James Echmalian

Thanks to everyone who attended my session “Practical Patterns in Flex” at the 2007 360|Flex Conference. I was pleased to share some ideas with other developers with such keen hunger for design patterns! The discussion and feedback during and after the presentation were much appreciated.

Here are the slides from the presentation: http://ech.net/360flex3007

I am withholding the sample code while building out one of the examples, in response to a request from one of the attendees. Comments would encourage this process!

Here is the output of a quick, fun project I did with some friends at Kayak.com: http://ech.net/kayak/globe

The Papervision 3D graphics package does all of the real work here.  Its well-designed API makes rendering bitmaps as 3D objects almost absurdly easy.  Being able to call on the open source Flex Framework was also a huge benefit.  But it’s the great performance of the Flash 9 graphics engine that really makes it go.

These days, I have little patience for problems that eat up time better spent with family or on work. Setting up this blog has been one problem after another. Setting up a blog should be as easy as filling out a form and pressing a button! Though I’m known to grumble under my breath, I’ll try to avoid carrying that habit into the on-line world. Netfirms (the hosting provider) has provided some good support. I also found this post by a fellow Netfirms customer helpful:
http://angrys0ul.com/blog/2007/04/01/netfirms-wordpress-and-pretty-urls-date-and-name/

However, problems remain. The main RSS feed produces the content of the comments feed. Spammers have discovered the blog, and I can find no way to stop only unregistered users from leaving comments, other than turning off comments altogether. The two problems seem almost conspiratorial. I intend to switch off comments for now, and to continue to work on the problems.

As the nudist camp director said of the leaky sewer pipe, “Please bare with us while we resolve this issue.”