THERMO!

This month we will be combining our meetup with the other Flash/Flex meetups in town for a special treat: a sneak peak at Adobe's upcoming Thermo!

Don't know what Thermo is? The best way to show you is, of course, video. Here's a link with Adobe's MAX presentation movies embedded, you are guaranteed to drool: http://aralbalkan.com...

Thermo is all about revolutionizing your Flash/Flex workflow, providing tighter integration between the beautiful graphics your art team creates and the thousands-plus lines of code your engineers crank out. It makes other Adobe files first-class citizens of your Flex application.

Imagine importing a Photoshop- or Illustrator-native file, but the layers actually have meaning and you can turn a graphical element into a working control (a text field, button, etc) in a simple click. This new workflow means that the artist alone can come much closer to making an application sing, and the coders get to start with most boilerplate code already written so they can focus on the "special sauce" for your particular application domain.

The venue will be packed, as 4 (maybe more?) separate meetup groups will be combining for this very special event. Our members should show up ready to learn and do some serious networking as this meetup will represent virtually all of the organized Flash and Flex professionals in the Atlanta area.

Flex is flash that doesn't suck.

Atlanta Flex & Actionscript Coders Dec 2008 Meetup: Thermo! - Atlanta Flex & Actionscript Coders Meetup (Atlanta, GA) - Meetup.com

Whether it is the car tuning crowd, the overclockers or the Perl hackers, they share the same thing in common: being devoted to something.

This devotion drives a great number of innovations, and this is where Software really stands out. Particularly amongst the Open Source crowd, where Software is bound with something even more polarizing: Personality

The merging of software and personality is both a blessing and a curse. People are seldom more motivated than when working with something that feels alive; but to attack or criticize is, by definition, personal.

The people who are the most knowledgeable to defend, market, recommend (or even attack) are the ones already entrenched. They are part of the personality mesh, and as such it is exceedingly difficult to try to promote and defend a software product without going into the years of positive experiences one has shared with the product.

This article is no different. I love Catalyst and have used it for years. I will, however, attempt to back up my passion with articles of reason and rational points rather than espouse virtues that are little more than anecdotal.

To get started down this path, I think it is important to properly frame Catalyst in scope. On its own, it doesn't do much. It certainly doesn't do much well, but Catalyst by itself is really little more than a web server; it is a request handler and dispatcher and sends the response to the client.

By itself, it fails to talk to a database or handle sessions. It won't even authenticate a user. It has no template system, and no caching. So why does Catalyst have a fanatical fanbase and successful sites with it?

Quite simply, it's the CPAN.

The Catalyst philosophy is populist, not dictatorial. A belief that tools should be built to do a specific feature or function, but not require usage of any given tool; granting flexibility to a developer to solve problems the Catalyst community has not thought of how to solve.

Catalyst doesn't require you to use Template Toolkit or Mason. It doesn't push DBIx::Class as The One True ORM. It lets you pick. It trusts that you are a software developer and you are solving a problem. Catalyst just makes it easy to make your decision, and integrate that solution and start working.

A case for Catalyst - Perlbuzz

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99designs » Leading Designer Marketplace for Logo Designs and More…

The First ATL Show and Tell - Monday, Nov 24th - Woo!
November 6th, 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to announce the inaugural ATL Show and Tell!

For those who haven’t heard, ATL Show and Tell going to be a monthly event for Atlanta area technology entreprenuers (and habitual technology builders) to get together and show off the projects they’ve been working on. The events themselves are a celebration of technology as much as a support group for tech geeks trying to make a buck.

That said, there will be food and beer.

The Basics for the event

Date/Time: Monday, Nov 24th. 7:00pm
Location: The East Atlanta Icehouse
Cost: Donations (which go to renting out the venue)
I’m still in the process of confirming the lineup. Expect more details in a couple of days.

The East Atlanta Icehouse has a full bar and kitchen (with great food, I’ve eaten there), so come ready to eat drink and celebrate our technological prowess. http://www.eastatlantaicehouse.com

For the specifics, Please register to attend here: http://atlshowandtell.eventbrite.com

If you are a service provider, we kindly ask that you not attend; this event is for us, not you.

ATL Show and Tell

BTW you don't need to reinstall Ubuntu. The issue is to do with the persistence model implemented by the udev discover process because your MAC address has changed. The easiest workaround is to edit the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and delete the lines including "'# PCI Device ..." to end. The net generator will recreate the correct entries on the next reboot.

If the networking on your virtualbox/ubuntu instance suddenly stops working when you accidentally change the mac address, this link is your salvation.

virtualbox.org :: View topic - No network interface in Guest Ubuntu

You maybe asking yourself, how do I create a MySpace app -- or where do I get started developing a MySpace app? You've found the right place. This is a rough over view in 17 steps, how to get started... I recommend you have some basic knowledge of MySpace, HTML, and PHP before you get started with this tutorial. If you're used to developing Facebook applications you'll find MySpace uses some familiar concepts. Namely, allowing you to utilize languages you are familiar with. In the case of this tutorial on how to create a MySpace App, we use DownDoggy.com hosting as a guide to get you started.

DownDoggy.com Low cost domain names, domain transfers, web hosting, email accounts, and so much more.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Finance::Quote;

my $q = Finance::Quote->new();
my %data = $q->fetch('usa', 'GOOG');
print $data{'GOOG', 'price'} . "\n";

Hackszine.com: Simple stock quote grabbing with Perl

The biggest news today comes from Amazon, which is staking the “beta” label off of its EC2 service and announcing the following upgrades:

* Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
* There’s now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
* Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
* Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
* We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
* We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

The Cloud Is Shaping Up. Amazon Beefs Up EC2, Bechtolsheim Shifts His Attention To Arista

You Aren't Good Enough

Matt Trout. You Aren't Good Enough @ YAPC::TV

Your Very Own Backhoe by miff 1.) what is it? backhoe is a backdoor daemon that copies a rootshell into /tmp periodically, then deletes it. You set the frequency that you want rootshells to appear, and you set the amount of time that they will persist before backhoe deletes them. This gives the user who knows what to look for a convenient backdoor without having to modify any system binaries or otherwise fuck someone's box. OK, so what? It puts a rootshell in /tmp every so often, BFD. Well, to make things more interesting, it also spawns multiple copies of itself, you know, in case root sees some strange process or behavior and decides to kill -9 the bitch. The separate copies (you pick how many you want) actually monitor each other using signals to make sure that all is well with the backdoor. If any of the copies of backhoe find that any of the other copies are missing or not functioning, backhoe goes into defense mode. In defense mode, backhoe kills all root sessions, spawns a new set of daemons (in addition to the ones already running), and reinitializes all of them. Normal operation continues, with a few more instances of backhoe in memory. In order to make backhoe harder to kill all at once, I added a disguise routine which makes backhoe appear to be one of any number of normal processes (at random), or joke processes, if you prefer to fuck with the admin.

I rewrote this in C, but was too embarrassed by my C to release the code. Was just looking it up to find out how to rename a pid with... $0 it turns out.

Miff - Backhoe