Archive for July, 2008

Writing a Flex application

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

This summer I have been doing some contract work with the Bill Ogden of the Psychology Department at New Mexico State University. For years he has been investigating the usability of IM systems that have a machine translation component. In order to perform more nuanced experiments he needed custom designed IM system and he contracted with me to perform the work. When you log into the chat system you select a language and all messages from other participants will be translated to that language. For example, this would enable a Korean speaker and an English speaker to communicate with one another. The server-side system which does all the translation and maintains the chat is in PHP. The client side app is in Adobe Flex. I was going to use AJAX but my son recommended that I look at Flex. I think Flex is fantastic, but learning it has been a challenge. Most of my problems have been with understanding gui components. The screenshot above is of the system right now, about midway through the project. Throughout the course of the last month I have worked through the following Flex books: (more…)

W.C. Clark – Saxon Pub

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

I went to hear guitarist and vocalist W.C. Clark at the Saxon Pub in Austin.  He’s been called the godfather of Austin blues. He has played with a number of the other big names in Austin blues including Stevie Ray Vaughn. He was born in Austin in 1939.  That makes him close to 70 and I was astonished by the energy he had. He played his 1 1/2 hr sets without break–one song seamlessly morphing into the next. At times he would talk to the audience while comping blues patterns. His tunes ranged from standard blues to covers of Stevie Wonder tunes. The Saxon pub was small and his sound system was not overpowering meaning I wasn’t worrying about hearing loss. The sound was balanced well. His quartet consisted of himself on guitar and vocals, a drummer, bass player and a sax/harmonica player. Sadly I don’t know their names. If you are interested in hearing him he has clips on his website and there are some youtube videos.  he plays mostly in the Austin & hill country area.