Now you can customize how avatars show up on your blog, including some cool never-before available options: You can find these options under Settings > Discussion. Here’s what you can do: Turn avatars on and off, which applies to their display on your blog. Choose a rating, which right now only works for Gravatars but as we integrate WordPress.com [...]

My dad has a Motorola T605 cell phone with Verizon. Most of the time, if he received a call when the phone was on the holder and connected to Bluetooth, it wouldn’t work.  Dialing out was no problem. The phone would remain on, but no audio could be heard. If he attempted [...]

A lot of interesting experiments are going on with Flex especially in animations and graphics. This week I thought giving a few of them a closer look along with other stuff Chart Drill down Animations Complete with source this one is sure to give you good hang of things on how to develop a drill down [...]

Click here to see large image On April the 26th, I turned 40! I decided not to throw a party, and instead do what I love the most: Go downhill skiing. So, a couple of days before my birthday, I packed my bags and headed up into the mountains. Long story made short: I had a blast! Got two full days of perfect skiing conditions and warm (spring) weather. Now to the great surprise: See the picture above? It was waiting for me when I got back to town. My mom found it among my late Grandfathers things. The picture was a small newspaper-clipping that he had stuck inside a book, and the clip accidentally fell out of that book the other day, while my mom were going through his old stuff. Funny thing, we never knew the picture existed. Moreover, although I competed in slalom for at least 10 years - I haven't got one single picture from that time. Having found the picture among my Grandfathers things, my mom and dad immediately contacted the local newspaper, and low and behold, they actually managed to find the original. And so they had it framed, and sent for my birthday. Next after the "Ego" book, by Erik Haaker, this is the best birthday gift I've ever got. Thanks mom & dad :)

On April the 26th, I turned 40. Hurray! I decided not to throw a party this time, and instead do what I love the most: Go downhill skiing. So, a couple of days before my birthday, I packed my bags and headed up into the mountains, to a place called Hemsedal. Long story made short: I had a blast! Got two full days of perfect skiing conditions and warm (spring) weather. And yes - a little bit of sunshine too :) Now to the great surprise: This b/w picture! It was waiting for me when I got back to town. My mom found it among my late Grandfathers things. The picture was a small newspaper-clipping that he had stuck inside a book, and it accidentally fell out, while my mom were going through his old stuff the other day. Funny thing, we never even knew the picture existed. Moreover, although I competed in slalom for at least 10 years - I haven't got one single picture from that time. Having found the picture among my Grandfathers things, my mom and dad immediately contacted the local newspaper, and low and behold, they actually managed to find the original. And so they had it framed, and sent for my birthday. Next after the "Ego" book, by Erik Haaker, this is the best birthday gift I've ever got. Thanks mom and dad! And a very special thanks to my late granddad :)

You can tile a material on a 3d object by adjust the “maxU” and “maxV” of the material that you attach to that object: For example, you set the “tiled” property of the material to “true” then set how many times you’d like to tile the material vertically and horizontally as follows: material.tiled [...]

Three ColdFusion positions this week, including one in Canada:

• New York City Human Resources Administration (Brooklyn, NY) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include at least 8 years of ColdFusion experience, as well as strong skills with IIS, SQL Server, and OOP. Candidates will be tested on their ColdFusion skills, and ColdFusion Certification is preferred. Details posted online (including contact information for recruiter Derrick Hemphill at CMA).
• Bark Communications (London, Ontario, Canada) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include 4+ years of ColdFusion experience (or equivalent experience in ASP.NET, JSP, PHP), as well as 5+ years DBMS and HTML/CSS/JavaScript experience. Familiarly with Ajax and Flash preferred. Details posted online.
• Unnamed client (Stamford, CT) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include 3+ years of development experience using ColdFusion MX or later, as well as strong SQL Server skills and full project lifecycle experience. Apply online (or contact recruiter Sean Hawes at Workstream Inc / 6FigureJobs.com).

Last time I wrote about Top Down parsing, a technique for parsing that can be easilly implemented manually using function recursion.

Today it is time to talk about one of the other ways of parsing, called Bottom Up parsing. This technique try to find the most important units first and then, based on a language grammar and a set of rules, try to infer higher order structures starting from them. Bottom Up parsers are the common output of Parser Generators (you can find a good comparison of parser generators here) as they are easier to generate automatically then recursive parser because they can be implemented using sets of tables and simple state based machines.

Writing down manually a bottom up parser is quite a tedious task and require quite a lot of time; moreover, this kind of parsers are difficult to maintain and are usually not really expandable or portable. This is why for my tests I decided to port bYacc (a parser generator that usually generates C code) and edit it so it generates ActionScript code starting from Yacc-compatible input grammars. Having this kind of tool makes things a lot easier, because maintaining a grammar (that usually is composed by a few lines) is less time expensive than working with the generated code (that usually is many lines long).
I will not release today the port because actually I had not time to make sure it is bugfree and I've only a working version for Mac, but I plan to release it shortly if you will ever need it for your own tasks. My goal for today was to compare the speed of the parser I wrote with an automatically generated bottom up parser, to see which is the faster approach.

I created a bottom up parser which is able to execute the same expressions accepted by the expression evaluator I wrote last time. There are anyways some differences that - as you will probably and hopefully understand in the future - that make those parsers really different. Some will be disussed shortly here.
To do that I created a Yacc grammar and some support classes.
The parser grammar is really simple and really readable:

%{

%}

%token NUMBER SYMBOL
%left '+' '-'
%left '*' '/'
%left NEG

%%
program
: expr                { Vars.result = $1; }
;

expr
: expr '+' expr       { $$ = $1 + $3; }
| expr '-' expr       { $$ = $1 - $3; }
| expr '*' expr       { $$ = $1 * $3; }
| expr '/' expr       { $$ = $1 / $3; }
| '-' expr %prec NEG  { $$ = -$2; }
| '(' expr ')'        { $$ = $2; }
| SYMBOL '(' expr ')' {
                        if( Vars.SYMBOL_TABLE[ $1 ] )
                        {
                          $$ = Vars.SYMBOL_TABLE[ $1 ]( $3 );
                        } else
                        {
                          trace( "can't find function" );
                        }
                      }
| SYMBOL              { 
                        if( Vars.SYMBOL_TABLE[ $1 ] )
                        {
                          $$ = Vars.SYMBOL_TABLE[ $1 ];
                        } else
                        {
                          trace( "can't find symbol" );
                        }
                      }
| NUMBER              { $$ = yyval; }
;
%%

Continue reading the extended entry to see the results.

Foo Fighters played on Friday and Saturday at the Acer Arena, here in Sydney. The show was bloody awesome! It’s one of the best shows I’ve been to in a long time, if not the best. I recorded some videos with my mobile, but the audio is crappy, so I checked if anyone else had [...]

In an exiting development Sony Ericsson has been able gel two of most popular development platforms in mobile computing through its new technology called ‘Project Capuchin’. It intends to combine the best of two worlds, Adobe Flash Lite and the Java ME development platform thus opening up a sea of possibilities for developers. The Java ME [...]

David Tudury is a guy who used to be on the Flash forums back in the day. I remember he did some crazy 3D stuff back before Papervision was even a dream. After a long hiatus, he is back with PseudoBiotic. Nice to see some old school Flash experimentation going on.

Pistach.io is entering beta testing. You've probably noticed the Pistach.io ad on my site for a little while now. Peter Elst was helping us alpha test the ad rotation. Seb's got his badge up as well and the other beta testers from the Pistach.io Flash Pack will be adding theirs shortly. So what's Pistach.io and the [...]

I just upgraded to FireFox 3 Beta 5 and immediately felt the loss of FireBug. Although FireFox can't automatically locate an update for it, FireBug 1.1 works in Beta 5 so grab it now! Also feeling the loss of my del.icio.us bookmarks, HTML Validator plugin, and Alexa rating graph, I googled for a possible solution and [...]

By default, Flex Builder creates inaccessible SWF files. Bad decision. This needs to change. Enabling accessibility features for The GAE SWF Project resulted in an 8KB file size increase in the SWF file. I can live with that. Creating inaccessible SWF files to save a couple of KB is no savings at all. The Flex accessibility overview [...]

Dan McAdams has posted a quick guide to help people get up and running with the CoverFlow Flex component SWC file. This component has generated a lot of interest, which is great, but it also means that there are a lot of people who are brand new to Flex (and hence don’t know how to [...]

In this tutorial you will learn how to make a car from scratch. Read tutorial and download support files

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Here’s a great article put together by James Ward and the people at InfoQ.com on the 10 biggest mistakes you can make while building a Flex Application. I particularly like number 8, I had no idea about the Runtime Shared Libraries (RSL) feature that you can use to reduce the size of your applications by externalizing shared assets into [...]

9,547 = Number of members of the FlexCoders Yahoo! Group. That’s 9,547 more reasons you can Count on Flex! “Count on Flex” is a series of blogs about the current state of the Flex ecosystem… by the numbers.

9,547 = Number of members of the FlexCoders Yahoo! Group. That’s 9,547 more reasons you can Count on Flex! “Count on Flex” is a series of blogs about the current state of the Flex ecosystem… by the numbers.