So Adobe has opened up the source to Flex, a development environment for Flash-based web applications.

This wouldn’t have been interesting a few months ago, but having jumped into the professional world and ending up a Flex developer upon landing, I find it pretty interesting.

When I first started, my employer sent me off to a Flex training course. As a long-time Free Software enthusiast (I’m posting this from a fresh install of Ubuntu Linux 7.04), I found the instructor’s “Adobe Rocks!” cheerleading a bit grating. Even if Adobe released the Flex compiler for free-as-in-beer, their somewhat lackluster Linux support for Flash and the obscene amount they charged for the IDE—which is little more than an Eclipse plugin—made it all seem a bit disingenuous.

So, a good old-fashioned open-sourcing makes me smile, particularly since probably about 40% of my development time is actually spent working with Flex. It’s nice to be able to get paid for working on a nice, cutting edge (if still slightly buggy) technology—specially now that I can do it without upsetting the open source side of my conscience.

… and I cannot lie.

Baby Got Back, Gilbert and Sullivan Style.

That’s insanely hilarious.

Really, this just makes me want to do a techno remix of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.”

Also: Just ignore the fact that I haven’t blogged in months. Thank you.

Andy Griffith: A Real American Hero. The PATRIOT Act doesn’t go over well. Even in Mayberry.

More or less unrelated: What was up with Aunt Bea’s accent? Weren’t they supposed to be in North Carolina or something?

• Some pretty good friends.
• A sweet analog synthesizer.
• A job.

That is all.

I’m now the proud (and in-debt) owner of Moog Little Phatty Tribute Edition, #492. It’s individually numbered like a commemorative plate, but this has a fully analog signal path and not a badly painted picture of Elvis.

An obvious question to ask is: why didn’t I just buy a FutureRetro Revolution, as I mentioned earlier? Well, because I saw the Moog in a store, the fiendish keyboard guy said, “Yeah, it sound great. And we’ve got one year same-as-cash.” So I had to get it.

And since I really (really) ought to have a job within a year, I’m not even that worried about the debt.

And yes. It sounds magnificent.

I’m having a renewed bout of synthesizer lust. For some reason, I started reading about the Future Retro 777 synthesizer. And I decided I needed to have it: there’s something about a real analog synthesizer with a built-in sequencer that takes me back to those halcyon days of tweaking an emulated TB-303 in a cracked version of ReBirth.

Unfortunately, the 777 is no longer in production. But Future Retro does still make a sonically similar machine, the Revolution.

Personally, I find the design of the Revolution a bit unappealing and its circular sequencer interface a bit odd, although it does have some cool sequencer features that the 777 lacks. Worse, though, the Revolution’s sound engine doesn’t appear to have sub oscillators, which are too cool.

Not that it matters: At $700+ for either one, I won’t be sating my synth lust any time soon!

That’s right, folks! It’s Music Snobbery in List Form, 2006! Same format as always: my ten favorite albums in roughly ascending order of preference! For your reference, behold the snobbery of 2005 and 2004.

Overall, 2006 was a fantastic year for music. In my view, it blew 2005 right out of the water, and 2005 was pretty good. In fact, I think that the the lower five from the 2005 list probably would be beat out by several honorable mentions from this year. Sure, I missed a few albums that are now among my favorites, particularly The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats and Tanglewood Numbers by The Silver Jews, but 2006 was just really, really good.

Hopefully I’ve done a bit better this time around.

Read on…

If the diabetes research discussed here proves to be even a fraction as promising as I hope, it will be an amazing thing. My grandfather, a somewhat eccentric fellow with diabetes, swears up and down that they’ll never find a cure. Hopefully they’ll finally do it. I’m pretty excited.

So, I finally got around to upgrading my Linux distribution: from Ubuntu 6.06 (aka Dapper Drake) to 6.10 (aka, Edgy Eft). Now, I did a clean install, since I had been messy installing various software on my previous installation (including something called Compiz which I’ll talk shortly) and I didn’t want any headaches.

So, once I finally got my wireless working (which took a while because I didn’t bother to confirm the name of my wireless network… doh), I started the work of installing all the necessary software. Now, once I got all the necessary bits running, I realized something was missing. Eye candy.

Read on…

The Universe is Complete

Consider a graph whose vertices are all the objects in the universe (assuming there were finitely many such objects) such that for any two objects A and B, (A, B) is an edge of that graph if and only if A and B stand in some logical relation to each other. That is to say, any two objects are “connected” if and only if they are somehow related.

This graph would be pretty big. But it would also be complete. That is, every object would be connected to every other object. Interesting.

To disprove this, we would have to find two objects that weren’t related. Suppose we had a pair of candidates, A and B for our counterexample, that are, we presume, totally unrelated. But A and B actually are related, by the “is in the same universe as” relation; i.e., A is in the same universe as B (by hypothesis).

So the graph described above is complete, since any two objects will always be related by “is in the same universe as.”

I have no idea what the completeness of that graph entails, but that’s what was on my mind at 3:39 am. :)