Happy New Year! And welcome back, Zune-sters!

Amazingly, someone has already determined the flaw causing all those Zunes to lock up today.

When I checked this MAKE magazine article describing the bug (part of the free runtime library provided by Freescale), all the code was rendered as left-aligned text in my browser.

year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */

while (days > 365)
{
if (IsLeapYear(year))
{
if (days > 366)
{
days -= 366;
year += 1;
}
}
else
{
days -= 365;
year += 1;
}
}

I couldn't see the flaw. Can you?

I reformatted the code in TextMate, and the problem became apparent.

year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */

while (days > 365)
{
  if (IsLeapYear(year))
  {
    if (days > 366)
    {
      days -= 366;
    year += 1;
    }
  }
  else
  {
    days -= 365;
    year += 1;
  }
}

Can you see it now? Thought so. I wonder how many people will complain about their Zombie-Zunes on Dec 31, 2012?

Free Flex and AIR resources? We can haz!

Free AIR and Flex training. Bring it on!

Fellow Vancouverite Duane Nickull informed me that the sessions he was running at both MAXen (MAXes? What is that the correct pluralization? Where's RubyOnRails when you need it!) are now available online.

The AIR Boot Camp session is intended to give you an overview of how you can leverage your existing Web developer tools to create desktop apps using the AIR platform, including the recently released AIR 1.5 runtime.

The Building Flex service clients session gives you an overview of consuming web services from a Flex app, with links to preconfigured WAMP and MAMP stacks to test against.

Also, make sure to check out the great Tour De Flex app, available both as a standalone AIR app, and an eclipse/FlexBuilder plugin.

Don't be fooled by the default view in Tour De Flex. At first glance Tour De Flex looks like a less full-featured version of the Flex Style Explorer, but check out that combo box that says "Flex Core Components". Other choices will reveal live apps and sample code for consuming well over a dozen popular clouds APIs like Twitter, Flickr, and Amazon, as well as demos/samples for Google/Yahoo/Mapquest maps.

Got something cool to share? Submit it to the Flex.org form and it may show up in the next publish phase.