Is Flash About Dead?

I was perusing Slashdot a little while ago, and I came upon the post “Windows 8 Won’t Support Plug-Ins; the End of Flash?”. What I found funny, besides the possibly premature jumping of conclusions regarding Flash’s demise, was one of the comments. I want to post it verbatim, as it is such a great comment.

This comes from Slashdot user killmenow.

————————————————————————

Adobe Flash: I’m not dead.

The Internet: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.

Google: Yes he is.

Flash: I’m not.

The Internet: He isn’t.

Opera Software: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.

Flash: I’m getting better.

Mozilla: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.

The Internet: Well, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.

Flash: I don’t want to go on the cart.

Apple: Oh, don’t be such a baby.

The Internet: I can’t take him.

Flash: I feel fine.

W3C: Oh, do us a favor.

The Internet: I can’t.

Google: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won’t be long.

The Internet: I promised I’d be at the Robinsons’. They’ve lost nine today.

Apple: Well, when’s your next round?

The Internet: Thursday.

Flash: I think I’ll go for a walk.

Mozilla: You’re not fooling anyone, you know. Isn’t there anything you could do?

Flash: I feel happy. I feel happy.

[Microsoft glances up and down the street furtively, then silences Flash with his a whack of his club]

W3C: Ah, thank you very much.

The Internet: See you on Thursday.

————————————————————————

That is fantastic Monty Python quoting/paraphrasing, if you ask me.

Proper Case Script for ESRI’s ArcMap

I want to make sure that any maps I make in ESRI’s ArcMap look as good as possible, and one thing I believe looks good on a map is street names having proper case. That is, instead of the name being completely uppercase or lowercase, the first letter of each word is capitalized while the rest of the letters in the word are lowercase.

The problem I have run into with the county’s data is that everything in the system seems to be capitalized, whether is be street names, the owner’s name to a parcel, or whatever. Everything is all uppercase. This is fine for within the database, actually I have issues with it, but I do not want to get into that in this blog post. So, what am I to do? After several iterations, I have hammered out what I think is a pretty good VBScript solution which will take the uppercase data passed to it and return a proper case result. In the following example, I am getting as parameters the street name (i.e. MAIN) and the street type (i.e. ST), but this could be altered to first and last name, or only a single parameter; you get the idea. This script takes care of names with spaces and apostrophes too.

Function FindLabel([ST_NAME], [ST_TYPE])
  Dim label, labelWords, i, j, retVal, word, apostWords 

  label = [ST_NAME] & “ “ & [ST_TYPE]

  If (NOT IsNull(label) AND Len(label) > 0) Then
    labelWords = Split(label)
    For i = 0 To UBound(labelWords)
      If (i > 0) Then
        retVal = retVal & " "
      End If
      word = UCase(Left(labelWords(i), 1)) &  LCase(Mid(labelWords(i), 2))
      apostWords = Split(word, "'")
      word = ""
      For j = 0 To UBound(apostWords)
        If j > 0 Then
          word = word & "'"
        End If
        word = word & UCase(Left(apostWords(j), 1)) & LCase(Mid(apostWords(j), 2))
      Next

      retVal = retVal & word
    Next
  Else
    retVal = ""
  End If

  FindLabel = retVal
End Function

 

Feel free to use this within your ArcMap’s Label Expressions and I hope it helps someone else out in the future.

AUTHOR NOTE: I had originally written this function in JScript, but for some unexplainable reason, ArcMap simply did not like my code, so I switched to /sigh/ VBScript instead.

HTML5 Bandwagon

I am officially jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon — I know I was always a strong proponent of XHTML, but I see great potential here. I am currently reviewing HTML5: Up and Running (O’Reilly) by Mark Pilgrim, and my mind is filling up with ideas for what I can do with it. Especially the <canvas> element, oh my!

But I figured I should learn more about all of this new stuff, especially since I have reentered the programming world after an almost three year hiatus. So I am also taking a free HTML5 Mobile course from @oreillymedia and @creativeLIVE starting October 5, 2010 that runs ten weeks (until December 7, 2010). Check out the course at http://training.oreilly.com/html5mobile/.

Book Review: Building the Realtime User Experience

The Web is moving ever faster towards sites that give users what they want, not when they load or refresh pages, but rather in real time. Understanding how this works and how to leverage it on your own site so that it is useful to the user is important knowledge any developer should have. In his book, Building the Realtime User Experience, Ted Roden does just that.

Building the Realtime User Experience breaks down the technologies that make the most sense for a developer to deliver to the user in realtime such as syndication and instant messaging, for instance. One thing the book does that I appreciate is it presents the examples found throughout using different languages, applying the most practical language for a give scenario or toolkit. Doing this does not make understanding the examples very difficult, however, and any developer with reasonable coding skills should be able to follow along in any language without difficulty.

The first chapter gives an introduction into what “realtime” means in terms of the Web and development and lays out the languages the examples will use. From Chapter 2 on, the book jumps right into the different technologies that present well in a realtime format starting with syndication. Roden focuses on two technologies for syndication, Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and PubSubHubbub, giving each protocol pretty much equal treatment, leaving it for the reader to decide which protocol to implement. Chapter 3 discusses how to implement widgets that will display realtime on a web page, using Twitter and FriendFeed as examples. What was of more use was the discussion in Chapter 4 on server-side “push” technologies, and the transition into Chapter 5, which introduces the reader to Tornado – an excellent chapter that shows through example how to get Tornado running and in use on a site.

The next three chapters deal with chat, instant messaging, and SMS respectively. In each chapter, Roden gives examples on how to build an application around these technologies, which a web environment can then utilize. The chat application built throughout Chapter 6 is quite robust, as is the instant messaging client/server created in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 then extends the instant messaging service by integrating SMS into it.

I found Chapter 9 to be an interesting chapter, but it differs from the rest of the book in that it focuses on what a developer can do with analytics to view a site from an administrative point of view in realtime, instead of focusing on delivering something realtime to the end user. The examples yielded some interesting concepts and left me considering all of the possibilities for back-end development that I more often than not neglect or even disregard in my own development. Of all the chapters in the book, I think this one is the one I am most thankful Roden took the time to write. Roden finishes the book with a “Putting It All Together” chapter that takes the different applications built throughout the preceding chapters and mashes them together into a realtime game that could be pretty fun with a group of friends.

Overall, Building the Realtime User Experience is a terrific introduction into the realtime Web, and shows the reader just some of the technologies that may work well on a site. The examples are thorough and yield robust applications that are tweakable and integrate into existing sites. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in developing applications or widgets for their site that work in a realtime manner.

***** (5 stars)

I Am Not a Good Blogger

I would say all evidence points to me not being a very good blogger: it has been over a year (how did that happen) since I last posted ANYTHING on this blog. I am not sure how that happened, and I will not promise that I will get better at this, but I will try…