blog-j: Symbolizing, Coding, Objectifying, Processing

Just noticed that there is a new release candidate of SEPY, released just this morning.

Personally, I use SEPY almost exclusively for Flash development, and it absolutely rocks. I’ve played a bit with FlashDevelop, and like it, but I don’t think it’s quite as polished as SEPY is (at this point).

SEPY 1.5 RC7: Download | Release Notes

Keep it up, Alessandro.

Via CNN.com:

Hamas has called for the destruction of Israel. The group’s military wing, Izzedine al Qassam, has admitted responsibility for terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians as well as attacks against the Israeli military. The group is listed as a terrorist group by Israel and the U.S. State Department.

Did I miss something? They “admitted responsibility” for terrorist attacks? What is that? I admit when I make a mistake - and try not to do it again. Hamas has not admitted to executing terror attacks - they have claimed responsibility. They have taken ownership. They have strut like peacocks, cheering at the killing of civilians.

They are moving into power. And this is somehow ok.

At least the US State Department doesn’t seem to thrilled about this, either:

The U.S. State Department was blunt.

“We view Hamas as a terrorist organization. We don’t deal with Hamas. And under the current circumstances, I don’t see that changing,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

For more information on Israel and the Middle East, visit HonestReporting.com

(and Studiously Sleeping)

Over the last long while (give or take 2 years), I’ve had some serious problems sleeping (snoring, restlessness, general exhaustion). I like to blame it on not taking naps in the afternoon, but we’ve gotten more and more concerned about it. I spoke to my doctor a few weeks ago and was referred to a sleep clinic here in Toronto. And had an appointment scheduled for April 30th.

So here’s a bit of advice: always ask if there’s a cancellation list. Then get on it.

I got a call from the clinic yesterday morning, notifying me that there’d been a cancellation, and would I like to come in, oh, say, tonight (eg: last night)? After a quick logistics work-out, I took the opening.

And spent last night at the clinic. All in all, it was an interesting experience. It’s somewhat difficult to sleep when you have electrodes taped all over your head, and I didn’t really think I slept at all. But at 5:50am when the technician woke me up and started ripping off said electrodes, he told me that I had slept. Oh, I’d tossed and turned a bit, but I’d slept. Which surprised me.

Now I have to wait a few weeks to meet with the specialist to go over my results. Hoping against sleep apnea, hoping there’s no need for surgery, but definitely needing to get this taken care of. Concentration is obviously difficult when exhaustion is the status quo.

In any case, I got to the clinic at about 8:30pm, hit the admitting office, and was all hooked up with the electrodes by about 9:30pm. Thankfully, they’d suggested bringing reading material, as there is practically nothing to do but pace the room until you’re ready to go to sleep. Having no shortage of reading material (thanks, Dad), I began reading a book by Robert J. Sawyer called “Factoring Humanity.”

I first noticed this book over at my in-laws. My brother-in-law has a copy of it, and I had pulled it off the bookshelf a couple weeks ago and read about 3 chapters. It was absolutely fascinating; I picked up my own copy earlier this week (along with a book of short stories by Sawyer called Iterations, one of Joel Spolsky’s books, and a book each for Phillip and Lauren). Given that I hadn’t had an read dedicated time to read over the past few days, I had been reading the short stories when I had a few minutes, but was waiting on Factoring until I had a solid chunk of time to read. Which fortuitously came last night at the clinic.

Factoring is set in TO (unsurprisingly: Sawyer is Canadian), and touches on topics ranging from psychology (false and repressed memories), computing (quantum and parallel computing, artificial intelligence), art, extraterrestrial life, and, with all that, is very much focused on being human (and what that means in all those contexts). Of course, for me, the particularly interesting bits are about computing (one of the main characters is an AI/Comp Sci. prof at the UofT).

In any case, considering I didn’t get the greatest night of sleep last night, so my thoughts are still a bit muddled (and I’m only about halfway through the book). Regardless, it’s a very stimulating read and I would highly recommend picking it up.

At least being in the office before 7am means I can take off a bit early…

One of the issues that always bugs me about developing for browsers (and not using Flash, of course), is the need to feature sniff due to differing implementations…IE does this, Netscrape does that, Safari doesn’t do anything, and Firefox does it for you. Thinking about it now, this may be the one thing that really pushes me away from using Ajax and dHtml more than occasionally.

However, I noticed a post today on the IEBlog discussing the XmlHttpRequest and it’s status as a native script object in IE7 (in addition to being available as an ActiveX object, for backwards compatability).

This is great news if you’re actively developing Ajax apps. Or if you’re like me and have been sort of (actively) lurking behind the whole Ajax “revolution” (man…I still hate that name…).

Read up @ the IEBlog.

Via the Google Blog:

Today [ed: Jan 12, 2006] is the one year anniversary of the Google Mini, Google’s solution for website and corporate network search, and to celebrate we thought we’d announce a few more of them. The standard Mini lets you search up to 100,000 documents. Now organizations that constantly crank out new content can opt for either of two new Minis: one searches up to 200,000 documents, and another that can manage up to 300,000.

We recently got a GSA here, and while we’re still in the process of getting it into production, it’s a sweet, sweet piece of hardware (try using that as a pickup line).

Happy (belated) Birthday, Google Mini.

And speaking of (belated) birthdays…happy belated birthday to…um…me. I got old(er) yesterday. To celebrate, Dumbledore’s Army (my floor hockey team) won our season opener 6-4, resoundingly crushing our opponents, the Muthapuckas. All I can say is that I’m sore as hell, but it was well worth it. It was really nice to get back into (somewhat) competitive sports (it’s been, oh, I don’t know, about 10 years). Anyway, happy birthday to me, and to you if it was or is yours.

Adobe’s $3.4 billion purchase of Macromedia is starting to have an impact on the software giant’s product line. The latest version of After Effects, unveiled by Adobe tuesday, includes Flash Video export among its new features.

Add anhanced OpenGL 2.0 support, and (unsurprisingly) it looks like the new After Effects seriously rocks. Not that previous versions didn’t (they did).

It’s good to see something like this come out after the merger - especially so quickly. Definitely speaks to a healthy evolution going forward.

Via Macworld.
More on AE7 from Abobe.