Data.driven()

Finally got a flickr account. I put some photos I took during my trip to argentina nearly 2 years ago (2004). Being pictures of Argentina, you are bound to find plenty of photos of various dead animals cooking on BBQs:) Yum!

I’m just starting to read On The Origin Of Objects by Brian Cantwell Smith for my PhD. My god! What a bunch of incomprehensible nonsense! The guy is talking about simple stuff (ontology, objects, properties), yet he uses the most convoluted language and metaphors ever. If I ever start writing like that, shoot me! Please. I have refraining from reading overly academic nonsense thus far for my PhD. Really! I don’t agree that you need to adhere to silly academic prose to get your point across. And it really makes me wonder why people make very interesting ideas completely inaccessible. I’m sure that Smith knows what he is talking about, but really! There is no need for this kind of unintelligible garbage:

“… a way to feed our undiminished yarning for foundations and grounding, while at the same time avoiding the reductionism and ideological fundamentalism that have so bedevilled prior fundamentalist approaches.” (p4)

“Bedevilled”? pelase! Anyway, now that I have vented I feel better. If I don’t end up throwing the book out the window in a fit of unintelligible rage, then I will move progressively review each chapter over the next three months. Pease note that I am not the only one that bitches about the complexity of this book, simply do a search for the book title, or look on Amazon, and you will see that I am not alone.

I’ve just finished coding two kids games in Flash called “BarryBell” and “DrumBell” (I will make them available here soon). ActionScript is a cool language: it has all the things you would expect from a real programming language, it is compiled, supports strong typing, classes and inheritance, interfaces, static variables, and constants. However, there are some things that suck.

The following is a list of things I think suck about Flash Professional (in order of most suckful!):

• no null pointer exceptions - I can reference properties and variables that don’t exists and Flash does not care! this is highly irritating when you make a spelling mistake as Flash will not inform you of the error. The only way around it seems to be to use a decent IDE that actually does strict checking of existing classes, their public properties (if any), and member functions.
• Event Dispatcher class - the included event dispatcher class lacks the option to provide a member function to call back when an event is fired.
• No generic Event class - of course you can write your own, but a standardised one would save you having to look through Macromedia’s EventDispatcher class to work how the event broadcaster actually works!
• Delegate class - really, why does this even exists! Plus the lack of support to bundle an argument is highly irritating.
• no ability to send arguments when instantiating a movie clip - that is pretty severe.
• Phoney-baloney iterators - calling the for (i in someHashMapObject) returns i as an integer instead of the object. What is that all about?!

If I get a chance, I will write another entry describing these problems in more details. All I can say is, if you are going to copy Java’s Event broadcasting model, do it completely as it is not that hard. There is hope yet, as all the core classes are open, you can simply re-code them to do what you need.

Mozilla, heed to the flaws of Adobe Flash and lets us avoid this in JavaScript 2.0!

The W3C has approved the publication of my Web Application Formats Requirements (YAY!). It should be out next week.

I just finished reading (actually, the computer just read to me (w00t!)) The Essence of Effective Rich Internet Applications, a Macromedia white paper by Kevin Mullet. Although terribly business oriented in tone and examples, (some people might like been spoken to like an executive-type, kinda makes you feel like you could hang out with Donald Trump) the paper outlines some nice little keywords that Macromedia uses to describe what makes an effective RIA, namely:

• Seamless experience
• Focused experience
• Connected experiece
• Aware experience

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Thanks to the Opera browser, I recently (re)discovered the joys of Text-to-Speech technology. In particular, how good it is for proof reading. I was looking into VoiceML stuff and voice activated browsing on the Opera website, and downloaded the speech expansion pack. If you haven’t tried it out, you should because it is pretty rad. Anyway, I got it to read back the W3C Note I am working on and to my [not so] great surprise, it started skipping words, and sentences made no sense. Obviously, this was not a reflection on the quality of the text-to-speech engine, but to my own abilities as a writer. It seems that I suffer from some form of dyslexia.

I had also had some else read over the document, and they had not found as many errors as I found when proof reading with the text-to-speech engine. So it saved me a bit of embarrassment when submitting the document to be more formally reviewed by WAF-WG. I’ve now become a bit obsessed and decided to buy a more sophisticated text-to-speech engine that can integrate a bit more with Office and other stuff that I use. I opted for NaturalReader, which came with only one voice (Mike). NaturalReader uses the AT&T Truevoice technology, which I know nothing about. However, judging by the 500Mb voice file I had to download, I assume that it is not actually synthesising the voice, but probably has some sort of look up table for words or word parts.

Anyway, I’ve only been using it for about 4 hours and so far it has been pretty good. I don’t think it is as good as what Apple is about to come out with, but I believe it to be comparable. Maybe I will put up a sample, but in the mean you can listen to mike on the naturalReader sample page.

So! No more rereading over emails, word docs, and entries that I write 1000 times over. I just get the machine to read it back once or twice, make sure it makes sense, and send! I’m a happy chap.

In this post I will give a review of each essay in the book Structured Documents, edited by J. Andre, R. Furuta & V. Quint. This collection of essays gives an overview of research into structured documents and declarative formats. The book is considered by many to be a seminal work on structuring documents. And even though it predates XML, it still has a very close relationship to structuring documents using XML. I am hoping that content of this book will help validate ideas I have about how to structure documents, particularly as they relate to my work on a Declarative Format for User Interfaces and Applications, and also provide new insights into effective ways of structuring documents. The essays in the book range in topics from the history of electronic publishing, theoretical foundations of structured documents, approaches to use when representing structured documents, to the semantic and visual semiotic structures of text. Sounds like my kind of book…

This will be an ongoing entry as I make my way through the book.
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