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Faulty Paradise

Here are some photos from a recent trip my wife and I took to the Northern California coast. We traversed the whole length of Marin and Sonoma, and covered a good bit of Mendocino as well.

This was our room in the first B&B we stayed in.  It is nestled in a canyon the tiny West Marin town of Inverness, just south of the Point Reyes Peninsula.  The room was exotically situated, perched on top of a spiral staircase and accessible via the top from a long wooden bridge.  Mist is burning off the bridge in this picture because the entire structure was covered in rime ice when we woke up.

This looks all cool ‘n’ everything, and the structure was neat, but the place was very sketchily decorated on the inside considering its high cost (faded blue shag carpet does not belong in a B&B that costs over $200 a night), and the breakfast cook was kind of grumpy and weird.  The owners were not to be seen — other people manage the place.  To get to the bathroom in the night required a trip across the icy, slippery wooden bridge, which made the whole tower shake.

Not that this mattered.  The area is beautiful and we spent all our Inverness days in the outdoors.

The Point Reyes peninsula casually jutting out into the Pacific, hoping to trip up a ship or two.  Peninsulas these days are so ill-mannered.

This one traveled some 300+ miles north on the Pacific Plate to get to its current location, sliding along the San Andreas Fault.  It took its original rocks and plants with it — never leave home without your ancestral flora and fauna!

This looks like some kind of vegetable that Benoit Mandelbrot’s mom probably made him eat until he invented fractal geometry.  It’s a type of cauliflower that we picked up at a neat organic grocery in Point Reyes Station.  It tasted exactly like… cauliflower.  Fresh cauliflower, though!

We saw a lot of little orange salamanders walking around.

On the last day of our trip we took a spectacular hike through the northern reaches of the Marin Headlands, just south of Muir Beach.  The fog and light were spectacular:

Not much more to say about this!

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Flash Audio IE7 Bug: Open Letter to Adobe

Hi, Adobe Flash Player Development Team.  Let me open with a positive statement that is not at all token in nature: you people rock.  Both in general and in the specifics.  Really, you do.  You have created something that has changed the world for the better, and has allowed some great software to be built.  Needless to say, I couldn’t do what I’m doing without you. I thank you for that.

Nothing’s perfect, though, eh?  That’s why we all have bug databases.  And I further applaud you for opening yours up to the public, which takes a real dedication to openness and also some serious resources to maintain.  Now, about that nasty FP-985 bug…

FP-nine-eighty… what? What’s that one, you say?  It’s all right. I understand.  You have many bugs and many important customers.  Let me remind you, all the while retaining my pleasant, smiling demeanor.

It’s the one that crashes IE7 if you have Flash applications in more than one window which use the wonderful brand-spanking-new dynamic audio API that was rolled into Flash 10 at the eleventh hour.  You know, the bug that cripples the API which finally allows Flash applications (like mine and many others) to synthesize sound, not just play back canned audio clips. The bug that cripples the API which begins to put the audible on a par with the visible in the Flash platform.

Yeah, that bug.

Please fix this crasher.  I’m asking nicely.  Please.

If the Bitmap class crashed IE, I know you’d be all over it.  If ColorTransforms crashed IE, you’d be all over it.  Well, Sounds crash IE.  So…

…thanking you in advance…

... .  .    .       j

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Talk on Flex Automation Framework at Boston Flex UG

My friend Eric Hilfer of Tom Snyder Productions is going to be giving the next Boston Flex User Group talk on Tuesday January 13, and I honestly expect this to be one of the most useful and informative talks that we’ve had so far in the UG.  This is partly because Eric combines brilliance with a talent for communicating ideas, and he’d be worth seeing even if he was talking about something everyday.  However, he is not talking about an everyday subject: he’s presenting on one of the most useful and (unfortunately) most obscure aspects of Flex, namely the Flex Automation Framework.  This framework is a set of capabilities built into Flex that allow automated operation (and hence, repeatable testing) of a Flex-based user interface. How many people do you know who have built real, working test suites for complex applications using this mechanism?  I know exactly one: Eric.  So… my point is: if you’re building something in Flex and you care about its quality, you should come see this talk!

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