blog-j: Symbolizing, Coding, Objectifying, Processing

Another year, another rockin’ festival, for some another 3 (or 4) hangovers. FITC was, yet again, incredible. Highlights for me included John Maeda (who is a very quirky and engaging speaker…a low key presence with a whole lot of personality), North Kingdom, and Danny Stillion of IDEO. Not to mention meeting (and re-meeting) people, including - Paul Ortchanian, Gary Stasiuk, Evert Pot, Kristin Henry, and loads of other people (and by loads I mean not too many, but anyway…).

Of course, being mistaken for Justin Everett-Church was fun, for no particular reason.

Which, surprisingly, brings me to my point - what is it that is just so unbelievably bad about Hungarian Notation? (Or, rather, why do so many people seem to just hate it?)

I was chatting with Paul Ortchanian after his talk (we’d met at FITC last year, briefly, which is apparently why he mistook me for Justin), and I mentioned that I thought his presentation was great, but his use of Hungarian was killing me - oCamera in particular. In a flight of genius, I even showed him the Framework Design Guidelines book (yes, I’m that big a geek that I carry it around with me), expressing the opinion that it is perhaps the most important book for the Flash community - we’re very good at solving problems and writing code that works, but writing solid, usable APIs seems to be beyond all of us (I include those writing the Flash equivalent of the BCL - come on: stage.stageHeight, for crying out loud? what were you thinking??).

Back to the point - what is so bad about Hungarian Notation? You know, naming things like oMyObject, iTreeSize, bIsThisTrue?

You may even see the problem right there.
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For those regular readers of my blog (Hi Mom, Dad!), you’re probably wondering why, over the past month or so, you’ve not been graced with the usual pearls of wisdom that I so wittily impart. Hardcore followers may have indeed noticed my lack of a “new years” post (really, if you’ve not been following me since my days on GeoCities, you’ve really missed a lot), coupled with the lack of a “Hi, it’s my birthday” post, and may have gotten the impression that I’ve fallen off the face of ye good Earth. (In 24 parlance, that would be “gone dark“. Hence the title.)

Well, I haven’t.

(For those of you uninterested in why none of the above has happened, you may want to leave now. Then again, if you are uninterested but are simply looking for something to complain about, by all means - read on, spread the wealth, and have your own private bitch-fest on my account.)

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Joe Balderson compiled a comprehensive listing of session notes from the myriad of sessions at this years FiTC festival on the FlashinTO message boards. This is seriously a public service, and very much worth checking out…

Check ‘em out @ flashinto.com

Silence is golden, don’t you think? Which must explain why I haven’t posted anything here in, oh, just over a month. Things have been hopping mad, which is good, so…there’s that.

Now that I’ve bored you all…

FITC starts tomorrow morning…roughly 9 hours from now. Looking forward, as I always do. I’m unfortunately not going to be there Saturday (other commitments), but that probably affects you not at all.

I will be speaking with Thierry Curis of Akamai on Sunday at 1:30pm. The presentation is titled “Strategies for Managing and Delivering Flash Video Streaming,” and should be fairly interesting if you’re into that kind of thing.

Drop by and say hi if you enjoy this blog. Actually, if you have strong feelings (or otherwise) about this blog, and you’re there, and you see me (be realistic - I’m pretty hard to miss), come over, tell me how much you love or hate it (and why, more importantly), and we can chat. Chatting is, after all, a whole lot of fun.

So, I’m just about too tired to actually be writing anything here.

Perhaps that’s the other reason I haven’t posted anything recently….

PS: I will be writing the follow-up to my last post shortly. Really shortly. Like so shortly you won’t have to wait as long as you’ve already been waiting to read it…

…starts tomorrow. I’m not going to be there on Saturday, but I will be there Sunday and Monday. If you happen to be there, drop by and say hi…I’ll be floating around.

I am very much looking forward to it. The festival promises to be one of the (if not the) best of the year.

Get more info @ fitc.ca.

A while back I posted some negative comments Guy Watson made on his blog, regarding the FITC Festival. It spawned a whack of comments (for my blog, at least), and a not-so-insignificant amount of emails going across the etha.
Well, it seems that Guy has come to his senses. He posted a follow-up on his blog yesterday. And not only has he apologized - but it seems he will be coming to the Festival (9 days away…).
Thanks for the apology, Guy. Looking forward to seeing you in Toronto.
Cold, blustery, it-was-over-15-degrees-celsius-on-Tuesday Toronto.

Not that that’s warm for the rest of the world, but I’m out in short-sleeves, practically ready to jump into my Old Navy Bermuda Shorts.