G-uniX Technologies

Crazy Flex RemoteObject Bug

2008-08-06T14:59:00-04:00

I was developing a coldfusion/flex app today and i ran accross the most weirdest bug. The following code is pseudo code :

say if you have a remote object

<mx: remoteobjec id=something destination=ColdFusion >
<mx : method name=test result=result(event)>
<mx : arguments>
<arg1>inputtext.text</arg1>
<arg2>inputArrayCollection</arg2>
<arguments>
<method>
<remoteobjec>

This will work and send arg1 to the server but arg2 which is an array collection will be blank ,desptite the collection having over a 100 records

however if i send the same remote object like this , something.test(inputtext.text,inputArrayCollection)
it will work perfectly fine

werid ?

A New Captcha Alternative. Demo Included

2008-08-01T17:14:00-04:00

Lately what i have been noticing is that these captcha files have been becoming harder and harder to decode till the point that they make you feel your working for the NSA trying to decrypt something. Plus its also a pain in the ass for people like one of my friends who has partial color blindness. Looking at all these features i came up with an alternative to captcha that uses flash and javascript, all you have to do is draw the right shape and you'll be a human. The javscript is not the most secure code in the world but that can be fixed, the point here is to be able to see how a simple captcha alternative can be implemented instead of making those silly words look like a lost language.

If I get enough attention on this, i will implement an API and etc to get it to production standards

The Javascript code is there as a quick mock-up , Under no circumstances will that type of Javascript code be used in the release if there should be one.

PS I havent decided on a name so suggest one!
also it will make errors, and I will fix that if i get enough attention on this by people who want a captcha alternative.
http://g-unix.com/alter/

Since when do people care about what browser their swf runs in?

2008-07-23T20:46:00-04:00

Check this out . Weird? Any reason why it runs better if at all it does, which i doubt it does.
http://www.g-unix.com/screencap.jpg

Euro Cup is done for me :(

2008-06-22T17:41:20-04:00

Italy lost :( what more can i say

Getting things rolling again.

2008-06-21T00:12:57-04:00

My final exams are over, the biggest stress is gone . Now I can concetrate on G-uniX , Flex , Flash , GAIQL , and everything else cool in the computer world, without worrying about studying and doing homework!.

Flex 4 SDK download

2008-05-26T19:24:25-04:00

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4

GAIQL News

2008-05-16T19:59:00-04:00

To all the people who singed up to test GAIQL , I will be emailing you a link so you can view a night release build system. Also these testers will get the beta , while the public will be getting the alpha ( the same one i used in the code when i showed the example). The differences in alpha and beta release is that the beta has an extremely fast GAIQL parser while the alpha is realtivly buggy. By all means if you want to be a beta tester just email me faisal @ g-unix . com and youll be in on the latest cool stuff!

Flash Player 10 Out Now!

2008-05-15T05:51:00-04:00

ITS OUT!!!!!!!!!

FlexCamp In 4 Days!

2008-05-11T22:10:22-04:00

Im going to be attending FlexCamp On Thursday , Hope to see cool stuff there! Cant wait :D

Taking Advantage Of Multiple Cores In Silverlight

2008-05-07T23:26:29-04:00

One of the coolest things about Silverlight is that it is using languages from the .NET platform such as C# and Visual Basic. While we all know VB is crap , C# is quite a powerful language especially with its vast amounts of cool libraries in which you can do all sorts of neat stuff. One of these libraries is the ParallelFX by Microsoft which lets you make your code take advantage of multiple cores on the clients computer. But what does this have to do with silverlight, well you can make your silverlight application use C# and have C# take advantage of the cores making the application much fast. Also you can use PLINQ which is a parallel implementation of LINQ .

On a side note if your looking for a solution like LINQ on the flash platform, check out my previous post on GAIQL which is essentially a PLINQ implementation in actionscript

Actionscript Integrated Query Language Preview Release

2008-05-06T14:45:00-04:00

For the past week I have been deeply involved over on the .NET side working with C#, Parallel FX and PLINQ ( Parallel LINQ). LINQ has been very useful as it saved me tons of times getting data back from large data structures and I thought to my self it would be neat if there was something like this for Actionscript 3. Well after i finished my work with .NET I fired up Flex Builder and started to work on a library for actionscript that does exactly what LINQ does . Its turning out to be really great and i want to give a few people the chance to test it out . If you want to play around with GAIQL (G-unIX Actionscript Integrated Query Language) then leave a comment or email me at Faisal@g-unix.com with the subject GAIQL Tester . Ill send you the swc to test it out.

For others who want to wait till the final release (Why Would you do that!) here is something that might convince you . Say if you wanted to check if an entry was in the array , all you would have to do to find out is the following :

private var q:GAIQL = new GAIQL()
private var result:Array = q.Call("FROM myarray GET thevalueiwant" ,this);

and the value you want doesn't have to be hard coded, it can be passed as a variable . Then you can simply check the length of your result array to see if it got populated or not .

Mate - The Holy Grail Of Flex Frameworks

2008-05-04T16:38:18-04:00

Ive been always involved in frameworks , I wrote an article talking about frameworks on CFDJ and Ive always experimented with them. Recently a new Flex Framework was released, oh great another framework you say , but wait till you see how ridiculous simple it is to use and manage. Its all tag based and it probably the most logical framework I ever worked with . Good work AsFusion!

http://mate.asfusion.com

F#

2008-04-30T18:44:00-04:00

Recently during the free time I get from school, finishing up FlexInAction , and working for a big client , I sit back and try to learn new things. One of which is F#. F# is a purely functional programming language ,very similar to LISP. Ive been giving it a try for the past couple of days and it seems pretty powerful, plus with the addition of the integration in visual studio its probably a good thing to look at for the future , especially with A.I a growing theme on the web.

Flash Player 10 News

2008-04-21T17:37:31-04:00

I was at FITC today and i got to see the presentation on Flash Player 10 . Man does this look cool, They had the framerate going at liek 90 something frames per second and it was running as smooth as butter. And some big news is that the Flash Player can do processing at 64 times the current processing rate. HOLY Smokes, this means really good news for 3D and complex R.I.A's .

In ohter news : The Silverlight project was shut down after hearing of this remarkable feats by the Flash Player 10!

Bloom! - Pseudo-Processing For Flash

2008-04-18T18:53:18-04:00

Check out Bloom which is a type of pseudo-processing for Flash. If you dont know what processing it , then check that out here and then check out Bloom!. Its really cool.

PlexiGlass Looks Amazing!

2008-04-16T21:19:47-04:00

If you havent checked out PlexiGlass , check it out at http://www.bobjim.com/ . Its a cool 3D OpenFlux extension that manages the X,Y,Z axis for components. Its a cool project im dying to get my hands on and contribute in any way i can. Keep up the good work Ryan

Urgent Need for a MXNA alternative . aka we need to create something better

2008-04-16T18:41:27-04:00

MXNA use to rock, but have noticed lately that its become somewhat weak and brittle. It keeps crashing, giving 500's and stuff. I think its time we get together and create a good solid mxna alternative. On launch day well have all the current blogs being aggregated and well continue to add more like mxna does. If your interested leave a comment and well get something cool running in no time.

Where have I been?

2008-04-12T17:06:47-04:00

Ive been really wanting to post tons of flex tutorials and other cool neat projects ive been working on but ive been really busy working for a cool company called Sensidea. Our ideas just seem to click and were rocking. Ive also been really busy with FlexInAction the coolest Flex 3 book coming Out. Get an early release right away and get started with Flex 3!
Flex3InAction

Python , the next big thing

2008-04-11T23:09:21-04:00

We all know pythons been around for quite some time now. Its being used by Nasa for the longest time and is a pretty good programming language. At first I have to admit when I saw python I thought it was some beginners programming language, with no typed variables and tabs all over the place . But still i played around with it and thought it was cool and kept it off to the side and went back to my Actionscript 3/Coldfusion/.Net life. Now i think i should go back to python and integrate it with Flex seeing how Google has suddenly made python the coolest languages on the block. Its a really good time to be a python developer!.

Flex 3 In Action Early Release!

2008-03-09T18:05:24-04:00

Manning's has put up an early release for Flex 3 in action. Its a book me and my developer buddies have wrote and worked hard on . Hope you guys like it

http://flexinaction.com/
http://www.manning.com/ahmed/

S.A.S will end piracy?

2008-03-06T14:01:35-04:00

I was watching part of the Engage 2008 web cast with Kevin Lynch and that other cool dude (Owner of adobe i think?) and they were talking about how the business model is changing and more and more applications are becoming a software as service. Photoshop and the entire CS3 suite will undoubtedly be converted to a web based suite and this makes me think about the impact this will have on piracy. I mean you will no longer be able to pirate software and download torrents because the services will be running online and on a subscriptions basis. What are you thoughts on this?

Silverlight 2.0 .. Is it worth it?

2008-03-06T13:56:21-04:00

After watching the live webcast from mix08 , i promptly downloaded the new silverlight 2.0 extensions for visual studio 08 and started to play around with them. Well i know its still in beta , but like the great Doug Mccune said, i have yet to see something done in silverlight that cant be done in Flex/Flash. Sure theres that cool kick-ass 3D thing, but thinking from a normal client/customer point of view unless there looking into building a 3D interface (which ALSO can be done in Flex ..Papervision anyone?), they rather put their resources on something that has been in the wild for a long time and has matured properly. The big problem with silverlight is that its being called the "Flash Killer" , the way I see it Silverlight is just that , a Silver light given off by a Flash that will fade away quickly.

Silverlight which was called WPF/E which stood for Windows Presentation Foundation "everywhere" is just a waste of resources on Microsofts end. Instead of developing a plug-in to run WPF "everywhere" , they should just port over the .net 3.5 framework over to the Mac and Linux and developers can easily put there current WPF windows form applications on the web .

So is it worth learning, spending time and developing applications? . For now just download it and tinker with it, dont spend too much time trying to learn the inside outs. If you know C# then your half way there. Stick to the flash platform for now , and think about silverlight in 2026 :D

Vista UAC and Flex 3

2008-02-26T19:40:16-04:00

I don't know if this has been brought up or not, or i dont even know if this is just isolated to my system or alot of people. But if you are running as a non-admin and click on Flex builder, it will show trial expired even if it is registerd as a professional or educational. However if you right click and run as admin , it wont show the expired thing

So Flex 3 is here and so is Air. Next Thermo...

2008-02-25T20:49:24-04:00

All that hype paid off, we have Flex 3 in our hands (well hard drives). Now everyone gets busy developing applications and telling their bosses, Look boss its final!. Most of us are getting excited over the fact that we have access to the SVN where flex 4 sdks are going to be posted in a couple of months :O! . What i am excited about is getting my hands on thermo. Burn baby burn!

Flex 3 Expired ? HUH!

2008-02-25T20:31:00-04:00

Do i have the worst luck or what, when B3 came out, within a day it expired, now again , the final one is expired within a day. I applied to the education license a minute ago but i have to wait 2 weeks for approval. What am i going to tell my clients, all of the work relies on the sdk3 build. Oh man...

Free software microsoft .. yea right

2008-02-24T20:32:46-04:00

According to good old Microsoft the dreamspark program : "The program is now available to more than 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States"

Way to go Steveo , so you get Finland (i don't have anything against you guys) on the program but you get one university from Canada on the program?. What about the rest of the thousands of universities, and what about the young developers in Canada. You guys go to Finland and get a list of Universities from there, but you cant travel a couple hours north (Canada) and get a list of Universities from here, hell you don't even have to travel god dammit, you just call OUAC and get a list of freaking universities from here.

Books,Projects,Investors

2008-02-20T23:21:30-04:00

I haven’t blogged for over 3 weeks and no I’m not dead. It’s been really hectic, firstly me, Abdul Qabiz , Jon Hirschi , and our leader Tariq Ahmed have been working day and night on our new book Flex In Action! flexinaction.com/.
Its a beginners guide to flex and I cannot comment on the release date (soon) but we are in the final stages of book writing (editing, polishing up). Another thing that has kept me busy is tons of new projects that we are working on and with investors to make them a reality; the home page will be updated with product pages and details about how you can work with us! It is going to be a great year for G-uniX and one that will put us on the map.

Vista is great!

2008-02-07T22:35:55-04:00

Ive read so many articles bashing vista that i frankly was afraid when i got my new computer. An acer Aspire AMD quad Core 2.2 GHZ with 4 GB of ram and a cool video card, i thought vista will be gone from my computer within an hour and ill have XP x64 running. Boy was I wrong, not only is vista a really good successor to XP , it runs smooth as butter on my computer. Vista with the right hardware is a really good operating system. However , there is ubuntu :P

An attempt at neural network programming in Actionscript 3

2008-01-25T00:21:00-04:00

After studying for a couple of tests for school, i had some free time on my hands and i decided to take a shot at implementing a perceptron in actionscript. Wikipedia quotes "The perceptron is a type of artificial neural network invented in 1957 at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt. It can be seen as the simplest kind of feedforward neural network: a linear classifier."

EDIT: I will be posting more about what this code is, and making the code better, right now its 1 am in the morning and I have an exam tommro !.

Normally this type of stuff is implemented on languages such as Java and C, but i decided to give it a shot in Actionscript, below is the code for a fully working Perceptron, however it is really CPU intensive, it did not work on my 3 year old pc, but it did work on my laptop which is fairly new but even then it took a while. I will optimize the code, but tomorrow after my exam, the code is below for you to learn from. enjoy.

package {
import flash.display.Sprite;
public class Perceptron extends Sprite
{
public var impressionPattern:Array;
public var goalPattern:Array;
public var inputNeurons:int;
public var outputNeurons:int;
public var numPattern:int;
public var weightFactor:Array;
public function Perceptron()
{
// Impression pattern
this.impressionPattern = new Array(
[0,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,1],
[0,0,1,0],
[0,0,1,1],
[0,1,0,0],
[0,1,0,1],
[0,1,1,0],
[0,1,1,1],
[1,0,0,0],
[1,0,0,1]
);
// Goal Pattern
this.goalPattern = new Array(
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
[1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
[1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
[1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0 ],
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 ],
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]
);
this.inputNeurons = this.impressionPattern[0].length;
this.outputNeurons = this.goalPattern[0].length;
this.numPattern = this.impressionPattern.length;
this.weightFactor = new Array();
var i:int;
var k:int;
for(i = 0; i < 20 ; i++){
weightFactor[i] = [0,0];
}
this.wthdoesthisdo();
}
public function delta():void{
var autoCorrect:Boolean = false;
var error:Boolean = false;
var learningFactor:int = 0.2;
while(!autoCorrect){
error = false;
var i:int;
for(i = 0; i < this.numPattern; i++){
var output:Array = setOutputVal(i);
var j:int;
for(j = 0 ; j < this.outputNeurons ; j++){
if(this.goalPattern[i][j] != output[j]){
var k:int;
for(k =0;k <this.inputNeurons;k++){
this.weightFactor[k][j] = this.weightFactor[k][j] + learningFactor * this.impressionPattern[i][k] * (this.goalPattern[j][j] - output[j]);
}
}
var z:int;
for(z=0;z<output.length;z++){
if(output[z] != this.impressionPattern[i][z]){
error = true;
}
}
}
}
if(!error){
autoCorrect = true;
}
}
}
public function setOutputVal(patternNo:int):Array{
var bias:int = 0.7;
var result:Array = new Array([this.outputNeurons]);
var toImpress:Array = new Array()
toImpress = this.impressionPattern[patternNo];
var i:int;
var j:int;
for(i =0 ; i < toImpress.length ; i++){
for (j=0;j < result.length;j++){
var net:int = this.weightFactor[0][j] * toImpress[0] + this.weightFactor[1][j] * toImpress[1] + this.weightFactor[2][j] * toImpress[2] + this.weightFactor[3][j] + toImpress[3];
if(net > bias){
result[j] = 1;
}else{
result[j] = 0;
}
}
}
return result;
}
public function printMatrix(matrix:Array):void{
var i:int;
var j:int;
for(i = 0; i < matrix.length; i++){
for(j=0;j<matrix[i].length;j++){
trace(matrix[i][j]);
}
}
}
public function wthdoesthisdo():void{
trace("before learn");
this.printMatrix(this.weightFactor);
this.delta();
trace("after learn");
this.printMatrix(this.weightFactor);
}
}
}

Your Favorite API - Tell us now

2008-01-22T21:48:27-04:00

With the release of the open source social network in a few weeks, I'm calling the community to present us with your favorite API. Facebook, MySpace , Flickr, anything and we will include most if not all in the social network as part of the release so you wont have to dig through the source to modify it, it will already be there