"Chaotic Neutral"

While reading Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns I’ve once again came across the AS 3.0 Singleton solution that has to deal with the absence of private constructors (I’ll save my rage and cursings about who had the idea to remove them for now ) and while the authors are using the already well known method of using a SingletonEnforcer class outside the Singleton’s package to verify that the class cannot be instanciated via the constructor they also note that this can be doublecrossed by giving null or undefined as a constructor parameter. As this is rather sub optimal I was wondering why they don’t just check inside the Singleton constructor for a null/undefined argument and throw an exception accordingly?!
I’m sure somebody else had the same idea already but here’s my idea of a waterproof Singleton class that cannot be misused from the outside (As always, if I missed any detail that accidentally breaks hell loose feel free to correct me) …

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

package
{
	public class WaterproofSingleton {
		static private var _instance:Singleton;
 
		public function Singleton(singletonEnforcer:SingletonEnforcer) {
			if ((singletonEnforcer as SingletonEnforcer) == null) {
				throw (new Error("Direct instantiation of a Singleton is not allowed!"));
			}
		}
 
		public static function getInstance():Singleton {
			if (Singleton._instance == null) {
				Singleton._instance = new Singleton(new SingletonEnforcer());
			}
			return Singleton._instance;
		}
	}
}
 
class SingletonEnforcer {}

I’ve been reading this book by Joey Lott and Danny Patterson since yesterday and thought I’d loose a couple of words about it …
The book starts with a chapter about application design where it explains how to go through the analysis-, design- , implementation and testing phase. It introduces how to utilize Use Case- and Class Diagrams and then gives a lesson on how to use FlexUnit for unit testing. In the second chapter is a good explanation about why and how to use Interfaces (instead of Inheritance) and after that it goes into detail with teaching nine of the more common Design Patterns, namely MVC, Singleton, Factory/Template Method, Proxy, Iterator, Composite, Decorator, Command, Memento and State. In part 3 of the book you’ll find in-depth information about AS 3.0 features like Events, data IO, E4X and Regular Expressions.

Read more

This is not really a true productivity tool but I think it has enough value that it deserves to be mentioned. If you’re on Windows and work with the Command Prompt a lot, you might be fed up with the overly dull look of the black Windows command console and you look over to the Linux guys with their stylish terminals with envy. Then it’s time for you to grab and install Console, a Command Prompt enhancement that adds several useful features like multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types and – the real deal – transparent background. This alone is reason enough to throw the old console look overboard. The console font as well as window size and position can be configured. Get the latest release version 1.5 at sourceforge.net/projects/console/ for free.

Just found this yesterday via Adobe Consulting Blog … Converse – Chuck Taylor, Jack Purcell, Basketball Shoes, Design Your Own Converse Shoes. Click on the first shoe under Collection. You can design your own sneaker with your own style of color combination and even add a personalized text at the side or back. I first thought its a nice gimmick for playing but in fact you can order your designed shoe in your preferred size! I’m a big fan of classic sneakers but I have rather large feet and finding large sneakers in Japan is more than just a challenge so I thought I’d make my own couple of neatly colored Cons and order them … until I saw the Shipping in U.S. only sign! Damn! Well at least I could print my design out. Here’s my low top suede model ‘Venice Nights’ …

This shoe designer is a nice example that shows that Flash really needs to support 3D! Imagine you could freely rotate and texture the shoe model! Wouldn’t that be cool?!

If you’re working with XML on Windows and you like your tool full-featured there’s a good chance that you have worked with Altova XMLSpy, a first of all very good and powerful XML editor but on second look becomes a nasty bugger that calls home as if there is no tomorrow.
Thats fine and good! Let them try it to call it home as long as they want, I can block it with my Firewall! It was noted by some other blogs that XMLSpy not only transfers data to check the legal ownership but also transfers private data that is none of Altova’s business, so there is good reason to block the spy (what a fitting name!) off!
But what if you want to use the Eclipse (or Visual Studio) XMLSpy PlugIn? If you block Java’s JRE, Eclipse also can’t connect to the web anymore. But fear not, there’s an easy solution. Here’s how to block off XMLSpy …
Go straight to your WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc/ folder and add the following line to the host file:

127.255.255.255 link.altova.com

This redirects every access to link.altova.com to the local machine, thus blocking of connection attempts. With that you’re free to let Eclipse access the net while XMLSpy has to stay inside the system.

Fotologue which was Japanese only for a while has been translated into English and opened up it’s gates for anyone else around the globe! Not only does it look much more stylish than Flickr or any other photo sharing site, it’s also completely done in Flash! Check out my gallery for a quick preview of how the user galleries look.
via If Then Else