Christophe Herreman

I just got back from the Flash Thriller Night in Ghent, Belgium. The event took place at Studio Skoop, a small cinema where they play alternative movies. Serge Jespers did a presentation on Flash 8, mainly focused at designers and I talked about Flash Player 8.5, Flex Builder 2 and ActionScript 3.0. My presentation was based on the presentation Daniel Dura did at the last MMUG meeting so I would recommend his presentation slides instead of mine. You can get them here.

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2 and changed the theme of the blog. If it looks weird in your browser please let me know so I can change it.

 Here’s a Christmas card for all you guys. The little fellow is Thomas my 11 month old son. The text is in Dutch but you’ll get the meaning.

 

I hope the coming year will be as good as 2005. A lot has happened and I can only say it was awesome. Getting married and becoming a dad were the most remarkable events in my personal life. On the job I had the chance to be working on a pretty large e-learning project which is completely build in Flash. I’ve had tons of fun playing around with some the new OSFlash projects and enjoyed contributing wherever possible.

My resolutions for the new year (and thinking out loud):

• read more non-tech books: I’ve been reading the Da Vinci code by Dan Brown and I love it. I should read more of this stuff. What about reading one for every tech book I read? If anyone has some interesting titles, please leave them in the comments.
• go back to the gym: no comment
• finish what I start: ok, I’m just terrible at this point. I have so much things I want to do and I have so little time. The result is that I tend to leave stuff in a 80%-90% state and I never manage to finish them.
• pick up the guitar more often: …and play some Megadeth and Dream Theater tunes. I bought myself one of those PodXT amps to play at home and it is very cool. Just connect it to your pc through USB and you’re done. Now turn the volume to 11 and “metal up your ass”.
• decide wheter to learn ASP.NET or not: I just can’t decide…

Have fun celebrating the new year. Don’t drink and drive ! See you in the blogosphere in 2006…

After 6 years and a lot of intense moments together, Isabelle and I finally got married. We spent the day in the company of our family and friends and had a really good time. Besides the rainy weather later that day, everything went alright. We went to a restaurant in the city, Cyrano de Bergerac, which is now owned by an old friend of mine. And boy can he cook! The evening couldn’t have been beter.

I’m really looking forward to spending the rest of my life together with my wife and son. They are the flames that keep me going. Thank you for everything guys, I love you!

25 candles on the birthday cake today, I’m getting old.

It’s been a while since I posted on this weblog so I thought it was time to write some things down.

The Work 1

I’ve been quite busy lately with work. On the fulltime job at MultiMediaLoft, we’re working on a very big e-learning project and I’m in charge of most of the Flash work. The project is called Idiomatic and its main goal is to form a framework for building e-learning applications ranging from online apps to cd-rom applications. Since I’ve been using ARP a lot in the last couple of months, I decided to extend it to form the Idiomatic framework. This has worked out quite well actually. We have base classes like IdiomaticForm and IdiomaticApplication that form the meat of all views/forms in the applications we make. They contain common operations that (e-learning) environments need to function properly. Besides the view part, we have also built an XML parsing mechanism that can handle QTI and our own XML structures. We still have a lot of work to do but it is fun as hell!

The Work 2

Also at multimedialoft, 2 new recruits were introduced. They’re both Flash developers and working with them is a real pleasure. Before they came in, I was pretty much alone to handle all the Flash work. This often lead to frustrating moments because there was nobody around to help you think about common problems in Flash development. Working with a team of Flash developers is pretty much new to me and I have only enjoyed it so far. Well…there were some times when we copied over eachothers files, but that was before we started using SVN. The only thing I can conclude is that working on a team demands more discipline than working alone, but after all that’s only a good thing. I also feel comfortable discussing problems (this may take some time to get everybody on the same level) and it feels like ideas grow at an exponential rate. You really feed eachothers brain with ideas.

The Work 3

I recently joined contracting forces with 2 ex-colleagues to form SuperUnit. We are focusing on Rich Internet Projects and are always interested in some challenging work. We are currenlty working on some projects and a website and will release more info soon.

The Format c:

I did a “format c:” some weeks ago and I still have to install some things. One of them is Skype, so Martin if you read this, I’ll be back online soon! I also installed Mozilla Thunderbird and I like it a lot. Some of the cooler features are the Conversation view and the RSS reader.

The Health

I’ve been ill since 6 weeks. My head was aching like hell, my nose all stuffed up and I had a pretty rough cough. The last couple of days have actually been better. I went to see a ear, nose and throat specialist and he concluded that I have hay fever (I already knew that), that my bronchial tubes are very sensitive and that I have the beginning of sinusitis. I should be very careful with airconditioning. Too bad I recently bought a new car with airconditioning.

The Baby

Little Thomas Herreman, my new hobby. It is so much fun to watch him grow and see him discovering the world. And man, all those efforts take a lot of energy, a good nap can do miracles.

The Wife

My wife (well not yet, but we have plans though) started working again after pregnancy leave. She now teaches the 2nd class in kindergarten and really loves the job. She is very devoted in what she does and truly is an amazing mother! Isabelle, I love you.

The blog

I have been considering blogging in Dutch also. After all it is my mother tongue and writing in Dutch is just easier than writing in English. I know how hard it can be for a none-native speaker of English to read a technical article and then actually understand what’s in it…let alone write an article. Even though the majority of developers can read/write/speak English, I still think there is a certain obstacle in understanding the full context of an article. So what I’m planning to do is to write some posts on AMFPHP or FAME/FAMES and see how the Dutch Flash community reacts to them. It should be noted that there is just a huge lack of Dutch resources for Flash development and my opinion is that it wouldn’t be bad if there were more, especially on the latest evolutions like the whole FAME setup.

The Flash Evolution

Talking about FAME: has developing Flash apps ever been more exciting? This whole evolution simply rocks! Even Macromedia likes it and decides to participate and support open source Flash/Flex development. Check out www.osflash.org for more info and be sure to join the mailinglist.

The End

That’s about it. Feel free to contact me at Domain(”herrodius.com”).addAccount(”info”); If that doesn’t stop spammers then what will…