mikemo

About a week ago, the Flex team took the afternoon off to go to the park and play kickball. Yeah that’s right, the game for little kids, like baseball except that you kick a big red rubber ball.

Wheeeeeee *owwww*. Catching a fly ball (at least I caught it), I jammed my finger. Turned out I fractured the fifth metacarpal bone in my hand, and will be wearing a brace and/or cast for four to six weeks.

This is making it ridiculously hard to type. I don’t really want to take any time off work, because I just got back from a nice long sabbatical and am eager to get back to Flex Builder features. So I’m just going to keep plugging away, albeit a lot more slowly than usual.

Voice recognition software helps with email and the like, but not with coding. I even had another weird but creative idea that didn’t quite pan out: one funny thing about this is that with the brace on my hand, it is actually easier to type on my iPhone than on a computer keyboard. (I am writing this blog post on the iPhone.) So, I installed VNC software on my computer, and then installed Mocha VNC Lite on my iPhone. That way, I can use the iPhone got typing on my computer!  But alas, when you do that, you don’t get the iPhone’s auto-correct capabilities, and without that, the iPhone was too tedious to type on.

Anyway, I am plugging away on lots of really cool debugger features for Flex Builder 4. I can’t tell you what they are, but I just can’t resist mentioning that our awesome summer intern, Sedat Akkus, has implemented one of the most-requested debugger features. So what is the feature?  Well, that’s a secret, but it rhymes with “fronditional schmakepoints.”

I was trying to free up some disk space on my Mac, so I ran Disk Inventory X to help me find big files I could delete.  I found a pretty big (669MB) file called /System/Library/Speech/Voices/Alex.SpeechVoice/Contents/Resources/PCMWave.  I suspected “Alex” was probably one of the voices that can be used with the Mac’s text-to-speech feature, and that turned out to be right: If you go to System Preferences > Speech, you can find Alex there.

The PCMWave file for Alex is much bigger than the PCMWave file for any other voice, so I wasn’t surprised to find that Alex sounds far more realistic than any other voice.  Nonetheless, I’m gonna kill him, because he is taking too much of my disk space.

In any case, I amused myself by listening to all the voices. Try clicking “Show More Voices” — the “Deranged” voice made me laugh out loud.

To install:

• Install Greasemonkey
• Restart Firefox
• Install Netflix Notes

Description:

This happens to me all the time: I decide to add a movie to my Netflix queue — perhaps because it was recommended by a friend, perhaps because I saw a good review, perhaps for some other reason.

Then, months later, I can’t remember why I put it in my queue! To address this problem, I wrote a little Firefox Greasemonkey script called Netflix Notes.

Netflix Notes changes your Netflix queue so that you can add a private “note to self” on each movie in your queue. The main point of this is to remind yourself why you added a particular movie — e.g. because a friend recommended it, you read a good review, and so on.

It only works with the Firefox web browser. If you are using another browser, such as Internet Explorer or Safari, Netflix Notes won’t work for you.

I would love it if Netflix obsoleted my work by integrating this functionality natively into their website! But in the meantime, you can use my program.

30-second demo:

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Can other people see my notes?
A: No. The notes are stored on your computer, not out on the Internet. Only someone using your computer can see your notes.

Q: Where, exactly, are the notes stored?
A: They are stored in your Firefox profile. To see them, navigate to about:config, and then type “netflix” into the filter box.

Q: You should store the notes on the Internet! I want to be able to see them from every computer I use.
A: Yes, I would love to add that capability; but I haven’t had a chance to do so yet.