Just case you were wondering, I can think ten things of off hand that make Aptana the best front-end code editor around. in no particular order:

1. It does real-time Javascript syntax checking.
   Does any other editor on the planet do this?
2. Code hinting is insanely thorough.
   Whether in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, Aptana was on it. In JavaScript, hitting the “.” property accessor popped open a code hint for whatever object type I was working with, incuding my own JS classes. In HTML and CSS, the space key revealed everything under the sun that could go into the declaration or element.
3. It has clear HTML DOM tree demarcation.
   Unlike a lot of HTML editors I’ve used, Aptana does an amazing job of letting me know where the opening and closing of the tag my cursor is currently inside. It’s such a simple thing, but when it doesn’t work well, it really blows.
4. Aptana does FTP.
   Eclipse, seriously, no integrated FTP? After installing Aptana, it took all of a few mouse clicks and one trip to the help documents to get an FTP site linked to my project folder. Uploading can be triggered from hot keys.
5. Aptana’s shortcuts make sense.
   For people who don’t use NuSphere, I’ll fill you in–NuSphere has some really strange default keyboard shortcuts. Most people would expect Ctrl+Shift+S to execute a “Save As…” type function. Not NuSphere though, that means upload the file you’re currently working on (by default anyway, this can be changed in the settings).
6. Aptana knows what is supported by what browsers.
   I’m not sure it’s natural for me to be so excited about this, but, seriously, how awesome is it to know from your editor whether or not the attribute you’re setting has any relevance in IE or Firefox. The little FF and IE icons in the code hinting are super quick to process and can save you tons of time hitting online documentation trying to figure out why you’re having some problem.
7. Aptana does JS document outlining.
   When you’re doing AJAX intensive stuff or dealing with any sort of lengthy JavaScript, this is an awesome timesaver both in terms of navigating your document and remembering all your method and property names.
8. Aptana auto-tabs when you wrap stuff in if-else blocks.
   So, you’re writing so logic and you realize you need to do an if-else. Normally, you go up above your code block, add the “if (…” part, then go underneath and add the “} else …” stuff, then select your lines of code in between and tab it over to make your code nice and easy to read. Well, with Aptana, adding the ending curly brace will automatically add a tab (if it’s needed) to the code block. Score!
9. It’s got a full-fledged snippets panel.
   How is it that so many editors still don’t have these?
10. It’s free.
    I should probably feel sad that I shelled out bucks for Adobe CS3 Web Premium’s included HTML Editor, Dreamweaver, when there was something like Aptana out there. But really, who wants to be bitter about it. Besides, Dreamweaver does have some stuff Aptana doesn’t. Overall, even it had cost me $100, Aptana would be worth it. Dreamweaver, be prepared to have a lot of free time.

If you read below, you can get a sense of what happened with BustedTees.com and I. The short and sweet is that they erred sending a shirt to a close friend of mine and expected me to pay the shipping to get the shirt returned so they could try again.

After four phone calls, the last being productive, I managed to arrange for them to ship a new shirt (the right one this time!) to the original recipient and to ship him a return, postage-paid shipping label. Not bad, eh? So, while their policy is definitely very crooked, if you’re willing to stay on them you can get what you want.

What did I do to get BustedTees.com to pay for return shipping? I spoke frankly about how they screwed up and embellished a little about how badly the wrong shirt was received by the recipient. In truth, it was received with more of a “wtf?” than a “omfg, I hate you for this” as I let them believe, but what is a boy to do when a company tries to screw its customer?

My advice to anyone trying to get their money’s worth out of BustedTees.com is to call during normal business hours, be unafraid of showing how much their error is affecting you, and not to give up after the first person says there’s nothing they can do. There most certainly is something they can do and will do if you make them.

Original Post

So, I recently purchased a t-shirt from bustedtees.com, a popular e-tailer of t-shirt with catchy crap on the fronts. The order total was $23.08, a fortune for a t-shirt, but I was making a present of it, so the cost was worth it.

After the package was received (thanks to UPS’s online tracking that is not bullshit), I called the person to whom I was sending the shirt. The t-shirt I picked made a perfect extension to a running joke I was participating in, so I felt sure that when the person got the shirt, he would be excited about it.

Was he excited about the shirt he received? No. Not at all. “Why?” you might be asking. Because BustedTees.com fulfillment department got my order wrong. They sent a t-shirt that had nothing to do with anything. One that wasn’t even funny.

Aside from being irritating this means that I have to go collect a present from someone, ship it back to Maryland, and wait for a new one to come through. Suck. Big suck in fact.

But that’s not all! With BustedTees.com not only do you get the wrong merchandise, you also get a company policy of non-refundable shipping charges.

That’s right, not only do you have to suck up the wait for the right t-shirt (theoretically) to come, you also have to pony up shipping costs for the UPS truck to haul their crap away.

In short, I will never be purchasing from BustedTees.com again. BustedTees.com is a rip off and a scam.

I chatted briefly with a woman who sets up and maintains greeting card displays for a living. I was looking for a card and she happened to be there straightening up the displays after inventory, so I hunted while she straightened. We talked about people’s varying tastes and how one card that might be hilariously funny to some people could be ultimately offense to some wimps somewhere. Well, that was my take on it, I won’t put words in her mouth.

My conversation with the card lady, who I’m choosing just now to call Maureen, ended when I found my cards and she finished her work but not before we stumbled onto a good idea for a website/social network. There’s little likelihood I’ll ever build it or even think much about it after today or this week, but something about an idea getting tossed around between two people who know basically nothing about each other interests me.

As a constant idea tosser, I spend a good part of every day cooking up grand (and not so grand) schemes for everything from a shorter route to work by bicycle to pondering what little I understand of the world’s distribution of power and wealth. Whether alone or with a Maureen, ideas come along at very strange times. As long as the ideator keeps her or his mind open to new concepts and/or complete abandonments of old ones, the possibilities are endless for what you might stumble into conceptually.

Having the thought, owning the thought, and executing on the thought are of course three very different things. For me, most thoughts (probably rightfully) end shortly after they start with no harm done to anyone aside from the lost brain cells others incur when I can’t keep them to myself. However, there have been several that have really stuck with me. A few of which I am executing on, the world be wary.

I suppose now that I’m reaching the end of my appetite for writing that I didn’t really have much of a point, except to mention what I’m sure many others have noted: ideas come along in unexpected circumstances. Maureen, wherever you are now, whatever cards you are arranging, the world (or at least archive.org and Google’s cache) will remember we talked. *Sniff*

So, what I noticed was that there was a pretty large spike in memory usage when the scene first loads–no problem, I’m loading a couple hundred images in, I should expect that. However, I noticed also that as I transitioned from one image to the next (the smaller to the larger), RAM use would jump up about 10 megabytes. Where is garbage collection when I need it?

The trouble turned out to be that I was re-instantiating a BitmapMaterial object during each from of the animation. For whatever reason (I haven’t had time to walk through the BitmapMaterial and MaterialObject3D classes carefully yet), BitmapMaterial objects seem never to leave memory. The issue may be more complex than this though, as I’m also reinstantiating a plane each frame as well to accommodate the changing siz. Perhaps the Plane is not leaving memory either?

Combing the web, I found an article on the Papervisio3D 2.0 Alpha “Great White” (http://thebackbutton.com/blog/47/materialmanager-memory-leak-in-papervision3d-great-white/) in which he mentions the whoas of a certain Singleton object that goes by the name of MaterialManager.

I scrubbed my Papervision3D 1.5 hierarchy for the same and found nothing. Looking a little further though, I found in the SceneObject3D class a reference to a class called MovieMaterial, which has in it a Singletonish static method called updateAnimatedBitmaps. This function references the animatedMaterials dictionary, containing (presumably) references to every material in the Scene including the one’s that I want, expressly, to die.

My apologies to anyone expecting a clearer outline of what’s going on with the animatedMaterials dictionary. You won’t find it here. You will however find a couple of fixes for this particular flavor of memory leak.

The first fix I found was to create a private class property of a BitmapMaterial object for each item that gets displayed. The class arrangement I am using has an composed DisplayObject3D inside of a class that handles event assignment, etc. So, by instantiating this BitmapMaterial once and simply changing it’s texture property each frame of animation instead of reinstantiating it, the animatedMaterials dictionary doesn’t get bloated with invisible BitmaMaterials, and the RAM uses stays where it should. Each frame I would then reapply the material to the newly resized plane.

A second fix, taking a note from Alex Bustin (see link above), is to simply comment out the lines of code in the SceneObject3D class that run the updateAnimatedBitmaps function. Both of these fixes seem to do the trick, I’ll leave it up to you decide which feels better.

I hope someone else might find this useful. Maybe you can spare yourself the three hours of trouble shooting. =P.

So, today when one of my coworkers responded to my poll of what’s up for lunch with Dan McGuinness for Fish and Chips, I was a little hesitant. Okay, actually, not hesitant at all because I was starving, but in other cases I would’ve been quite hesitant.

The ride over to Dan McGuiness was short, in fact we probably should’ve just walked but the sky was threatening rainfall and I really didn’t want to muss my hair.

Leaving a little early paid off when we arrived, finding only a couple of seats in the whole place occupied. The three of us (we picked up an extra on the way out) grabbed a table next to a big open window letting us feel the breeze off the roundabout while we grabbed our food.

If you ask me, that’s a fine portion for five bucks. While the plate may look a little empty in the pic, in reality it was both a very large plate and a very large portion. Rarely do I not finish my food, but today I actually left a bit of fish behind. *sniff*

The waitress was great, not over attentive or under, and very direct in getting things done.

Dan McGuiness is a fine place for a quick lunch too, I was surprised to find. From the time I stood up from my desk to when I returned to my desk was about 40 minutes. Definitely worth a go once every couple of weeks, I think.

Though they’re probably known more for their backed house at night and stage in the back, Dan McGuiness is a pretty sweet spot for a quick sit down lunch that is Music Row friendly — if you get there early.

http://www.danmcguinnesspub.com/nashville/

Enough with the past, let’s talk of revolution!

The revolution mouse is truly a stand-out in the world of wireless mice. At the nearest evil retail price gouger, I tested out every mouse on the rack and found that, at the most expensive end was actually the best mouse, not just the most hyped.

Until you have used the rubber wrapped steel scroll wheel of the Revolution mouse you probably can’t imagine the feeling of the weight and momentum of the wheel. Unlike any other mouse I’ve ever used, the Revolution also features a software customizable clutch system that allows you to scroll normally (with the quiet, clicky, one-line-at-a-time speed) or to spin the wheel with some gusto and disengage the clicky mechanism allowing the steel wheel to spin freely on bearings. The result: a page that scrolls at blinding speed (or not so blinding speed, depending on how hard you flicked the wheel) for several seconds without you doing anything. I have yet to test the system with a stop watch or other method, but I have been able to scroll smoothly from the top of a very long page to the bottom with a single flick of the wheel’s rubber center track. Very cool. When the wheel stops, the clutch re-engages letting you scroll smoothly again.

The mouse also has a unique thumb scroller which reminiscent of the scroll wheels of several years ago. On some sort of spring, the wheels allows about a quarter turn forward or backward. Using the SetPoint software that comes with the set, I was able to set the thumb scroll wheel to control the playback volume on my workstation. As an over frequent loud music jammer, it’s very nice to be able to click the thumb button to mute or rock my thumb back, letting the volume decrease gradually when the guy next door starts banging on the wall.

The mouse also glides much, much more smoothly than the one it replaced on the same desk surface. Maybe that’s something that wears down over time, but for the time being I’m soaking up the glidiness (note: glidiness is not a word). Overall, I’m very satisfied with the Revolution mouse. In fact, if there had been a decent corded keyboard, I might’ve gotten the mouse alone and a separate keyboard.

Who needs an LCD on their keyboard, really?

I’m not a fan of whirlygigs and dohickies that serve no practical purpose. While it’s certainly nice to be able to use my keyboard as a thermometer… or to use my keyboard as a stand alone calculator, since I don’t have one of those available in my operating system, I can imagine my life without this stuff. There doesn’t seem to be a way to disable the LCD either, so I’m interested to see how short of work the keyboard makes of the 4 AA batteries it requires.

Aside from the completely extraneous features the keyboard sports, the key resistance, clickiness, and angle of keyboard are all very nice. Definitely superior to most of the other keyboard I tried out. Though I have to say I would much prefer a Firefox logo function-key icon on the F5 key rather than the Internet Explorer “E” it sports. They should at least give you a sticker or something you could cover that up with so if my friends come over and see my keyboard I won’t feel embarassed. =) If anyone does judge me harshly, I’m sure I can win them over with the cute noise the Capslock key being toggled makes the keyboard emit.

Bluetooth? I thought white teeth were in fashion these days?

Yay! Bluetooth! Meh, no matter how hard I try, I still feel a little underwhelmed about having a bluetooth device that I actually make use of. Maybe as I use the keyboard the necessity of this will reveal itself.

I should also note that the Logitech Bluetooth dongle does NOT play nicely with other bluetooth devices and settings your machine my already have in place. In my instance, I had installed a Widcomm bluetooth antenna in months past. When I installed the Logitech drivers and restarted my machine I was met with some port devices not showing in my system boot and then Windows hanging perpetually on the loading screen. After several restarts to the last “good” configuration with no luck, I arrived the conclusion that Logitech can make Windows simply not boot. A quick restart in safe mode and removal of all things Bluetooth from my system got me back into normal windows and I was able to reinstall logitech from a downloaded executable with no issues.

Overall, despite paying a price that I am trying to love my new hardware enough not to be ashamed of, I’m pretty satisfied with my new desktop input devices

Ouch, the Power key is no joke

Seriously, the Power key by default body slams your machine into standby without a confirmation warning, delay, or shred of mercy. I thought my machine had crashed.

Conclusion

Viva la revolution! For the price I paid I am determined to be happy with the set and, in truth, it’s not hard to be happy with the MX5500 Revolution Cordless Desktop. Lots of superfluous extras and great coverage of the fundamentals, the kit is worth the price.

To my surprise and delight, the app installed quickly, quietly, and in less than 10 seconds. Though I do have a fairly fast workstation, this was still much faster than a lot of the crap I have downloaded recently.

So now what? A long lengthy configuration? Lots of preference settings and setting up a synchronization repository or something equally invasive? Nope. In fact, within about a minute of running Allway Sync for the first time I was able to set up two Jobs–their term for folders and files you want to sync up–and synchronize all my project files to my jump drive (see here). I got a little tripped up in how to create/save jobs, but in doing so I found another cool feature of this application–multiple receiving folder synchronization.

Allway supports synchronizing your files across drives and even into multiple folders. So, for me, I can backup my files at the same time as synchronizing them since Allway also allows you to set up different preferences for each synchronizing folder. Allway indeed.

Needless to say, I’m very excited to have Allway in my arsenal of cool, free apps that help me do what I do. Visually, Allway is a little bit lacking. In fact, it could almost pass for a 16-bit app from years gone by. But who cares? The app has works so flawlessly it could be all ASCII and I would still use it. The other upside is that the light-weight interface means it’s really light on the processor.

I hate to shamelessly plug something without at least needling it’s flaws a little, but there’s really not much I can say about Allways except that its menus could be a little more intuitively laid out. The functionality is there and is good.

The 8 GB model shown here marks Corsair’s new line of ultra-durable flash storage drives. Generally the drives come with lots of stickers, but I’m of the mind that if the device looks good without embellishment, one should let it be what it is.

While the 16 GB and 32 GB were both tempting offerings, but at $63 dollars shipped by ZipZoomFly.com was clearly the best value. The 8 GB make roughly 16 times the capacity of the drive it’s replacing, so I’m not too worried that I shouldn’t have gotten one of the larger models.

The construction is rugged, even a little imposing. To my eye, it looks a bit like the sort of device the evil villain would manipulate in some way to reveal a glowing green glass vial of something hazardous. Within the first minutes of having the drive, I removed the stickers that label it as a Corsair Survivor. The slightly spattered stencil-like “SURVIVOR” logo doesn’t really fit the smooth anodized aluminum shell if you ask me.

Larger than your average drive, the Corsair Survivor sizes up more or less equally with a full roll of nickels. It feels lighter than you would expect for how solid it looks, but you definitely know you’re handling some hardware. When opened, the drive looks as though it’s probably just glued into the screw-on cap rather than being a solid piece of aluminum. One molded piece would be stronger, but the glued plastic feels very solid. I pried against it for several minutes to remove the last of the goo from the adhesive of the label and never felt as though I was going to damage the drive or break it loose from the cap.

The LED built into the drive is an exceptionally bright blue. You’ll definitely know if the drive is operating if you’ve got a clear view of the machine it’s plugged into.

Access speeds speeds seemed acceptably fast to me. My previous drive was a three year old 512 MB SanDisk, so anything would probably seem blazing fast to me.

Bundled with TrueCrypt

When I plugged the drive into a USB port I was surprised to see AntiVir throwing several heuristic warnings and one virus signature match on the drive. All the warnings and detections were caused by non-essential auto run files to launch TrueCrypt installer. All were easily deleted without breaking any functionality of the drive that I’m aware of.

The TrueCrypt interface was surprisingly good and I easily set up a 512 MB encrypted volume on the drive to use for all my deep dark secrets and my Swiss account numbers. The next time I’m on an international flight and get cornered by the bad guy, I can feel comfortable turning my drive over, I guess. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get much use out of the ability to securely store lots of files, but at present I’m using it to store backups of all my server user names and passwords in case I need to migrate systems, etc.

If nothing else I can say that I got a bit of education about the world of file encryption with TrueCrypt. Though I have nothing to substantiate the opinion, I think the folks who wrote/write/maintain TrueCrypt definitely know what they’re doing. I’m not exactly sure what a TwoFish Serpent Whirlpool encryption scheme is all about, but it definitely sounds complicated and hard to crack. If you’re interested in protecting the key codes to your off-shore intercontinental ballistic party poppers, check out TrueCrypt.

All In All

Overall, I’m very happy with the drive. I won’t have to worry as much about handing it over to a consulting client and having the disk be too full to copy the necessary files. I’ll do my best to put the drive through it’s paces, and I’ll update this post if I manage to break the drive or cause it to malfunction.

And of course, if you’re into massive flash drive storage capacity, there’s always the 16 GB and 32 GB alternatives.
Corsair Survivor 8 GB at ZipZoomFly.com

Corsair Survivor 16 GB at ZipZoomFly.com

Corsair Survivor 32 GB at ZipZoomFly.com

If, for instance, you try to import a sub-package of the flash package and find yourself with only display, external, filters, geom, net, and text much like this:

The problem is that your ActionScript file is loading code hints for Actionscript 1.0 and 2.0. This problem would be very apparent to anyone who, unlike me, leaves the ActionScript editor’s built-in class and package browser open. For those who have closed this frame in order to save horizontal space might be at a loss for why their code hinting is incomplete.

The Fix

To fix this issue, just open the ActionScript class and package preview pane and select the proper version of ActionScript for the AS file.

I actually thought this was a probably held exclusively by BlueCross/BlueShield–whose websites by the way are absolutely mare’s nests–but I’m dismayed to find that Humana, who I’ve chosen as my carrier suffers from the same woes. As I’m writing these lines I’m waiting for the “My Messages” screen to load. A whopping 24 second load time for a screen that looks a lot like this:

(click to view larger)

If you do click the link, make sure you check out the sweet 1px horizontal scrollbar, which sticks around even when the window is stretched out to 1680×1050.

The bank I prefer has amazing web applications, great security, and has never once thrown an exception generating basic UI elements. They also take a lot less of my money than my insurance company. Humana, you lured me in with cross-browser support on your main site (they really did, that is the actual reason I chose them over BlueCross/BlueShield), but you have since shaken my confidence with your ASP errors and User Interface neglect. Shame on you and the precedent you maintain with such a crumby application.