Book Recommendation

I am enjoying this book immensely. Highly recommended:

http://www.codersatwork.com/

Updated Resume

Just in case:
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickmain/NickMain-Resume-redacted-10-2009.html

Any suggestions for improvements are welcome.

Snow Leopard FTW

My 32-bit-only first-gen Intel MBP finally has Java 6 !

OWL 2 Overview

An overview of the OWL 2 semantic web ontology language. The important elements and their relationships:


If anyone wants the original Omnigraffle document, please let me know.

Visual Ontology Editor

I've been taking a short sabbatical from all the Flash-related projects to work on future career options. Part of that is building a visual ontology editor.

Screenshot shows the early stages of an interactive visualization component plugged into the Protege ontology editor. The goal is to be able to create and edit semantic web ontologies entirely via diagrams.

Exploring the infamous "Pizza" ontology:

Vector.<Joy> - J2AVM update

Just got the new Flash 10 "Vector.<>" typed arrays working. Using them to translate Java arrays, so those should be much faster.

This means that J2AVM is now targeting Flash 10+ only.

Somewhere along the way I lost the code generator for creating the Java representations of the classes in the Flash Player library SWC. Busy rewriting that so I can generate the Java for all the new Flash 10 classes.

Progress Update

J2AVM progress update:

• Figured out how to support Java Framework classes - effectively it's by including special implementations of them in the generated SWF. To-do is lazy inclusion of referenced methods so that this does not impose too much overhead. Currently this only implements some of the append methods of StringBuilder (which is how Java does its string concatenation).

• Also, figured out a reasonable way to do event handler functions. A static "delegate" method call is translated to a fetch of a named method closure. Screenshot of Java code below should be self explanatory. The @Name annotation on the "onMove" method provides an explicit name for the generated member - otherwise the name would be mangled, such as "onMove(95c0166a)", where the number is a String hashcode of the parameter signature. This mangling scheme is necessary since Java method names can be overloaded.

Next up - unit test framework.

Also, considering going to Flash 10 as the default runtime target so that the new Vector class can be used to speed up array operations. This would also allow Pixel Bender support - write Kernels in Java !