Like a High School romance I believe my love for Adobe Air has fallen by the way-side. Like many of you I saw the huge potential of Flex Apps on the desktop, all the cool amazing things I could do and all of the amazing new capabilities. I was drooling to write my first AIR apps after MAX Vegas...

Then reality hit me after recently being charged with creating several Adobe AIR applications; 1 large and 2 small ones. I love flex, I love ActionScript, I even still really like the Air Runtime. AIR truly allows you to do some things with the client side computer that will never be possible via a web browser. The local database, file extension capabilities and encrypted file store are a few. Also you can run larger applications faster and you can easily write agile “sometimes-connected” applications.

What is the reason for my waning love affair? It's really very simply: capabilities!

Adobe has tried so hard to lock down AIR to avoid the possibilities of someone writing a malicious program that they have turned it into a small shadow of what it COULD be.

• ZERO ability to make system API calls
• Inability to load DLLs and other Libraries
• No registry functionality 
• Can't launch outside/non-air applications 
• Horribly locked down and inflexible install process/package 
• Piss-poor uninstall capabilities

These are just a few of the things that have come to erk me over the last few months with AIR. The more I look at what I can't do with Adobe AIR, the more I realize that there just is absolutely no need for me write an AIR App unless it HAS to support “sometimes-connected” and I can't take the time to write it in anything else!

I understand that every technology has it's place and application; however I think AIR is missing a massive massive market by willingly or even striving at making it's self so ham-fisted just to play it safe. People write malicious VB, C++, C# and so on applications all the time. You don't see any calls out there from the masses: “Oh my god don't download that application, it was written in Visual C++ and might do bad things”!

My few months of working with Adobe AIR has left me feeling the same way about it as I do about Apple and their asinine rules surrounding the iPhone. Adobe can still fix this though, they can still add in the capabilities that I think should have been there from the start. Until then, I will continue to simply use Flex where it kicks-ass the most: the web!

This isn't a review for the Oregon brewery, but instead of my new favorite Guinness mix. Six or so months ago I was at a nice restaurant; I asked the waiter if they had either Guinness or Smithwick's on tap (these are my two favorite common beers). I hesitated for about 1/2 a second trying to decide on my food pairing, when the waiter recomended a blacksmith. Upon my puzzled look he informed me that a blacksmith was a Guinness and Smithwick's poured like a black & tan [with Smithwick's on the bottom]; I tried 3 to make sure I liked it.

I highly recomend that both be drawn from a tap, I have tried this at home with bottled, and it's definetly not as good. I would also recomend finding a bartender who actualy knows how to pour properly as it's important. A direct pour of both will still taste good, but is not prefered.

For those who would like to know the proper pour steps for any mixed Guiness

1. Hold glass at an angle and fill to just over halfway with in our case Smithwick's.
2. Pour draught Guinness over a pouring spoon or upside-down spoon in a pinch
   • In a double pinch you can also slow the flow control down to about a trickle, letting the beer hit the side of the glass on filling
     
3. Let the glass surge and settle before enjoying!

You will most likely not find a bartender who knows what this is unless they are a decent place. I've had this drink out about 2 dozen times in the last 6 months and only 3 places knew what a blacksmith was and only about 6-7 of those knew how to pour. Hard nosed Gusinness consumers will most likely snub their nose at anything other than a genuine black & tan or black & fog, but there are so good mixes out there (as well as a number of very bad ones). Personally I think worth mentioning are:

• Black & Tan: Guinness & Bass
• Black Fog: Guinness with a drizzle of Chambord liqueur
  
• Blacksmith: Guinness & Smithwick’s
• Half & Half: Guinness & Harp

I love my Blackberry Bold 9000, but I've been very dissapointed with some of the available media players. Media/Streaming players like xPlayer and PocketStreamer have so far done nothing but dissapoint.

Today however I ran accross 2 players I didn't know existed before.

1. FlyCast delivers music, talk, weather, and traffic to portable devices. Introduced in January 2008, the network has grown very rapidly from 80 channels to well over 1000 in a nine month period, and more channels are added weekly.
   
   I've listened to about an hours worth of talk radio and I would have to say I'm impressed. I'm often without a radio or the ability to stream audio onto my computer, so this should be a great little app to have while I work. I've tried several other radio streaming apps; all of them were horrible in comparison to my short experience with this product.
   
2. Slacker Radio: I can't lie, when I found out that slacker radio had a mobile app that actualy worked on my Blackberry Bold I was almost gitty. The app is clean and easy to use, very professional. I listened to about 3 hours of my Latin & Reggaeton channel with my headphones and I was extremly impressed with the sound quality considering the type of hardware I was listening on.
   
   There is also a pay to play that will cut out commercials and give you unlimed skips, something I might invest in for the paultry 3.99 a month.
   

After months of issues with HostMySite's shared hosting and issues related to their inability to not rekick my server 15 times a day I moved 2 of my sites to their lower end VPS hosting package. I looked long and hard for alternative solutions, but it was hard to compete with their prices and to be honest they have had the best customer service sales and support wise I've ever experienced with a hosting provider. The test sites include this blog and a new application that I will be doing a seperate press release on in the coming weeks. Mango Blog has it's own framework and my new venture is a decent size MachII ColdSpring application.

Considering HostMySite just rolls out images of only 3 seperate completly non customizable VPS package, I was completly suprised by how absolutly poor and pathetic the initial setup of my site was. My VPS has limited HD space and only 512 megs of memory. MSSQL, ColdFusion+IIS were setup as if they were running on seperate boxes with tons of memory. Simply starting up my blog site took so much memory that if something crashed, there wasn't enough left for either ColdFusion or IIS to even start back up.

I also suffered from major IIS stability issues; for some reason a secondary IIS site (the one for my new app) kept crashing. It would throw no errors and would partially work, but the root folder of my site would for some reason go to a different IIS site, which got me a 404 due to my blogs cflocation.

Last night was the first time in 2 months I've been completly happy with my VPS and some of it involved doing things that HostMySite wasn't too keen on.

1. Tune MSSQL memory usage
2. Tune ColdFusion JVM args
3. Disable mail server website (Google Hosts all of my company's mail services)
4. Disable SmartStats completly
5. Disable IIS Admin, Windows FTP and IIS www
6. Install Cerbus FTP (half the mem usage of iis admin and ftp)
7. Install Apache with a VERY trimmed down and tuned out config file

I know Apache on Windows has it's own issues and HMS tech support apparently has religious issues with it, but the new setup breaths so much better and as of now I currently have 178ish megs of free physically memory which is huge considering I only have 512 to begin with. Prior to 100% of all these changes, I was lucky to have 5-20 free megs...

So at the end of the day, after tutoring and HMS staying late after school I give them an adjusted grade of A- after their initial grade of a C. I plan on reaching out to them in the coming days to inform them how piss poor their default roll-out is, but I'm guessing nothing will be done any time soon... I know that a VPS is already geared towards the knowledgable, but with 15 minutes they could at least configuer IIS, MSSQL and CF8 JVM args to something that doesn't fall over and die.

Anyone else using HMS VPS? What have your experiences been?

I know many of my readers are more technical and I haven't blogged\r\non anything non-motorcycles in a while but I had to post about the Red\r\nBull U.S. Grand Prix MotoGP race on Sunday. After some marked\r\nimprovements to Casey Stoner's\r\nDesmosedici GP9's electronics the 2007 world champion has been\r\ncompletely unstoppable in the last 3 races. Seven time world champion Valentino Rossi even joked before the Laguna Seca round began that he would have to shoot Stoner in order to stop him.

In\r\nan amazing show of talent and aggressiveness from both riders, Rossi\r\nwas able to finally stop the train that is Stoner. Knowing full well\r\nthat if he let Stoner stay in front for long that he was pull away,\r\nValentino made multiple daring and aggressive passes in order to\r\nmaintain his lead providing for some of the most exciting and breath\r\ntaking racing the sport has seen in many years.

The wheel to\r\nwheel race was brought to an end though when Casey Stoner ran wide in\r\nlap 24 of 32 and dropping his bike in the gravel. However the duo had\r\nbeen racing so hard that they had already obtained more than a 25\r\nsecond lead on third place. So while Stoner was unable to re-challenge\r\nRossi, he was still able to retain second place.

If you've ever wanted to check out a MotoGP race, I would highly recommend looking into this round and if you follow the \"Read More\" link you can view some video from YouTube.