The Danosphere.

The company I work for, Decision Lens, is getting into the social media game [finally, somewhat... ok just a little]. Anyways, we have a youtube channel now, it’s pretty sparse at the moment but if you are a “youtuber” it never hurts to follow the Decision Lens YouTube Channel to keep up to date with our new videos.

In the meantime checkout this vid, it’s a little long but in all fairness it’s pretty hard to describe what the Decision Lens Suite does in a succinct way, it’s a very powerful software platform with a wide range of uses-and the video goes a long way in explaining that. Check it out, for more info visit the Decision Lens website.

Hey everyone! I have been really really busy lately, and thus haven’t had the time I usually do to post here and respond to requests. I know there are quite a few of you waiting for me to release source code to some of my projects. I will gladly release it- I just need time to get it all together, upload, link, describe, etc. Since I’m so busy working on v2 of tcbn (the college blog network) I haven’t had time to site down and get that all up on the site. It’s looking like I will have it up sometime in May, sorry to make everyone wait, but I wanted to let you know, I WILL be posting it!

In the meantime you can checkout my code snippets on snipt.org. Until them just hold on tight, I’ll still be making my usual random posts here but the source-code related stuff won’t be up til sometime in May. I’ll also be posting some other cool stuff I haven’t had time for around then as well. Thanks for your patience everyone, I really appreciate it!

I’m pleased to announce Snipt.org the twitter-based code sharing service is growing into much more. Today the Snipt.org API was released along with a number of other features including an AIR App, AS3 Library,  and Wordpress Plugin (which I’m using on this site!). Hopefully we will see some cool implmentation of the API in the near future (Textmate hint hint). To check out all the goodies head to Extending Snipt.org.

I was a little surprised when I went to make this post using the comedy central “video embed” and upon previewing my post saw tiny text-link advertisements for other comedy-central programming underneath the embedded video. I did not want this! I only wanted the video!

Direct Embed From Comedy Central:

Code Trimmed to Show JUST the Video:

So I hacked their code [deleted] to get rid of the advertisements which I never asked for to begin with. Want to see the difference between my “pure video” embed and the “advertised embed”. Here is the code comparison:

Pretty lame that they try and get people using the embed to unknowingly run their advertisements.

Here is a recent code snippet I wrote to draw dashed lines in Actionscript (I am using it in Flex). Very cool. I’m displaying it using the new “Snipt Embed” functionality from Snipt.org, pretty neat!

Using the Flex 3 logging API is not really cut and dry. It is made to be rather extensible and flexible but at the same time it manages to be completely painful and hard to understand. The Log, ILogger, LogLogger, TraceTarget, LogEvent and LogEvent level classes and be rather cumbersome.

An example of a straight up ‘log write’ would be:

var mylog:ILogger = Log.getLogger("my.package.MyClassName");
if(Log.isDebug()){
     mylog.debug("Hello from the logger");
}

This would get you [DEBUG] level output with the message “Hello from the logger”. The problem with this approach is that I wanted to be able to log from any class, without having to create ILogger instances in all classes. I also wanted the logging to be dynamic so I could hide the class package if I wanted, I also wanted the LogEvents to carry all the information that the actual ‘log write’ contained.

So I created CustomLogger and CustomLogEvent classes that are built on the pre-existing logging API. This simple goal of these classes is to make logging easier. Now you can directly call:

CustomLogger.debug("Hello from the custom_logger");

or you can access it with a Singleton instance:

var log:CustomLogger = CustomLogger.getInstance();
log.debug("Hello from the custom_logger");

So thats all good and well but how does this make things easier? By using the CustomLogger you now have FULL control over the log messages as opposed to handing them off to a Flex ILogger/LogLogger and letting it do what it will with the log messages. Also, you do not need to instantiate a new ILogger for every class that wants to write log output. Additionally the expanded CustomLogEvent class gives whatever is listening the full rundown on what is happening in terms of logging as opposed to just a glimpse.

Here is an example that shows how useful the new CustomLogger/CustomLogEvent classes are especially when it comes to directing log output to a different target (in this case, a List component).

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