Robert Synnott

Unpleasant surprises

2012-05-05T15:53:00.002+01:00

Every few months, a Progress robotic spacecraft (it's basically an automatic Soyuz without the living space or re-entry module) visits the ISS, with supplies.

It occurs to me that it would be hilarious if the occupants opened it up... to find an enraged, floating cat. But then I realised my mistake.

An owl would be far better.

I expect NASA and Roscosmos to give me 10% of the revenue from the hit reality TV show which results from this.

Important Theological/Medical News

2012-05-01T01:25:00.001+01:00

Regulators have determined that Jesus is ineffective against cancer, with no improvement in outcome as compared to a placebo deity.

Principal distributor Catholic Church Ltd (NASDAQ: INQSTN). has issued a prophet warning, but CEO Joe Ratzinger assured investors of the continued viability of the conglomerate's financial services and childcare businesses. It is understood that production of a next-generation product, codenamed Secundo Adventum, has been accelerated.

Representatives of other manufacturers, which have been locked in legal disputes over the medication since the patent expired in 1521, were unavailable for comment.

Disaster-friendly domains

2012-04-23T23:31:00.002+01:00

So it turns out that the OPW has a website called flooding.ie, for what to do in a flood.

Has anyone checked their other recent registrations? If they have plagueofvoles.eu or zombiestalin.mobi, the public has a right to know.

Note the cheerful wave design. Not pictured; cars floating mournfully in their underground layers, imploding shopping centers etc.

And then there's this:

We don't actually have any facts about flooding, but these magic boots are in some way involved.

I do love the cheerful illustrations, though.

Apple, the mysterious shrinking processor, and hot iPads

2012-04-13T00:59:00.001+01:00

There was an interesting article today about the new Apple TV's processor. Essentially, the Apple TV now has a dual-core A5 with one core disabled. But that's not the interesting part; it's actually a fairly common strategy in dealing with a not-100%-reliable process, where one core may end up unusable. Those weird three-core AMD processors, for instance, are reportedly four-core parts where one core did not work correctly, and was disabled. All PS3 chips have one SPE (a glorified DSP; the Cell chip has a number of them) disabled, likely to improve yield.

The interesting part is that, unlike all previous A5s (and A4s), which were made on a 45nm process, this one was made on a 32nm process. In general, you'd expect an equivalent 32nm chip to have lower power consumption (and thus heat output) than the same design on a 45nm process.

The even more interesting part... When they looked inside a new iPad 2 (the cheaper one announced at the same time as the new iPad), they found a 32nm A5, with both cores enabled. It'll be interesting to see if the new iPad 2s have better battery life than the old ones; you'd certainly expect it.

And now the borderline conspiracy theory part. The A5X (new iPad SoC) looked at by Chipworks was a 45nm part. But are all A5Xes 45nm parts? Surely, if you have a 32nm process available to you, you'd want to use it for your largest and most expensive, and hottest, chips? Is it possible that some iPad not-3s have 45nm SoCs, and some 32nm?

In a now-notorious test, Consumer Reports found that the new iPad gets hot, ~~so hot that it could melt a cat~~ well, warm; about 46 degrees, when playing a strenuous game and plugged in. They also found that the charger was unable to keep up with it in this condition; the battery kept draining. But, while some were able to reproduce at least some of this, others failed, with some tests finding it getting only marginally warmer than the old iPad 2, and cooler than many competitors. Could there be a 32nm version in the wild?

Back to the blog

2012-04-09T17:36:00.001+01:00

So, I think I'm going to start blogging again; in that sort of mood. For anyone who is still, for some ungodly reason, subscribed to this thing, you have been warned. Coming up, a book review, a webcomic review, and more, to bore you to death!

Google UI designers gone wild; or, how to create a filter in new Gmail

2012-03-01T22:56:00.001Z

So, I'm not a huge fan of Google's recent feats of web design. In particular, in Reader, they took one of the best webapps around and made it basically unusable. But that's a story for another rant-y blog post. Today I'd like to talk about creating a filter in GMail.

This used to be quite simple; there was a link for it. Now… Well, I'll let you guess from the image (and what you need to do it is in this image):

What's that arrow beside the search box for? Why, it must be a combo box! How very retro! Remember combo boxes? Sadly, they never really joined us in earnest in the 21st century, and certainly they haven't made it into this decade:

Well, no, actually, it is not a combo box. It is, er, this:

Yes, when you click it, you get a sort of drop-down pseudo-modal form. I propose that we call this fabulous new user interface paradigm 'the Google', and use it everywhere. Or possibly just call for an international moratorium on it.

Silly product description of the day

2012-03-01T21:50:00.001Z

From a liquid soap dispenser:

Dermatologically tested for kindness

For kindness? How does this work? Did they apply it to a dermatologist and then track how much he gave to charity? On the plus side, animal testing of non-medical products have been largely phased out, so it probably wasn't tested for kindness through being unkind to a rabbit.

From the same dispenser:

3x better at eliminating bacteria [FOOTNOTE: Than our previous hand cleaner]

This seems rather unhelpful, as for all we know their previous cleaner might have been made out of pure raw chicken.

Fun with Python for iOS

2012-02-26T04:34:00.001Z

So, a Python environment for iOS has been released. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide a way to import code. This more or less renders it a toy, right? Well, not quite!
It does provide both exec and urllib, so I wrote a little script to load libraries on it. The script works by creating modules with exec, putting them in sys.modules, and attempting to emulate the behaviour of Python's own module loading. Currently, the module must be specced in the following format:

('web',
        'utils',
        'net',
        'webapi',
        'http',
        'httpserver',
        'wsgi',
        'db',
        'template',
        'debugerror',
        'form',
        'session',
        'application',
        'browser',
        ('wsgiserver', '__init__'),
        '__init__'))

However, it would be possible to divine dependencies from the library.
You can see it in action by entering:

import urllib2
exec urllib2.urlopen("http://rsynnott.com/pyios/loadcode.py").read()

load_package('simplejson')

import simplejson

in Python for iOS, or indeed any interpreter. Run that, then enter 'import simplejson', and you have an external library!
For a slightly more interesting example, do

exec urllib2.urlopen("http://rsynnott.com/pyios/loadcodeweb.py")

This will give you web.py (actually a slightly modified version, with __file__ removed from the error page generator, and a minor modification to the wsgiserver to tolerate the module loading scheme), running a hello world app. If you switch to the browser and visit http://localhost:8080, you'll see the page, though it may take a little while to load.
You can see the loader code here.
Having the ability to bring in your own code obviously makes the app far more useful.
Python for iOS (and a few other interpreter environments for iOS) seem to occupy an interesting place as regards the App Store terms of service. You're not allowed, in principle, have an application which downloads and executes code from the web, but obviously in the case where you have an eval equivalent and a HTTP client, the user can do that themselves. In practice, this seems to be largely ignored.

Introspection

2012-01-13T00:05:00.001Z

So, for the last couple of years I feel like I've been stuck in a rut. I'm not depressed, as such; been there, done that, it's a lot different. I'm just a bit, well, apathetic. Anyway, I just realised that in a bit over a year, it'll be ten years since I started college. Ten years! So I'd really better snap out of it, start doing stuff again. Hobbies, not dreading the long evenings, etc. Maybe even get back to writing this blog!

Well, that's it, really. I just wanted to get that out, so I told the Internet, which hopefully is too busy with popup ads and cat photos and The Twitter to judge me for it.

Come Censor with Me

2012-01-08T18:09:00.000Z

I was watching Come Dine with Me with the subtitles on (as you do), when I noticed something vaguely interesting. One contestant was bemoaning her shriveled vegetables; the commentator's line was "Shriveled or not, the show must go on", but the subtitles said "Shriveled or not, the show must go on, as the actress said to the vicar". I assume this was considered a little racy for a respectable Channel 4 show about having horrible people over to your house, particularly as one of the guests was a vicar...

Careless, careless governments

2011-11-06T02:11:00.004Z

As you'll no doubt remember, the Irish government recently found an extra 3.6bn euro it didn't know it had. Bizarre, right? Well, it turns out there's a good bit of this about!

Last week, Germany found a little windfall in a nationalised mortgage bank; 55 billion. And the week before, the US government found 6.6bn dollars it thought it had lost in Iraq.

Perhaps the entire financial crisis was caused by national governments losing a billion here, a billion there, down the back of the couch.

Another victim of LIBERAL OPPRESSION

2011-10-30T19:35:00.000Z

Poor Eamon Delaney. The gays are demanding rights, when everyone knows that those are only for white heterosexual middle-class men like Eamon Delaney! Really, when I first saw the article I assumed it was a parody of one of those absurd American right-wingers moaning about minorities...

I mean, really:

Increasingly, it seems as if the homosexual community has forgotten that it is the minority

Bloody minorities, looking for special treatment! (NB. In screeds of this sort, 'special treatment' means the rights that everyone else has anyway.)

AS the cliche goes, some of my best friends are gay.

This has to be a joke, surely?

Bisexual? Isn't that reminiscent of the loose Seventies sexual experimentation? How many bisexuals are there? And will the plain people of Ireland be happy with legalising rights for, and spending money on, all of this?

Bisexuals? Do they exist, Ted? Also, bisexuals are apparently very expensive.

Thus gay magazines are full of ads endorsing late-night gyms, sex lines and a freewheeling sexual activity which would be dismissed as sleazy in heterosexual culture.

Did you know that there are no sex lines for heterosexuals, and those which don't exist certainly aren't advertised in magazines that you can buy in Easons, or indeed on cable telly? It's true!

Still, at least someone benefits from all this; Kevin Myers, who for once didn't write the stupidest thing in the Independent this week.

More Android tablet numbers confusion

2011-10-22T23:07:00.004+01:00

The latest controversy in the world of mobile devices is the market share of Android tablets; in particular, when analysts claim that Android has, say, 26% of the tablet market share, are they talking about sales to real live people, or shipments to the channel?

One technique for getting a very vague idea is to take the total number of Android activations (190 million) and multiply it by Google's version share data for the tablet OS, Android 3.x (1.8%), giving 3.4 million total Android 3.x tablets (as compared to about 40 million iPads sold thus far). Clearly less than 26%. I used this technique before it was cool.

However, it should be cautioned that it is a very, very vague technique. There are a few problems. First of all, the Google version share numbers are based on Android devices which have been in accessed the market in the last two weeks. Does this mean all devices in use and in communion with the Android market, or does it mean all devices where the user has hit the marketplace button in the last two weeks? If the latter, it might be the case that there are lots of Android tablets, but their owners don't bother much with the marketplace.

Second, what is an activation? For instance, if a phone is sold to person A, returned, and sold to person B, is that one activation, or two? If person B then buys a new phone, is that another activation? That is, does the figure relate to a specific device, or to a specific Google account, or to a specific device with a specific user account?

Then, even if there have been 190 million Android devices 'activated', undoubtedly many are now out of use. Say there are 100 million now in use; that's only 1.8 million Android 3.x devices now in use.

And finally, is it possible that Google's reported figures are just wrong? A cap of 3.4 million 3.x tablets sold seems bizarrely low, as compared to shipment numbers of 4.6 million in the most recent quarter alone. It should be borne in mind that these numbers include Android 2.x tablets, and the Barnes & Noble Nook, which, while it can be used as a tablet when rooted, is really intended to be used as an ebook reader, of course.

Anyway, I mention this because of this GigaOm article, by the same author who cited me a while ago on the above technique. I think he's relying on it too much; he seems to almost be stating as a matter of fact that there are 3.4m 3.x tablets, and further muddying the waters by comparing that estimated lifetime sales number to a claimed Q3 shipment number. All a bit messy, I fear.

The AWFUL TRUTH about the Star Trek replicators

2011-09-25T21:43:00.000+01:00

In all series of Star Trek but the Original Series (where they eat common household sponges), most of the crew's food comes from the replicator. The official line is that this is a machine which synthesises food, through Star Trek magic. But think of it; how much simpler would it be if it were simply a 3D printer which produced the 'food' out of whatever biomass was available (human waste, crew members shot by the Romulans in the previous episode, etc.); tongue implants would then be used to lie to the brain about what the subject is tasting.

This would also explain why, when they visit Earth, we see people cooking, even though they have the magic ultra-convenient replicators.

It can, in fact, even explain the peculiar tendency of Kirk-era Starfleet people to eat kitchen sponges (watch an old episode if you believe me not); presumably the secret to 3D printers was lost in the turbulent years of the 21st century (along with circuit breakers to stop consoles randomly frying operators, emergency stop buttons for enormously dangerous things like the Holodeck, emergency brakes for lifts, and so forth), and subsequently rediscovered (unlike any of that other stuff).

And why do we never see toilets on Star Trek? Because the toilets discreetly built into the back of the 'replicators' would be distasteful to modern audiences!

HP's poor luck with CEOs

2011-09-24T13:25:00.000+01:00

With all the fuss about yet another ejected HP CEO, I can't help remembering Carly Fiorina, about three ejected CEOs ago. Who ran for office in California. With THIS:

I mean, if you were a company board, would you hire the sort of person who'd greenlight that as a CEO?

Incidentally, the new HP CEO, Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO, also ran for office in California, but had less insane ads.

The slow, grinding death of Flash continues

2011-09-15T21:38:00.000+01:00

When in 'metro mode' (the mode for tablets), IE10 for Windows 8 will not support Flash, or any other plugins. Further, it looks like IE for Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) may lack Flash, too. Adobe had previously said that Windows Phone 7 would be getting Flash, but then, back in the day they said that the iPhone would be, too.

There's been a rather perverse tendency in the tech press to view the absence of Flash on iOS as some personal vendetta of Steve Jobs'. I don't think that's really credible, now, if it ever was; other companies are clearly willing to avoid it.

By the way, I called this in February 2010:

Microsoft says that it is working with Adobe on this. I strongly suspect that Microsoft, which has the advantage of entering late, is just playing for time; by the time the initial Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever we're meant to call it now) comes out, Flash will have been on Android for some time, and Microsoft will just be able to point and say "Given that everyone hates Flash on Google phones, we're not going to bother". This wouldn't be a great surprise; when Microsoft pre-announces a feature, that by no means demonstrates that the feature will actually ship, as we saw with Longhorn/Vista

It increasingly looks like Mobile Flash will be an Android-only thing, which can't be wonderful for Adobe.

Worst ad targeting ever

2011-09-10T14:26:00.001+01:00

Should be self-explanatory.

Lazy, lazy police on anarchists

2011-08-09T00:02:00.001+01:00

From the Guardian:

There was no warning about other political groups, but next to an image of the anarchist emblem, the City of Westminster police's "counter terrorist focus desk" called for anti-anarchist whistleblowers stating: "Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police."

From the Wikipedia page on anarchism:

Anarchism has been variously defined by sources. Most often, the term describes the political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy

And the same page a few months ago:

Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy

Such a shame the wiki hadn't been vandalised the day they looked. "A type of vole? Oh, okay! Beware the voles, citizens!"

Cute Lion UI feature

2011-08-01T23:46:00.001+01:00

The terminal in Lion:

What's new? Note the icon; it represents the current directory, is draggable, and uses the assigned directory images. Though, slightly oddly, in the older style, not the newer one found on the side of Finder windows:

Minor, but a nice touch.

ROS.ie on Lion

2011-07-28T22:51:00.001+01:00

If, after upgrading to MacOS Lion, you find that you can't access ROS.ie (Revenue Online Services), first, check if you have Java installed (by going here, for instance); it'll install it for you if you don't. If you still can't access it, try using Firefox. It looks like something has changed about the way Java applets ask for permission to look at your local filesystem (which they need for the ROS site, as they have to be able to read your client certificate); it seems to work in Firefox but not Safari or Chrome.

Weird aspect of the new Blogger interface

2011-07-08T02:17:00.002+01:00

Google Blogger has a new posting UI. It's mostly quite nice, but there's at least one strange thing:

You might expect that to be a link. But in fact, only the '2' is a link to the moderation section, the rest is just text. Awkward to click on. Not a great idea, I feel.

The mystery of the apartment building heat providers

2011-07-07T00:43:00.001+01:00

In both my current apartment and the previous one, heating has been supplied by a building-wide boiler. Now on the face of it this sounds like a very good idea; you don't need a boiler in each unit, and there are various economies of scale involved. The trouble comes when it comes time to pay for it.

The previous apartment's provider was a company called Dalkia, part of a large French group called Dalkia. The current one is Bord Gais Heat, a division of Bord Gais Energy. And both were a tremendous pain in the neck.

The trouble with Dalkia was the issuing of bills. They got round to doing it at highly irregular intervals, and they often never showed up in the post at all, only getting paid when a reminder for the bill I never got showed up.

The trouble with Bord Gais Heat was simply getting them to acknowledge that I existed at all, and allowing me to pay them. I didn't actually manage to get signed up properly at all until I'd been living here for months; my first attempt got lost in the move to "the new system" (a common problem with utility companies; got similarly lost in a new system move with UPC a while back), and it was remarkably difficult to get through to them on the phone. And eventually I did, and paid the deposit by laser, and asked could I set up a direct debit over the phone, but was told that no, I must send in the form. So I sent in the direct debit mandate.

And then, I get a reminder to pay my bill, warning it must be paid by date X. It had allegedly been issued the middle of last month, but only turned up a couple of days ago. So I rang up and paid it, and am setting up a direct debit over the phone tomorrow, and hopefully the whole thing is now finally sorted.

It must be something about the proximity to hot water; makes billing impossible. Both companies keep a remarkably low profile, too; if you google for "bord gais heat" all you get are boards posts trying to find out what it is, while if you Google for Dalkia, you get a confusing website with the eight million things the conglomerate does. Bizarre.

Dealbook.ie - How rude!

2011-07-07T00:27:00.001+01:00

So, last week, I was the proud recipient of a piece of unsolicited commercial mail from a new company called dealbook.ie, one of the several million Groupon-y things launched in the last month or so. So, according to The Twitter, did many other people. I, in common with all normal people, don't care for unsolicited commercial email, so I was a bit miffed.

The odd thing about it was that I was addressed as "Dear Robert", and it apparently knew I was male, presenting this charming bit of sexism:

We have a section for him and a section for her, so you won't need to be bothered by the girly stuff.

The interesting thing about this is that it indicates that they got my name and email, and probably gender, from some list or other. I was understandably fascinated to see what list I was on that was being used by random companies for commercial email, so emailed and asked. A week later, no response.

I think, really, if you're going to send people unsolicited commercial mail, the very least you can do is answer them when they try to find out where the hell you got their details. Most unimpressed.

A quick search of my email indicates that it's actually not the first mail I've had from them, either; the previous one was sent using a different bulk mailing solution, mere days after the company was registered.

Using Flex UI elements from within a Flash AS3 project

2011-06-23T21:01:00.000+01:00

First, a bit of terminology, just in case anyone might be confused by Adobe's wondrously simple world of Flash.

Flash Player - A browser plugin which plays Flash (swf) files.
Flash - The platform itself
Flash Movie - A Flash application
Flash Video - A synonym for Flash Movie, obviously. Hah, tricked you! It's actually a video container format used in Flash; it may contain Sorenson Spark, AC6, h264 or WebM.
Flash CS5 - A tool for making Flash movies, and assets for use in Flash apps
ActionScript 3 (AS3) - The language in which Flash apps are usually written these days.
Flash (as an SDK) - An SDK for making Flash apps, possibly using assets created in Flash CS5. You can make a Flash app either with CS5, embedding Actionscript around the place all willy-nilly, or with AS3, importing visual assets from CS5 or elsewhere as appropriate. Or a terrifying combination.
Flex (as an SDK) - An SDK for making 'rich internet applications' which compile to Flash, using a peculiar and unpleasant XML-y templating system
Flex (as a toolchain) - A compiler for AS3. For both conventional Flash and Flex-the-SDK
Flash Builder - An Eclipse plugin with debugger, profiler, etc, for the Flex toolchain. Until version 4, was called Flex Builder, for extra confusion.
Air - A thing for making Flash and/or Flex apps into desktop or smartphone apps
Flash Lite - An incompatible cut-down version of Flash for dumbphones; nobody uses this.

All clear? Good. Adobe are masters of clarity, as you can see.

Now, Flex and Flash are not necessarily used for the same things. Flex is intended to be used for 'rich internet applications'; that is fake desktop applications which run in your browser, or when used with Air fake desktop applications which run on the desktop. Flash is intended for multimedia-y things, like games.

However, it would occasionally be desirable to have the best of both worlds. For instance, you might have a game where you wanted to use Flex's graphing libraries, or its far superior UI widgets. Or you might have an application-y app where you wanted to use some fancy graphics, from Flash.

This may not be as easy as it sounds. They're not precisely interchangeable; Flash assets can be used in Flex, but with various caveats; in particular, Flex widgets may not be placed in Flash containers (Sprites, MovieClips and so forth). So, for many purposes, that route, while officially semi-endorsed by Adobe, is out; simply enclosing your Flash thing within a Flex app and using Flex widgets where appropriate is not an option.

That leaves using Flex stuff in Flash. Unfortunately, while you can use Flex libraries in a Flash app, the UI stuff won't work; it assumes that the SystemManager (a thing created on Flex startup) is there, and even if you meticulously create one, you still have the problem that Flex widgets can't be placed in Flash containers.

But there is a third option, one very much not endorsed by Adobe. You can always embed compiled SWFs (Flash's, and Flex's, ultimate output) in Flash (or Flex), and interact with them. So, the solution, or at least a solution, is to create an essentially blank Flex project, load it into your Flash project, put it in a Sprite or similar, and interact with it. Here's how you do that.

First, create a Flex project. In your main mxml file, do something like this:

public function addElement(thingToAdd:Object):void {

var mxmlApp:* = FlexGlobals.topLevelApplication;

mxmlApp.addElement(thingToAdd);

}

public var thingy:Function = setVarOne;

]]>

Set Framework Linkage to 'merged into code', and compile. You may want to make a release build, to keep down the size. Take the produced SWF.

Now, create an AS3 project, and do something like this:

public class ContainerTest extends Sprite

{

[Embed(source="../flash/AsFlex.swf", mimeType = "application/octet-stream")]

private var myWeirdThing:Class;

private var loadedSM:SystemManager;

protected function getThingInstance(handler:Function){

var loader:Loader = new Loader();

loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, function(e:Event):void { onLoadDone(e, handler)});

loader.addEventListener("mx.managers.SystemManager.isBootstrapRoot", systemManagerHandler);

loader.addEventListener("mx.managers.SystemManager.isStageRoot", systemManagerHandler);

loader.loadBytes(new myWeirdThing());

}

private function systemManagerHandler(e:Event):void {

// Prevent default stops default behaviour here and thus stops some potential

// run time errors.

e.preventDefault();

}

protected function onApplicationComplete(e:Event):void {

trace("app complete");

var expenses:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection([

{Expense:"Taxes", Amount:2000},

{Expense:"Rent", Amount:1000},

{Expense:"Bills", Amount:100},

{Expense:"Car", Amount:450},

{Expense:"Gas", Amount:100},

{Expense:"Food", Amount:200}

]);

var canvas:Canvas = new Canvas();

canvas.width = 200;

canvas.height = 200;

var pieChart:PieChart = new PieChart();

pieChart.dataProvider = expenses;

var pieSeries:PieSeries = new PieSeries();

pieSeries.field = "Amount";

pieSeries.nameField = "Expense";

pieSeries.setStyle('labelPosition', 'callout');

pieChart.series.push(pieSeries);

pieChart.x = 50;

pieChart.width=150;

pieChart.height = 150;

canvas.addChild(pieChart);

var legend:Legend = new Legend();

legend.dataProvider = pieChart;

canvas.addChild(legend);

e.target.application['thingy'](canvas);

}

protected function onLoadDone(e:Event, handler:Function):void{

handler(e.currentTarget.loader.content);

e.currentTarget.loader.content.addEventListener("applicationComplete", onApplicationComplete);

loadedSM = SystemManager(e.currentTarget.loader.content);

}

public function ContainerTest()

{

getThingInstance(function(x){addChild(x)});

}

This requires some explanation. In this case (as it will be our main class), the function ContainerTest is our point of entry. We kick off getThingInstance. This loads the AsFlex.swf file (created in the last stage) which has been embedded as a binary blob. Note that things will not work properly if you embed it as an swf; we are essentially faking loading it from the network.

First, we add a few event listeners; the two which call systemManagerHandler should prevent crashes. onLoadDone is called when the data has finished loading; all it does is runs the pre-provided handler (which in this case just adds the imported swf to the stage), adds an event listener, for when the internal application is done loading, and fetches the app's system manager. Note that we may not, at this point, start messing with the internal app; we have to wait til it has finished loading.

Once the internal app finishes loading, onApplicationComplete is called. We create a Flex canvas, a Flex piechart and a legend for the piechart, and add both to the canvas. We then instruct the internal Flex app to add the canvas to its layout. However tempting it might be to forgo the Flex app entirely and add the Flex canvas directly to the stage, or to a Sprite or whatever, this will not work.

Because we're actually creating Flex objects in the Flash app (even if we're not displaying them there) we have to add a few support libraries. You should add framework.swc, datavisualisation.swc (for the graphs, replace as appropriate to what you're putting in the Flex canvas), and framework_rb.swc; the first two are found in your Flex SDK libs directory, and the third under frameworks/locale/en_us (or whatever locale is appropriate). Build this and it should Just Work.

Note that I haven't tested any of this too thoroughly, and am not responsible for it causing your computer or application to explode, or whatever. I'm not even saying it's necessarily a good idea, but if you really do want to use Flex components inside Flash, it's a working approach.

Only on the App Store...

2011-06-06T20:58:00.001+01:00

It's going around the Internet that MacOS 10.7 will only be available on the Mac App Store. Of course, they said nothing of the sort in the Keynote; they said that it would be available in the App Store, but didn't say that it won't be available anywhere else. App Store only supply would cause trouble for all sorts of people (particularly small corporates), and I really can't see them doing it. Link-bait by tech blogs until proven otherwise, I feel...