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February 25, 2008
Open Source Flex Compiler
Flex 3.0 and AIR 1.0 are here. Congrats to the teams, and I hope they're all getting some sleep now. Even more interesting to me is the open sourcing of the Flex compiler and framework. It's something which may get lost in the shuffle today, especially without a lot of developer documentation out there yet, but there's a lot to dive into.
Once you get the source, you'll have Eclipse project files in the 'development' folder. You can compile easily and start seeing what you can break. I was just poking around, and I'm remembering a number of interesting files to look at:
flex2.tools.Compiler, the entry-point for mxmlc
flex2.tools.Compc, the entry-point for compc
flex2.tools.flexbuilder.*, the interface to FlexBuilder
flex2.compiler.as3.EmbedEvaluator and flex2.compiler.*Transcoder, the heart of Embed
*.vm files like flex2/compiler/binding/BindableProperty.vm for some interesting codegen
flex2.linker.FlexMovie, the confusing guts of the Flex SWF
I see something I'm going to look at already, a simple change I'll try to blog about this week.
February 4, 2008
Vote on Some Deferred Bugs Today
Sure, if you're in one of 24 states in the US, you should do your civic duty and vote today. But the real voting is going on in Super Tuesday Flex Voting. Adobe has fixed JIRA so that you can vote on deferred bugs, so vote early and often. While Matt's request is for a specific group of bugs, see my previous post on voting to get a full list of bugs.
Book Exchange from 1999
I was looking for some Perl code for a script and came across a book exchange I wrote and open sourced in 1999. I created a zip file of the Perl and Turbine versions.
I don't expect this to really be useful to anyone, but I thought a few people would enjoy reminiscing over CGI.pm. I swear I'll get back to writing about Flex one of these days.
Hacked with Hidden Links
I found out recently that there were hidden links at the bottom of most deitte.com pages. It looks like someone was using my site to increase their PageRank. Before I cleaned this up, you would have seen links using a clear image within the page source. I'd mention the site that did this... but I'd rather not give them any traffic. I'd also mention the site that alerted me to the issue, but it's a SEO site that sells text links, which looks shady to me.
Given that my hosting provider checked out their servers and I use a pretty secure password, I assume they found a security hole with my old version of Movable Type. My very old version of Movable Type. I saw a similar issue on blog-101.com a few months ago. I take it this happens a lot? Don't make my mistake and keep your blogging and other website software up-to-date.
