Reading the News

I decided to check out the The New York Times – Times Reader 2.0 today and it was a very enjoyable way to read the newspaper online. Much better than I expected.

Flex AdvancedDataGrid Source Code

If you happen to have a Flex Builder Professional license you also have the source code for the datavisualization components. The source is archived in the DMV-source.jar file. This file is located in the lib directory of your SDK.

For Windows machines this is

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\sdks\3.2.0\lib\DMV-source.jar


To extract the source you run the following command.


java -jar DMV-source.jar [license-file-location] [output-location]


The license file can be found here

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Flex


You can put the source anywhere but Flex Builder Professional is already setup to read the source from

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\sdks\3.2.0

so it is easiest to just extract it from there.

The final command to extract the code would be

java -jar DMV-source.jar C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Flex C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\sdks\3.2.0


SETI@Home plus other ways to share your CPU

I used to have all my computers running the SETI@Home. Then I switched from Windows to Mac and never reinstalled it. Today I found BOINC. It is a way to share your spare CPU cycles with numerous projects including SETI@Home.
I’m currently sharing my CPU with SETI@Home and climateprediction.net.

Launcher for Windows

At home I’m a Mac user and I’ve loved using Quicksilver to launch apps and search for files. At work it was frustrating me that I couldn’t do that same thing. Eventually I found Launchy. It is basically a poor man’s Quicksilver but it gets the job done quite nicely. Today I discovered yet another Windows launcher called Executor. Not sure how it compares to Launchy yet but at least the number of options are growing. Maybe at some point we’ll have some comparable to Quicksilver.