I finally got around to updating Wordpress this week and ran into one problem. Once I finished updating all the files I couldn’t log into the admin. it turns out that I needed to disable my plugins before updating, something I would have known if I had read the advanced upgrade instructions. So if you don’t happen to do that before you update the simple trick is to rename your plugins directory to something else. Then you can log in to the admin and preform your database upgrade if necessary. Once that’s done you can rename your plugins directory back and everything should be back to normal after that.

Over the Easter weekend I upgraded from XP Pro to Vista Business edition and I am really liking it so far. At first I wasn’t sure what to think, but the more I use it the more I like it. I find it’s somewhere in between XP and OSX. There are a few quirks but once you get used to them you really don’t notice them. And the only reason you notice them in the first place is because it’s acts differently then you are used to in XP.

But  below are some things I ran into while installing it and the solutions.

FlexBuilder
When I first  ran  Flex Builder it gave me an error and wouldn’t start up.  I thought something might be up so I re-installed it and the same thing happened. After some searching I found that you have to right click on the .exe and select “Run As Administrator”. You only have to do that the first time you run it though. And then when I got it working it decided to use the French Canadian Keyboard layout instead of the English one. I didn’t even have that layout selected but it was still using it. So I actually went in a deleted the entry from the Keyboard utility app in the Control Panel. It was really weird because every other app used the right layout.

Annoying Permission Popups
When you are installing a lot of apps at once you get these stupid permission popups asking you to allow the install. Think of that Mac and PC commercial by Apple where the security guard is standing behind PC. It’s pretty much like that. So to turn it off check out this link to turn it off.

Firefox
While I was customizing Firefox I deleted all of the bookmarks in the bookmark tab. If it’s empty the page while keep jumping on you. So just make sure you always have 1 bookmark in the tab.

Acrobat Reader
If you have turned off the annoying permissions popups you will get a “Temp Drive Full” when trying to install Acrobat Reader. The only way to fix this as far as I know is to temporarily turn on the permissions.

Now the only thing I still haven’t figured out is how to uninstall the Vista apps like Windows Calendar, MovieMaker, Mail etc… Really it’s not that big of a deal but it would be nice to get ride of them.

I hope this helps make installing Vista a little easier. And if you aren’t sure on whether you should upgrade I would recommend it.

Over the last couple of weeks the flash community has been hit with numerous blog posts on the new Apollo Alpha and CS3 launch, and I have to say I am just excited as everyone else. But there have been 2 posts that I really enjoyed that have hit home about why I love my job so much.

The first was from Guy Watson, who has been very quite over the last little while.  In his post “Where Have I Been?, he explains his lack of visibility in the community. It was great to hear that one of the best Flash Developers over the last couple of years came to the realization that being the best isn’t all that there is to life, and that it is important to have balance. I have always felt this way, especially going through school. Could I have got straight A’s all the way through school? For sure I could, but I would have had to study WAY harder then I did and would have missed out on a lot of great  experiences. I made the decision to have my education suffer a little so I could hang out with friends, go on road trips and play guitar, and I have no doubt in my mind that I would be a much different person today if I didn’t. And it’ s only been the last year or so that I have started to do this with work. When I first started my career as a Flash Developer 4 years ago I was really driven to be one of the best. I wanted to be on every beta program, speak at every conference, and hang out with all the other rockstars in the community -  and I got do do some of that. But to be honest it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. Don’t get me wrong I love speaking and going to conferences but it’s for an entirely different reason then it used to be. It used to be about “look what I can do!”, but now it’s about going and meeting new people, teaching and just having fun. When I meet new people at conferences the first few questions are the typical where do you work, etc… and it’s more just so I can remember them or track them down later, but after that I would much rather talk about what they do when they aren’t working. “Where do you live? What’s it like there? Do you have any kids?” There is so much more to people then the latest open-source project that they have been working on. In fact when I interview people for positions at Fuel Industries there is 3 things I look for, and in this order. 1. Do you fit into our culture. 2. Are you passionate about what you do? 3. Talent and knowledge. You can have the most talented developer on your team but if they aren’t going to fit in then chances are it’s not going to work out. So with FiTC just a few weeks away, please hold me to this. If you see me let’s hang out, have a beer, and talk about how the Ottawa Senators are going to win the Cup and the Leafs are going to miss the playoffs for the second year in a row.

The second was from Aral Balkan. He has been going back and forth with Patrick Mineault about whether or not his new open-source project SWX is worth the trouble. But Aral’s post “SWX: Still a good idea“  made some great points on flash development that little to do with SWX.  So forget the actual debate for a minute, because really how many people have actually used SWX yet? not me so I can’t comment one way or the other. The part of Aral’s post that I like the best was that developing in Flash is more often then not a hack, which I think is the best part of being a Flash Developer. I took a Multimedia Production Program at a community College where we didn’t learn a whole lot of programming. I have never taken a Computer Science course, I don’t know Java, any form of C, and have a very limited knowledge of server side development. But I can program in flash and I think I do a pretty good job at it. I’ve read books about design patterns and object oriented programming and all of the best practices articles out there. And they have all helped me a great deal in becoming the Flash Developer I am today. I try to plan as much in advance and write code as clean as I can, but if I have to use this._parent to make something work I am not ashamed to do it. Maybe it’s just the nature of the jobs that I work on that allow me to get away with this. At Fuel we don’t work on really any big RIA’s or have to integrate with anyone else, so there is usually no need to worry about overwriting someone else’s _global variables or prototype functions. Most of our jobs are one shot deals with quick turn arounds, and really does the client care that your referenced _root? As long as it works, is bug free and looks great that’s all they care about at the end of the day. And when I am trying to achieve something that I haven’t done before, like maybe a cool scripted animation, I totally hack it together in AS1 first to get it working, tear it down, rebuild, clean it up and then port it over to AS2. If I had to worry about all the “rules” when I sat down to do something I would get nowhere fast. So my advice is to read what you can and try to understand why and how things get built the way they do, and then find a solution that works for you.

So all that being said try not to get to wrapped up in everything the community throws at you. There are lots of great developers out there that have a lot of great things to say, listen to them and learn but don’t hold on to their every word. Do what works for you and go outside and enjoy the nice spring day.