The Saints won 37 - 32 in a very exciting, high scoring game.

I was very impressed with the last release, 7.10, which I only upgraded to a while back. Ubuntu just keeps getting better and better and hopefully this next release continues that trend.

Firstly you need the Flex 3 SDK from the adobe site. Same package for all platforms. Download it and extract it whereever you like, in my case i put it in my home directory in a flex_3_sdk folder.

If you want you can get the flex builder plugin for eclipse which I suppose is useful if you’re doing some serious scale development but I couldn’t be bothered, any text editor on my system will do the job after all flex files are just xml. I’m using the SCITE editor at the moment.

Once I have my mxml file ready I need to call the mxmlc compiler in the flex_3_sdk/bin folder. You can do this the long way e.g.
./flex_3_sdk/bin/mxmlc myflexfile.mxml
or you could just edit your bashrc to add a shortcut alias to mxmlc e.g.
alias mxmlc='flex_3_sdk/bin/mxmlc myflexfile.mxml'
- now you can just call mxmlc with the filename.

Here I hit a problem I couldn’t figure out, after calling the compiler an error message appeared “Segmentation Fault - core dumped”. After a bit of googling it seems that the segmentation fault error is caused by the java runtime and thanks to this explanation and solution I saw that I needed to get the Sun Java runtime as opposed to the default one that comes with Ubuntu. The quickest way to do this was just to use the package manager to get and install the Sun Java 6 JDK and runtime. Once you have the latest Sun version installed I edited the mxmlc file to point to the new java location
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin/java $VMARGS -jar "$FLEX_HOME/lib/mxmlc.jar" +flexlib="$FLEX_HOME/frameworks" "$@"

And finally my flex file compiled and I got my swf which I duly opened in firefox and had the joy of seeing a label with “hello larry” on it

Aral is just an amazing swirl of activity and in his spare time recently he put together a flash version checker website - something that everyone looks for at some stage but never knows where to go to, well now it’s sorted!

Wireless broadband is available in a lot of places mostly thanks to Digiweb although you need to be in line of sight of a station and within a certain distance which can be a bit difficult in rural areas.

The satellite broadband is a laughable option, so laughable that I don’t think you can call it broadband, certainly not when it’s realisitcally only one way service, although at least there’s plenty of companies out there providing it and offering some relief to dial up sufferers.

What is Singularity? - I’ve no idea but it seems to be another great project involving super flasher Aral Balkan and by putting the badge and links on your site Aral says you get an early insight to it. So voila….