The Grand Cloud

After spending a long time yesterday trying to get the Adobe Air Auto-Update to work I realized it was a bug with Flex SDK 3.5.  What happens under Flex SDK 3.5 when you run the auto-update is you only see a blank / gray screen pop-up with no wording.   At first I thought it was my code so I tried it using Greg Wilson’s sample.  Compiled under Flex SDK 3.5 it doesn’t work at all, but then I tried it under 3.4 it works great.

I have filed a bug with Adobe, so please vote for it so we can get a quick fix -http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-24919

Ryan Knight flex

As a slight departure from the technical matter usually covered on this website I wanted to share some resources we have found for learning french.  Our son is in a french language immersion program at his elementary school and so the whole family has decided to learn the basics of french.  We have found the hardest part is learning how to actually say the words correctly.  We found two websites the have been extremely valuable in this process.

The first website we use is Hello World.  The biggest problem we have had is a lot of french learning courses are geared to traveling and only teach phrases you would use as a tourist.  We just wanted to learn simple vocabulary words and learn how to pronouce them.  Hello World was perfect for this because it provides the pronunciations of basic french words and other languages if you need to, like Indonesian.

The other great website is Mango Languages and their newly launched Mango Basics.  It provides on-line courses for learning the basics french and many other languages.  The best part is we where able to access it free through our local library.  The courses are very intuitive and walk you through the pronunciation of basic words and phrases.

Ryan Knight recommended websites french

James Ward asked me to file bugs for some of the issues we have been seeing with flex builder.  I have posted them here in hopes you will go vote for them.  This is only some of the many issues we are seeing using Flash Builder

Allow multiple instances of an AIR app to run at the same time. – There was a previous issue for this which was closed, so I created a new issue with more details.

Need to be able to navigate to classes and methods that implement an interface

Flex Server ate my bin! – This bug was already in the system, but looks like it is stuck on waiting on Info -  Hopefully voting on it will get it moving.

After changing a project type from Flex Server I still can not set my output folder in Flex Build Path

Multiple runnable Air applications in the same project using locale causes tabs display name to be null

Should be able to navigate into script source with Go to Definition

Looking through the bug database it looks like several of the renaming bugs have recently been fixed, so maybe renaming will work in the latest release.

admin flex

I had a terrible bike accident that tuned into a major ordeal. I was coming down the hill way to fast on my bike when I fell off the trail in a patch of soft dirt and went flying over the handlebars. I was clipped into my pedals and did not come out in time to catch my self. I ended up taking the entire crash in the face (I am not sure what I did with my hands).

What happened after was worst then the accident itself.  I was treated in two regional hospitals that almost killed me.  The my life was saved at a third hospital.   Sadly I found you can not trust our modern medical establishment.  What I learned after is every nurse and doctor should know the ABC’s of keeping someone alive – airway, breathing and circulation.  What is scary is two of the hospitals I visited almost killed me by ignore this basic principal.   If you don’t mind gory pictures, there are more details and some pictures after the jump.

Read more…

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Having developed Flex for several years now I am getting really tired of Adobe’s lack of support for developers. I was hoping they would bring at least modest improvements to Flex Builder (now Flash Builder) 4, but it is not much better. Re-factoring support is almost non-existent, something I consider fundamental to the development process. Even simple renaming and moving of classes and variables doesn’t work properly.  Code Formatting is still missing.   And why can they still not get proper code navigation?  What I mean is why can you only navigate up the class hierarchy and not down?

The most painful part of the development experience for me is how slow visual design is. The visual editor is useless.  So all layout has to be done by hand.  But even making a single change to the layout of a component, it re-compiles the entire project.

And there seem to be an endless amount of bugs.  For example we recently found you can not have multiple projects that use locales.  Or odd behavior, like changing the server side support in project properties messes up the entire project.

If I where to choose a new UI framework today I would have to seriously re-consider whether to use Flex. I would want to look at the entire development eco-system around alternatives.  I think this is where JavaFX might be able to take the lead.  It all depends on what Oracle does with NetBeans and JavaFX of course, but we can always hope.

admin flex flex

I put together a cloud hosting comparison chart on Zoho DB.   You can also view the full DB and some reports on Zoho DB.  I need to figure out better ways to visualize the data, so let me know if you have any ideas.  I had to makesome assumptions to try and make the comparisons somewhat equal.

Let me know what you think.

Ryan Knight Cloud Hosting Cloud Hosting, VPS

Mosso just announced they are going to be offering cloud servers at $10.95 / Month.  That is about half of the cost of of the competition.  This cloud service is based off their acquisition last year of Slicehost.   It will be interesting to see how similar this offering is to Slicehost.  They have a good reputation for excellent customer service, so hopefully they will keep this up.

What else was interesting was they have updated Jungle Disk to support Cloud Files.  The cost currently only includes the monthly storage cost and there is no cost for data transfer.  That would make the price much lower than storing files in Amazon S3 through Jungle Disk.  The cost for direct use of Cloud Files though does include fees for data transfer.

Update: I just realized that the cost of Cloud Servers does not include data transfer.  They charge $0.08 / GB for bandwidth in and $0.22 / GB transfer out.  If you assumed 50 GB in and 100 GB out that would add $26 to the total cost.  So it is not as competitive as I originally thought.

Ryan Knight Cloud Hosting Cloud Hosting

Amazon today announced  EC2 Reserved Instances.  This allows companies to pay a one-time fee upfront for a guaranteed reserved instance:

Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

This brings the price down of using EC2 for hosting a web site, similar to using a VPS.  For comparison we put together a chart showing how the price compares to other major VPS providers.  We made a number of assumptions to calculate the monthly price for Amazon EC2.  I have also published  more comparisons on this Google Doc.

One of the challenges with making these comparisons is each of the services have slightly different offerings and different hardware configurations. For example GoGrid does offer Hardware Load Balancing, but many websites won’t need this. Some of the services have more polished control panels and others appeal more to Linux geeks whole like full control.

If we were to pick a winner today it would be Linode. They have several unique offerings such as disk images that allow custom partition schemes, configuration profiles to store muliple profiles and the Linode Shell that allows out of band access to your instance for emergency repairs. We are planning to change our hosting provider soon to Linode and will post a review shortly.

Let us know what you think.

* For Amazon we calculated the price as the base price per month (approx. $27/month) plus the hourly cost of keeping the server running 24/7 in a month. The calculation then is (30 days * 24 hours) * ($0.03 per hour) = $21.6. The base cost then is ($27.083 + $21.6) = $48.68. On top of that we calculated approx data transfer as Data In (50GB * .10) = $5 and Data Out at (100GB * .17) = $17 for a total data transfer cost of $22.

** For RimU we choose the customized option to add extra storage and transfer space

*** Media Temple (gs) Ram was based on the advanced specs for GridContainers.

**** For GoGrid we used the Business Cloud PrePaid Plan of $99.99 / month plus $49.99 / month for 200GB of outbound transfer

Ryan Knight Cloud Hosting Amazon EC2, Cloud Hosting

I have decided to stop development on anvil flex.  It had a good 2 year run, but it’s sorely out of date.  Mostly it has been replaced by other frameworks.  Flex has made dramatic changes in the past several years and made a lot of anvil out of date.  The Spring BlazeDS project provides much better back-end support and integration.  On the Flex side the biggest downside is most of the data is passed using custom events.  Today I would rewrite this using something like Swiz.

It has been really interesting developing anvil flex and I have learned a lot.  Probably the biggest lesson is how hard it is to keep an open source project up to date.  It gives you a much deeper appreciation for major open source projects and the amount of commitment it takes.

Some parts of anvil flex are still useful.  It allows dynamically loading and managing modules.  It also has a unique portal framework.  The code will remain available on sourceforge and provides some good sample projects.

admin flex

I have been working with transactional databases for a long time, so I was very sceptical about Amazon SimpleDB at first.  The most obvious short coming is that it is non-transactional.  It also uses what Amazon calls “eventual consistency”, that is multiple copies of the data are stored in different places so it takes time for the data to propagate to all storage locations.  That  means the data will eventually be consistent, but an immediate read might not show the change.  This could lead to the classic database problem of dirty reads.  This obviously will not work for any application requiring data consistency; the ACID properties of traditional databases.

Where I think SimpleDB could be useful is that it more easily maps into an object model.  This could be ideal for developing rapid prototypes.  I have developed countless applications that where a proof of concept and just need a basic data store.   Often in these cases it would be nice to not have to worry about mapping the data to a relational data model; the impedance mismatch problem.

To test the service out I built a simple GWT client for administering SimpleDB.  Using the Java library it was very easy to create new data models and query a domain.  The main problem I did see was the speed of access.  Basic operations like deleting a domain took several seconds.  This obviously would not work for production systems.

Overall I would say for the right applications SimpleDB could be beneficial.

Ryan Knight Cloud Hosting, Databases Cloud Hosting, Database, SimpleDB