I may have some site downtime over the next week as I transfer over to a new host.  I’ve been using a very cheap webhost over the last year due to my college student budget, but now I’m out in the real world and have bandwidth and language needs that I’ve found a better host for. I’m switching over to slicehost.com. I have had a desire to work with Ruby on Rails and possibly Python web dev at some point.

Hopefully all goes well, but this is a bit of a dive for me.

I’ve had some recent issues with Firefox. Nothing that bad, just frequent crashes, corruptions, and an unwillingness to create new tabs with any sense of speed. I know that barebones Firefox probably wouldn’t have these issues and my problems are likely the result of some malicious script or bloated add-on. However, This would be the third time in two months I’ve had to wipe the software and start over clean slate.

Frankly, I’m sick of it. I love Firefox, but when software stops working for me in a repetitive fashion like this it’s time to find alternatives. I chose to go with Firefox’s cousin, Flock. Flock has many great social networking features already integrated (in fact I’m posting this from Flock itself, not a webpage in Flock, the application itself). It’s also based on the Mozilla Firefox codebase so the experience is very similar. I don’t have all my favorite add-ons, but i suspect porting them wouldn’t be that difficult.

Here’s to change!

I’ve been having a major issue with Flex/Adobe AIR over the last week or so when serializing my data to files. I use a FileStream and call writeObject() on an ArrayCollection of my data. Pretty simple. Serializing seems to run fine, deserialization as well. The problem arises when I try to cast items in the collection to their appropriate type. It seems the objects have lost their type information and are plain Objects.

After a while of thumbing through the documentation it finally hits me. FileStream uses AMF3. Usually when using AMF3 you define RemoteClass metadata for each of your classes that mirror server-side classes. I had just assumed that since AIR knew I would be loading the object back in AIR again, it would do that stuff automatically. Turns out it doesn’t. A few lines of RemoteClass metadata later it’s working fine. You just need to define the alias as being your class with the full namespace typed out. Not in the documentation (or if it is, it needs to be in a more obvious spot such as here or here). Although knowing its was AMF3 format, I probably should have realized this sooner.

Hope this saves someone else some time.

I created a blog demo written in Python that runs on Google’s new App Engine and uses PureMVC Python as its architecture. If you haven’t checked it out, you should, it’s a phenomenal piece of web technology.

The blog demo is a basic one with the ability to add, edit and delete blog posts. Each post includes a title, content and the date and time it was last updated. It’s now at version 1.1.

Also, any of you programming in any of: AS2, AS3, Python, ColdFusion, Java, .NET, Perl, or PHP, check out the ports for those specific languages. PureMVC is the best MVC implementation I’ve found and there’s a good and very helpful community going on the forums too.

As a side note, I apologize to anyone who got a blank post with a similar title in their feed a few days ago, WordPress has been giving me some issues after an upgrade.