Sam Shrefler

Comcast cries about how mean the NFL Network is to them here.

Regarding the NFL Network: “Comcast makes it available to those who want it, saves money for those who don’t.”

Further, David Cohen who is the Executive Vice President of Comcast Corp, goes on to say “(On top of that, it (The NFL Network) denies tens of millions of cable customers access to hundreds of games provided exclusively to DirecTV.)” Then while throwing rocks at a glass house, he says “But despite our offer to do what’s in the best interests of fans…”. Another gem, “Nobody can doubt Comcast’s passionate commitment to giving our customers the best sports programming.” Apparently the key to this statement is “our customers”. That should probably be written as “Our subscribing customers to our cable services, definitely not fans of the sports teams we own (Flyers & Sixers) whom subscribe to Dish Network or DirecTV.” Mr. Cohen then ends the article with my favorite line: “The NFL should join us in putting the interests of fans and the viewing public first.”

The fans and viewing public!?! Are you kidding me? Once again, I’d like to offer a better choice of works:
“The NFL should join us in putting the interests of fans, or at least those who subscribe to Comcast Cable Services and the viewing public, of course the public being those who subscribe to Comcast Cable Services, first.”

Living in Comcast’s Philadelphia region, I feel absolutely NO remorse for Comcast. See, I love watching the Sixers, and would like to be able to see some Phillies and Flyers games as well. The problem is, Comcast has a little monopoly in this area when it comes to providing passionate sports coverage to the fans and viewing public (whom they care so much about). I am unable to watch any Sixers or Flyers game because I receive my television services through Dish Network. Of course, I also pay much less for comparable services and feel that I receive a better service - I digress.

The problem is, Comcast has been taking advantage of a piece of legislation from the 1992 Cable Act often referred to as the “terrestrial loophole”.

Forbes published an article in 2005.

From the Forbes article: “(the loophole) allows Comcast (and any other broadcaster) to withhold programming if it is transmitted from a stadium to cable boxes entirely over wires as opposed to satellite. Comcast takes advantage of the loophole to keep games in Philadelphia away from DirecTV and EchoStar.

So, Comcast loves to talk about supporting the fan and general public, apparently as long as it doesn’t hurt their penetration rates for subscribers.

I would welcome a response from Mr. Cohen about how they justify punishing Philadelphia fans for not using Comcast Cable Services and how it differs from the NFL Network putting its long term goals and profits ahead of Comcast’s customers.

Even more, I’d like to see the FCC finally correct this “loophole” and force Comcast to play by the rules that were meant in the Cable Act.

I felt this was worth a post because I was VERY impressed with this customer service. So I found some very cool Oakley Goggles on a great sale ($64 from $99) at Boardparadise.com. Found a coupon for $10 and they give free shipping at $75. So I found a long sleeve quicksilver shirt (very cool shirt, I’m actually wearing it now) on clearance for $9. I got to $75, entered the coupon code bringing the cost back down to $65, and it still was free shipping.

2 Days later I’m wearing my new shirt and the goggles still show shipment pending. So I call them and after being on hold a very nice woman explains they were supposed to ship from one of their retail stores, but they sold out. They then checked every other retail store and were sold out. I figure my deal is gone and I’m getting a refund…instead she offers to let me pick a different goggle to get shipped out. She lets me pick a more expensive non-sale goggle at no extra cost. Then, she notices this too ships from retail. She asks me to hold so she can confirm they will send it. A minute later she returns explaining that they do have it in stock and they’ll ship it today, 2-day mail.

WOW! From now on I’ll be checking boardparadise.com to try and buy from them! Kudos!

This shameless post is a simple attempt to stir up some news about Flash Player being released on the iPhone. I haven’t seen any formal announcements on the situation. With Apple’s recent announcment of 3rd party applications coming in February (SDK), could this possible put more control in Adobe’s hand for releasing Flash Player 9 on the iPhone?

Please!!!

“Cause I’m ain’t too proud to beg!”

Honestly though, Flash Player not on the iPhone might be better for my health in the long run…my brain goes CRAZY thinking about all the new possibilities it would open for me…

On the newly redesigned Flex.org site, there is now a link for “Flex for .NET Developers”. After clicking the link, you’ll quickly see some information on WebOrb & Fluorine and a couple links to some quick little tutorials I had written a while ago to getting up and going with Flex + .NET. I’m happy to see Adobe making an effort with those of us that combine Flex and .NET technologies.

I think it’s important to remember that these technologies can and do play nice and I’m excited to see this sub-group of the community continue to grow! Thanks!

I finally got around to posting the pictures from our trip to Haiti. It was an awesome experience but heart-breaking at the same time. We worked on building new classrooms for a school (the school has 500 students, and is a man’s house that he made into a church/school….amazing!)

Anyway, a truly life changing trip that really helps to put into perspective how Blessed we all are!

Haiti Pics on Picasa

I just wanted to let everyone know that next week, Thursday night, my wife and I will be leaving for Haiti and be gone Feb 16-25. We’re really excited and this weekend we’ll be packing and finalizing all the supplies we’ll be taking. If anyone is interested in knowing a little more, here is the website of the group we’ll be going with:

http://www.partnerswithhaiti.org

We’ll be working on a roof for an orphanage and working on other buildings in the village of AFCA. We’ll be staying at a church outside of Port-Au-Prince called Nazon. There is a video, sort of long (maybe 10-15 minutes) about the project going on and specifically the area we’ll be working. In the video, they talk about the Bethany project. It’s a school in the AFCA village. This is the school that we sponsor Michael and Kentia (two children Stacy met on her first trip to Haiti a couple years ago) to attend. On this trip, I’ll get to meet them both!

http://www.partnerswithhaiti.org/afca_video.htm

Any thoughts and prayers for us and the people of Haiti would be more than appreciated.

- Sam

Fluorine has been updated to Alpha release v16. Big news in this release is that it adds support for Flex’s RemoteObject! A special thanks to TheSilentGroup for a great release! Possibly my favorite part of the new release and using RemoteObject is that ServiceCapture now parses my AMF3 correctly! Yippee!

In order to update my projects (As created from my this post), I’ve followed the following steps and everything seems to work great.

1) Create a services-config.xml in the root of your Flex application. It should look like this:

[xml]



class="flex.messaging.services.RemotingService"
messageTypes="flex.messaging.messages.RemotingMessage">

[/xml]

2) In your Flex Project Properties -> Flex Compiler -> Additional Compiler Arguments add the following
[xml]
-services “services-config.xml”
[/xml]

3) Create your RemoteObject services as follows:

[xml]
destination="fluorine"
endpoint="{gateway}"
source="com.yourdomain.service.yourServiceName"
showBusyCursor="true"/>
[/xml]

4) Copy the new “com.TheSilentGroup.Fluorine.dll” file from the new Fluorine release into your .NET Application’s bin directory.

Good luck and enjoy….and again, thanks SilentGroup for the fantastic product, Fluorine!

Truth be told, the theater has been done for a couple months now, but I’ve finally gotten around to organizing my pictures (Google Picasa comes Highly recommended) and getting them uploaded (again Google Picasa Web Albums). I thought about trying to use Flickr, especially with all the Flex Mash-ups people have been doing with it, but Picasa was just too easy to pass up. Maybe they’ll release some APIs (or maybe they already have) that will help Picasa gain momentum since I love it for organizing my photos.

I’ve posted two different albums, one is a album with descriptions of the finished theater and the other is lots of Before & After pics (and some in progress) of the theater that can take you on a trip of our past two years.

So without further ado: My Picasa Web Albums

Background Information:
I’ve inherited an application that stores many Dates and Times. The software is used by people all over the world who manually enter Dates & Times from worksheets into the software. The information is stored in a SQL Database and all dates and times are stored without any Timezone information and represent all different timezones. Dates from different timezones aren’t compared or mixed, so when a report is generated form the database, its assumed the report and its dates and times are relevant to the client.

Many different applications hook into this system and I don’t have the luxury of changing anything other than my Flex application to make it match the rest of the system.

My Goal:
My Flex application should allow a user to enter a Date and Time, which I store into a Date Type. For example:
“11/16/2006 03:00:00 PM” would be entered by a user in Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5).
“11/16/2006 03:00:00 PM” would be entered by a user in Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8).
“11/16/2006 03:00:00 PM” would be entered by a user in Moscow (GMT+3).

Each of those Dates would be saved in my database as: “11/16/2006 03:00:00 ”

My Problem:
AMF3 no longer supports a Timezone Offset. See “AMF3 Specification” at OSFlash.org. I currently can take a Date & Time from my Database -> Backend (.NET in this case) > Gateway (Fluorine in this case) -> AMF3 and in reverse from AMF3 -> Gateway -> Backend -> Database without the Date or Time being modified in any way and without any Timezone information.

The problem is, Flex assumes the AMF3 information is in UTC(GMT). So as soon AMF3 is deserialzed into Flex, the Flex Date is modified to the client’s local timezone offset.

What I want is all three of the dates above to show up in Flex, regardless of the client timezone, as “11/16/2006 03:00:00 PM” and I don’t want to have to manually display the UTC Date all over my Flex application in order to do this. This would include if the Date is a member in a ValueObject.

My Solution (Work in Progress):
Everytime a Date is brought into Flex, I call a function:
[as]
public static function getUTCDate(myDate:Date):Date
{
return new Date(myDate.fullYearUTC, myDate.monthUTC, myDate.dateUTC, myDate.hoursUTC, myDate.minutesUTC, myDate.secondsUTC, myDate.millisecondsUTC);
}
[/as]
which is called as
[as]
flexDate = DateUtil.getUTCDate(flexDate);
[/as]

Everytime a Date is sent from Flex, I call a function:
[as]
public static function sendUTCDate(myDate:Date):Date
{
var sDate:Date = new Date(Date.UTC(myDate.fullYear, myDate.month, myDate.date, myDate.hours, myDate.minutes, myDate.seconds, myDate.milliseconds));
return sDate;
}
[/as]
which is called as
[as]
flexDate = DateUtil.sendUTCDate(flexDate);
[/as]

My Wish
Something that would make this automatic for me. Either a way to tell the AMF3 Date Deserialization to be saved as a Local Date, or some way to not make me call manually call these functions every time a Date is deserialized or serialized.

Many Thanks to Anyone with Any Ideas!

Due to an existing implementation of the application I’m working on and problems transferring Dates from Fluorine (.NET Remoting Gateway) to Flex, I decided to store and pass all my Dates as Strings. At first, this seemed like a reasonable and easy to implement change. As time has gone on, more and more problems seem to arise. I’m sure the best thing to do would be to find a way to use Date-typed Dates, but I’ve figured out and thought I’d share some workarounds/hacks in case anyone else is trying to/forced to use Strings as Dates.

1) Binding my dates to a DataGrid column:
In order to have my dates display in the form mm/dd/yyyy, I do the following:
Call a labelFunction named “dateLabel” which then calls a static function from my Util package “formatDateDisplay”
[xml]

[/xml]
[as]
private function dateLabel(item:Object, column:DataGridColumn):String
{
return Utils.formatDateDisplay(item[column.dataField]);
}
[/as]
[as]
//This is found in my Utils Package
public static function formatDateDisplay(date:String):String
{
// This removes any time data that is appened onto my Date String
return date.substr(0, date.search(’ ‘));
}
[/as]

2) My DataGrid Columns should be able to be sorted by Date rather than by String Comparison
Call a sortCompareFunction named “dateMyDatePropertyCompare” which then calls a static function from my Utils package “dateFromStringSortCompare”
[xml]

[/xml]
[as]
private function dateMyDatePropertyCompare(obj1:Object, obj2:Object):int
{
return Utils.dateFromStringSortCompare(obj1.myDateProperty, obj2.myDateProperty);
}
[/as]
[as]
public static function dateFromStringSortCompare(obj1:String, obj2:String):int
{
var date1:Date = (obj1 == ” || obj1 == null) ? null : new Date(obj1);
var date2:Date = (obj2 == ” || obj2 == null) ? null : new Date(obj2);

if (date1 < date2)
return -1;
else if (date1 > date2)
return 1;
else
return 0;
}
[/as]

3) Binding my String-Date to a DateField
You can not bind a String to a DateField selectedDate property, so it must be cast into a Date Type. The only way I’ve found to make this Bind is to do the following:
[xml]
selectedDate=”{(model.myDateProperty == null || model.myDateProperty == ”) ? null : new Date(model.myDateProperty)}”
[/xml]
and to save the DateField value to a String:
[as]
obj.myDateProperty= myDateField.selectedDate.toDateString();
[/as]

My hope is that one of the following happens from this post:

- Someone can save some time and use something I’ve written here
- I’ll learn a much cleaner way to do this and I’ll follow this up with a “I can’t believe i was doing that, now I’m doing this…post”

Comments are welcome and hoped for as always….