I've been waiting for an app that would allow me to make Skype phone calls from my iPhone.! And it is here... woo hoo!

It is called "Fring" (and it is now an accepted terminology to use the word "fringing"!).

It not only allows you to make Skype calls and do Skype chats, but also integrates with MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Twitter and a whole lot of other chatting services.

Check out the Fring site for more.

Installing it was a breeze. And the interface is really nice and simple. It uses WiFi to make Skype calls. So if your phone is connected to WiFi, you can make Skype calls.

Fring is also available for other handsets like Wi-Fi Symbian 8 or 9, Windows Mobile 5 or 6 and UIQ.

Creating/modifiy the Apache webserver .htaccess files by hand can be a bit of a pain at times.

Today I came across a website that lets one generate an .htaccess file using a nice, Ajax-y web interface.

For example, to setup authentication, one has to create a user. You can do that by simply filling out a simple form like:

» Continue reading "Online tool for creating Apache .htaccess files"

Adobe Devnet has a security advisory on the upcoming Flash Player 9 update. The advisory lists a few very important changes to the security model in Flash Player which can possibly impact your existing Flex and Flash applications. The changes are primarily to address the vulnerabilities of the earlier versions of Flash Player (9,0,115,0 and before).

There are four key changes that can possibly impact existing applications:

• A socket policy file will always be required for all socket connections
• A policy file will be required to send headers across domains (This will possibly affect some of the Flex apps that I work with)
• The allowScriptAccess default will always be "sameDomain"
• "javascript:" URLs will be prohibited in networking APIs, except getURL(), navigateToURL(), and HTML-enabled text fields

» Continue reading "Important Flash Player Security Update - Check your applications"

Today I needed to use Groovy to create a dump of all MySQL databases on the MySQL server running on my local machine.

So I looked at my earlier blog entry on how to dump MySQL databases using the "mysqldump" command.

So when I issued the command create a dump from console, the contents of the database are dumped to a sql file as expected.

// Works in command line

mysqldump --all-databases -u [username] -p[password] -C > alldatabases.sql

As you might know, it is fairly straight-forward to execute shell commands from Groovy. You simply put the command in quotes and call the execute() method.

However, when I issued the same command using Groovy, the command did not work... well, at least not at first.

» Continue reading "Dumping MySQL databases using Groovy"

I just saw that Universal Mind Cairngorm extensions for Flex are now set up on RIAForge (thanks Andrew).

We have been using the UM Cairngorm Extensions at Straker Interactive (where I work) for ZoomFlex since about six months.

One of the features that I really like about the UM extensions is the ability to combine together event-business logic. Given that any real-life application (like ZoomFlex) has quite a few commands, having a separate Command class for each command can become quite overwhelming. The ability to aggregate command logic into context-specific command classes is very useful.

» Continue reading "Cairngorm extensions from Universal Mind"

Just found this blog entry that speaks of why New Zealand is a great place to do business. Some of the reasons mentioned are:

• At 30%, the corporate tax is lower than or equal to most developed countries’.
• Our GST is only 12.5%, in most developed countries it is 15-25%.
• Workforce participation is 68%, very high by international standards.
• ACC provides no-fault income insurance, meaning businesses to not have to go to massive expense insuring themselves against litigation by injured workers and hiring lawyers to defend themselves.
• Ease of doing business is New Zealand is second in the world only to Singapore.
• This is the least corrupt country in the world.
• Corporate profits were up 60.5% in just six years from 1999 to 2005.
• Only 0.54% of businesses failed last year.

Plus it offers a great lifestyle!

On the downside, Internet connectivity less than average, but is getting better every year.

But if you can be happy living on a large, very pretty island, New Zealand is the place for you.

I came to New Zealand five years back and have been working in the area of software development, and have enjoyed every minute of being here.

Today I wanted to give ColdFusion 8 debugging a try.

So, I started followed the instructions on how to setup the enviornment for debugging. After installing ColdFusion 8 extensions for Eclipse, I went to enable debugger in ColdFusion Administrator. The CF administrator instructs that:

You must specify this debugger port in the JVM settings of your application server, for example: -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005, and restart the server.

If I was using JRun, I know that these options can be added in the jvm.config file.

But as I use JBoss, it took me little bit to figure out where I need to make these changes.

» Continue reading "Setting JVM options on JBoss for ColdFusion 8 debugging"

Just saw an interesting article on Engadget that compared iPhone SDK to Windows Mobile, Android, S60 and Toolchain.

What is really interesting is that Windows Mobile along with Nokia S60 supports Flash.

iPhone, as you know, does not support Flash (and won't support it any time soon, given Apple's comments yesterday about Flash being too slow to run on iPhone).

And what is even more interesting is that Microsoft and Nokia have signed a deal to make Silverlight available on Nokia S60 and S40.

So two things really:

1. Adobe needs to do something to get on to the iPhone platform. AIR runtime perhaps?
2. Adobe needs to look at engaging Nokia for AIR runtime.

Here is the article at Engadget: iPhone SDK Comparison Chart.

A note to myself: The only constant in life, Indy, is change!

I've been using Subversion for version control for a couple of years now. It was quite a change moving from Microsoft Visual Source to Subversion. A different mind set. A different way of doing things.

And then I read about Mercurial today.

Mercurial is one of the new breed of version control systems.

Its major goals include high performance and scalability; serverless, fully distributed collaborative development; robust handling of both plain text and binary files; and advanced branching and merging capabilities, while remaining conceptually simple. It includes an integrated web interface. (Wikipedia)

Basically Mercurial moves away from the paradigm of working with centralized repositories (like CVS and SVN) to support distributed, collaborative development. And at the same time trying to be a simple-to-use system (a big challenge!).

» Continue reading "Life after Subversion -- Mercurial!"

I just went to download Flex 3 SDK from the Try Flex Builder 3 page on the Adobe site.

The file that downloads when one clicks the "Download Flex SDK 3 for all platforms" link at the bottom of the page is called "flex2_sdk_hf1.zip".

When one unzips the file and looks at the readme, it confirms that the SDK vesion is: Version 2.0.1.

I presume the "hf1" in the file name suggests that it is Flex 2 SDK with 'hotfix 1'.

Is anyone else also facing this issue or is it only me?

The SDK that ships with Flex Builder 3 does indeed have a readme that indicates SDK version 3.0. I guess I'll just use that for now.

Update (9.30 a.m.):

The link on the download page has now been fixed. Adobe took just an hour to pick up this blog entry, respond to it, and fix the issue. Very impressive!

Given that I downloaded the incorrect Flex SDK (2.0) earlier today, and am downloading the correct one right now (3.0), I can't help but comment on the size of the SDK. Flex SDK 2.0 was 38.11mb. Flex SDK 3.0 is 78.44mb! Lots of goodies!