However, don't let the war make you think this is some majestic good vs. evil epic space war. Battles are mostly low key. There is lot's of narration and dialog. Sterling self-claims his crammed prose. No kidding. Adjectives rule supreme in this novel; as many as possible are crammed into each sentence. If one would do a histogram of adjectives, this novel would be on the far right tail of the bell curve. Here's an excerpt: " He always wore his spacesuit, [something something], and [multiple length modifiers] body odor came through its [multiple adjectives] collar with [multiple adjectives] pungency." Sentences like this go on and on and on and on and on and on and on throughout the novel. And there's no shortage of hyphenated words, like long-fermented, eye-watering. On one page, there were no less than 11 hyphenated words, plus one triple one.

Similar to the prosthetics of the Borg, the sentences themselves seem interchangeable. Here's another excerpt of a dialogue:
"What was your brigade?
I'm no Cataclyst.
I have your weapon here.
Constantine pulled a ... vial from his ... jacket ..."
You may as well interchange your own sentences: `The tree fell in the forest; it made no sound' or `the space ship went into orbit; it's boots were muddy.' Give it a try. It'll make as much sense.

The lapl.org now links to amazon.com reviews; how cool is that? The above excerpt also goes on at length, BTW. And some reviewers really liked the book, one enough to read it four times. !

My own one sentence view of agile development? It's one way to control schedule variability in circumstances where resources and schedule must be relatively fixed, but the feature list is flexible.

I loved the photo of the pair programming gurus in front of the MacBook. Actually, I think maybe I worked at that company for a couple of years. It was great!

Fabric covered journal with pen holder - Red and Yellow Shibori

Description I'm not good with pens. I purchase a constant stream of them, but they always wander off within a day or two. I mention this only because since making myself one of these journals, I have had the same pen for 43 days now. Never underestimate the usefulness of a simple loop of fabric.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. There are many things of beauty at the Etsy shop of antieuclid. Enjoy and be amazed or if not amazed at least nonplussed.

Git for OS X

You will want to install Git after you watch Randal's talk at Google on YouTube.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Title:

Informal MAX 2009 recap at Busby's in Santa Monica

Date and Time:

October 14, 2009 from 8:00pm - 10:30pm

Address:

3110 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, CA
google map

Agenda:

Want to find out what you missed at Adobe MAX 2009 and meet and talk with other local Flex developers?  Our next meeting will be an informal hang out session at Busby's where folks who attended can share their impressions with those who didn't.  Also, most of the sessions from MAX were recorded and posted on tv.adobe.com, so be sure to check those out too!

Hope to see you all there!

(Busby's is just down the street from our normal meeting place, see the address above).

-Tom

Weds nite, looks like fun!

Want a framework like PureMVC but without Singletons, Service Locators, or casting? Perhaps one with Dependency Injection and Automatic Mediator Registration?

Well, you might enjoy RobotLegs AS3: yet another lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications.

It’s got the bits that I like about PureMVC (Mediators, Commands and Proxies) without any of the bits that I’m not so fond of (Service Locator, Singletons, casting casting casting!).

I’ve put the source up on GitHub, so feel free to Fork it and make it better:

Its from groups.oogle.com/group/robotlegs

oogle mah boogle, i mean google!