? What’s up with iPod? Here are a few items - not necessarily latest, but worth noting!

• IE on the Mac is dead. Microsoft will not port IE7 to Mac. They suggest using Safari instead.
• Mac-Intel’s - Macintosh computers using Intel processors - may debut very soon. A lot of announcements and demonstrations may happen at the upcoming MacWorld expo.
• iPod generation 5 is here! It’s slimmer, available in black and white colors, plays video and is cost effective. But may be the scroll wheel quality has gone cheap!
• There are big plans to release products around the iPod line. An iPod Boombox is coming.
• The iPod clones keep coming! Bottom parts of many things are more interesting then the tops; thinking this, somebody came up with an mp3 player that’s the bottom of an iPod!
• You can now even get iPod underwear! The iBoxers come in trendy colors and a pocket to keep your iPod!
• Apple is expecting major growth in computer shipments in the next quarter! The iPod halo effect is helping them.
• Belkin said more and more people are buying accessories with their iPods now. In the early days, only one person in a 15 would buy an iPod accessory. Now almost everyone does.
• For the people who didn’t know this, Apple has been keeping a port for Intel processors for its major softwares (including OS) for about five years now. Every version was ported to x86 architecture.

Let’s see what’s coming next from Cupertino.

I was on the script.aculo.us site and tried the search visual effects! Particularly I tried typing two characters and submitting.

Hey! Haven’t I seen that effect before?

It’s the same effect we added to Glancer on a login failure, and what Vijay demonstrated in his AJAX talk at Foss.In/2005!

And yes, it is inpired from the Mac shake on a failed login attempt!

Feels good!

And yes, they do have a neat library for AJAX apps!