With the webDU conference just around the corner I’m getting ready to leave for Sydney, hope the 22 hour flight won’t be too draining 
Before I leave I still have a quick trip to London and back, a bit absurd to head back to Brussels only to fly via London again that very night — but thats British Airways’ policy for you.
Its no secret that the US patenting system is somewhat flawed but this one is just beyond me. Neil Balthaser, apparently a former VP of Flash Strategy at Macromedia (”Et tu, Brute”), has been granted a patent covering design and creation of rich-media on the web.
He was quoted as saying: “The patent covers all rich-media technology implementations including Flash, Flex, Java, AJAX and XAML and all device footprints which access rich-media Internet applications including desktops, mobile devices, set-top boxes and video game consoles … Balthaser will be able to provide licenses for almost any rich-media Internet application across a broad range of devices and networks”
How this patent could even be considered is baffling, there is a huge amount of prior art available . Let’s just hope they see sense and nullify this one as soon as possible.
http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-6042085.html
I’d better find out if its too late to patent double clicking… 
If you’re running WordPress its well worth doing the upgrade to 2.0.1! I just did it here this afternoon and it fixes a whole lot of issues I had with 2.0.
The dashboard is now actually usable and doesn’t crash all the time, performance seems to be way up, smilies are working, linebreaks in the WYSIWYG post editor are converted to linebreaks in HTML etc. Not sure what went wrong with my 2.0 install but it was extremely buggy to say the least and now I’m a happy camper again
My author copies for “Object-Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8” have arrived! Its looking pretty good, at least what’s left of it, the wonderful people at DHL were kind enough to leave the package standing outside in the rain.
Luckily I’m expecting another few copies to arrive soon so I should have some in better shape. The books should hit bookstores very soon now, looking forward to getting some feedback on it!
Just got an email by Jeff Veen that Measure Map by Adaptive Path has been acquired by Google. Should be very good news for bloggers, I’m sure we’ll see some great things happening with it.
Do wonder how it will relate with Google Analytics, will they merge the two into a single tool down the line or keep one specialized for blogs? Time will tell…
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/here-comes-measure-map.html
DMXzone.com has just published my follow-up article on using an XML file to configure your Flash applications, its a pretty cool piece even if I say so myself
The article talks about how to take things one step further, change config parameters at runtime and save the XML file back out using a simple PHP script. I’ll probably have more articles available in this series in the coming weeks, so if you liked to first free article, you’ll definitely be interested in reading this one.
Any feedback or suggestions for future articles is of course very welcome!
“what we do in life echoes in eternity”
Inspired by those words Bart Stassen, a regular at our MMUG Belgium, took a week off work, bought himself a plane ticket and flew out to New Orleans to help clean out homes struck by hurricane Katrina.
I can only applaud him for flying halfway across the world to help out and make a difference. Imagine a world where more people took such selfless action, imagine …
Read Bart’s story and support him by visiting the website below:
Flex 2 Beta will be available from the labs.adobe.com site very soon and as you’ve probably heard by now an important licensing change was announced. The Flex 2 SDK, framework and compiler will be *free of charge* — (with the Eclipse based Flex Builder 2 priced at under 1,000 USD).
