My recent work with Groovy & Grails has reignited my passion to blog…

Watch out for a new Grails version of Polymercode.com - hopefully launched before I land at JavaOne…

Found this excellent application of AJAX. It’s an AJAX MySQL Designer application. It has intuitive design tools; comprehensive types and allows import/export of your designs for MySQL as well as XML generation and SQL generation.

well done.

Web2.0 is the common name for the ‘next generation’ of web-based products, services and businesses that leverage the platform independence and ubiquity of the Internet. Some would put more restriction on the definition referring to browser plug-ins like Macromedia Flash or specific web technologies like Ajax, but Web 2.0 is a concept that is independent of the technology it is built upon the same way that e-commerce is not a Java, PHP or Ruby dependant product.

If you’re looking for the leading edge of Internet programming, think about Web 2.0 products and services.

ProgrammableWeb.com has (beta) list of Web2.0 applications you can use right now.

Still interested in Web2.0? You’ll want to check out the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference

Petefreitag.com has a collection of cheat sheets for a variety of technologies. Split into 5 main categories - web, languages, database, version control and other. There are over 30 cheatsheets on languages like Java, JSP, Perl and Ruby. Web technologies like XHTML, CSS and JavaScript each have cheatsheets as well. The other category has cheatsheets for Linix, Vi, Google, mod_rewrite, htaccess, and windows commands among others.

Check them all out at http://www.petefreitag.com/item/455.cfm

link - O’Reilly Radar

If your business is based on software development or support, as either a producer a vendor or a 3rd party integrator, you need to know how to price your product.

O’Reilly OnLamp has some pointers for you on how to Calculate the True Price of Software.

You know they’re mainstream when Donald Trump has blog a in the top links list at bloglines.com
(#13).

RSS on the other hand - while available with almost all blog software, is not mainstream even within the blogging community. A study by the Neilson Group shows that out of 1000 members of their research panel who are blog readers; 66% of the blog readers have never heard of RSS, and only 11% of the blog readers use it.

link - O’Reilly Radar

Like Flickr.com, you can create a free profile and upload media. In this case it’s short video clips instead of images. Like flickr, they use flash to display the media, making it more difficult to copy off of their site. They also include features like links, and RSS feeds.

Simple, straight forward Flash movie player interface is a major plus.

For example,
office sports
extreme 747 landing

Links like this make me wonder how long they can go without a lawsuit…
Family Guy Season 4, episode 8

A detailed list of new functionality that will ship with Flash 8 including BitMap API, Filter API, Text Rendering, Post Processing and External API.
link - flashmagazine.com

Update your operating system, Flash 8 is not going to support Windows 95, NT or classic Macintosh.

Tons of Macromedia Flash 8 and Studio 8 articles.
link - casario.blogs.com

Download a free desktop Flash Video Player.
link - flashguru.co.uk

WebOrb - connect your Flash or AJAX clients to your server side applications. Integrates with .Net, Java EJBs and POJOs, ColdFusion, and XML Web Services.
brought to you by-

Flash(R) by Example and Flex(TM) by Example will ship with the SYNC Socket Server Framework. SYNC allows you to create a multi-user server with a custom protocol tuned to your application.

Check out Ripple - a Framework designed to help structure your Flash site so that it may be deep linked and indexed by search engines.

Developing in Actionscript? Don’t do it in Flash. Try the MTASC plug-in for Eclipse

Find other Open Source Flash projects at OSFlash.org.

thanks peterjoel.com

As expected, Macromedia Studio 8 was announced today.

Macromedia employees are already writing about how to make use of its improvements.

• Studio 8 feature lists
• Flash Player 8 bitmaps

A few months ago Kottke.org went pro. Jason quit his job to work on his blog full time. He generated the money he needed with a short PayPal driven donation drive where people could, and did, donate whatever amount they felt comfortable with from a couple of cents to hundreds of dollars. In typical kottke fashion, he even posted the results of the drive on his blog.

Another blog that I visit regularly, The Jason Calacanis blog talks about the business behind weblogsinc.com. They make over $2,300 a day - just from google ads. That’s just shy of a million dollars a year. With money like that, it’s easy to see how they can afford to pay bloggers to blog. Is that the simplest ways to make money from your blog?

For business advice, FastCompany is another blog I visit. They recently posted a list of Top Business Blogs - I was astonished to find PolymerCode was not one of them

FastCompany was one of the blogs that made Forbes list of best Small Business Blogs. The most recent Forbes - Best Of The Web series features Blogs That Matter - their list of top blogs which include blogs on a variety of other subjects as well.

The unfortunate thing about these lists is their heavy focus on the US. Being Canadian, not all of their advice is relevant. Where are the top Canadian Business Blogs?

Even if you’re not being paid to blog, there are other ways to make a return on your investment. Heidi Cohen is getting a lot of traffic lately after she wrote an article about measuring the ROI of corporate blogs; A very good article that mentions some of the tangibles and intangibles that blogs bring to a business irrespective of what country you call home.

Macromedia working on the next generation actionscript editor codenamed Zorn. They’re asking for your ideas. I’ve put in my 2 cents. You should to.

Add View Source to your Flash and Flex applications

I’m thinking of buying a new hard drive. It time for me to learn how to reinstall windows without losing your data.

IE7 (beta) isn’t fully CSS complient. They’re fixing bugs, but it looks like IE7 still won’t be fully CSS complient before it ships.

Opera says they’ll pass the W3C Acid Test. Opera also says that their next version will stop spoofing user agent as IE. This should give a more accurate distribution in most sites web statistics.

I am a fan of movie trailers. That sounds a little odd to some people, but I really enjoy the anticipation I get from watching a good trailer. One of my favorite sites to check out trailers is apple trailers. They have a good, up to date selection of trailers all viewable in quicktime. The downside is that they don’t have an RSS feed. So I made one.

I built a screen scraper that parses the site and looks for all of their latest releases and outputs it into rss, then uploads it to polymercode.com. The feed is very much in Beta, so don’t be surprised if it isn’t readable by your RSS reader. Also - I am going to schedule the reader to scrape the trailers web site only a couple times a day - so don’t be surprised if the feed it slightly out of date with what is actually on the site.

I would appreciate your comments, and any errors you find. I’m going to release the source code for the application once it’s stablized and production ready - so keep checking back if you’re interested.

Apple - Movie Trailers RSS 2.0 Feed