Factum Vicesimus Quartus » School

Training Period @ The Factor-E!

Wietse Veenstra — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:01:14 +0000

Last week I visited The Factor-E in Groningen to talk about the possibility to do my training period there. And today I got it confirmed! I’m very happy that I can do this with them because they are about the only company in the northern regions of the Netherlands who really use Flex and are on the cutting edge of web 2.0. I really enjoy working with Flex and ActionScript and I really want to continue working with them, also as a profession. Great news!:) On february the 5th I will start my training period for about 5 months.

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The North Netherlands RIA / Web 2.0 scene

Wietse Veenstra — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 11:23:21 +0000

The RIA Web 2.0 scene in the north of the Netherlands has been described in a very nice article by Edgar Jager, who is business development director with Adobe. They linked to my weblog (i’m quite proud of this) and to the blogs of Niels Bruin and my teacher Raymond van Dongelen as an example of the scene. Waldo Smeets of Adobe Netherlands commented on a post of Niels with the question to submit ideas on how Adobe can support education in a better way. I have some ideas on how they can improve or achieve this.

Within our schoolminor called RIA Web 2.0 we are purely focussing on development with Adobe Flex Builder 2.0 and Ruby on Rails. We have a wiki where we try to collect useful information that can help us with our study. Unfortunately this wiki isn’t working properly at the moment. The students don’t visit it because there is not enough useful content. So my idea is for us to collaborate with Adobe on how to make a useful wiki (a web 2.0 wiki built with Flex ofcourse) for both parties. Adobe could post useful links, tutorials, etc for us. The wiki could also serve as a platform where we can post our questions/problems which Adobe can answer or give us hints to where we can find a solution for it. Perhaps there could be a showcase section where we could show our Flex products (like the Adobe Flex Cookbook).

Another suggestion might be to send the Flex API poster to schools who work with Flex as this is a very useful poster and the PDF version is not that handy to read from. Ofcourse it would be great if students could also help Adobe in a way. This could also be done within the wiki or the students weblogs. We could post wishes for a next Flex release and provide self-written tutorials or code-snipplets (this already happens at the moment). As Waldo suggested in his comment, there could be a weekly live connection with Adobe Connect between one of the Flex people at Adobe and our students to discuss problems or give tutorials.

I hope my ideas will help improving the collaboration between Adobe and Flex students.

Related posts:
Niels Bruin: The North Netherlands Web 2.0 / RIA scene is gaining interest
Gerben Robijn: The North Netherlands Web 2.0, RIA scene
Raymond van Dongelen: Supporting the scene

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Fase 2.0: Build

Wietse Veenstra — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 16:49:26 +0000

We finished the first fase of the project, the concepting fase. We finished all of the designs and are ready to start building. We are rounding up the database design and are already experimenting with Flex in combination with Ruby on Rails. The first connection with a MySQL database has been made and RoR looks to be very promising. I’m looking forward to really start building the CMS for Mjuks. The finished graphical designs can be viewed by clicking the thumbnails below.

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Early mornin’ post

Wietse Veenstra — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 06:56:15 +0000

Hello me ol’ chums. I just woke up, had a quick shower and now I’m devouring my breakfast and typing here. 2 Days ago (Wednesday) we were working @ the Mjuks HQ. We decided to skip the class that was planned for the afternoon because we had a load of things to do. After last weeks discussion and struggle on what video type to use for the streaming part of the new Mjuks website we got a little treat that day. The was a man from JetStream who was going to update Mjuks on their latest techniques. JetStream is a big company on streaming video and Mjuks is already streaming their WMV and MOV videos overthere. The man was delighted to tell us that from now on they have the capabilities to stream FLV movies so our problem is solved. Streaming FLV gives us some new features we have to experiment with. Very positive. Yesterday I worked quite late to finish the final grafical mock-ups for Mjuks. I hope they will agree with them so we can start building next week. If they do (which I’m fairly positive about) I’ll post them here later today. For now, take care… I’m gonna prepare for another schoolday.

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The problemchild called CMDwiki

Wietse Veenstra — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 13:03:23 +0000

The current CMDwiki isn’t working the way it’s intended to. No one is updating the information or placing new information or reading it to gain knowledge (simply because a lack of information). After our minor discussion this morning on ways to improve this, Raymond asked us to think about it and post a possible solution on our weblog.

Fact is that the current CMDwiki isn’t relevant to us anymore. We have already advanced too far into the project to make relevant use of it. My idea is to make a project of this problem for the next group of RIA-minor-students. This group can assign all of the EC’s which can be scored during this minor to this assignment. They can build a web 2.0 RIA platform which combines a number of existing communication channels since there are too much channels at the moment. We have the ELO, our weblogs, a project management tool, the CMD website, the google calendar and the wiki. I, and a lot of students with me lost track of all the data long time ago with this forest of channels. The platform should include the wiki, a discussion board of some kind, the calendar, all of the news, a corner for sharing interesting links to web 2.0 apps and a secure part which requires login. After logging in the user should be in the ‘group’ part of the platform where he or she can share documents with fellow group members and where groups can plan their project. This part should replace the current ELO and project management tools.

That’s my vision on the situation. Take care…

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Amsterday

Wietse Veenstra — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 22:06:07 +0000

Yesterday we went to Amsterdam with our Minor group. We had an appointment with some of the great internet minds of Holland, Patrick de Laive and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. They are pioneers on internet business in our country and are currently working on their new project, called Fleck. They are working with 3 other developers on this. We talked with them about the term "web 2.0" and the future of internet. It was very interesting. After the meeting we went to a bar and had a drink. A nice day and a good trip:). Some links of their works: BlueAce – Web 2.0 weblog eKudos tw0nes Wakoopa The Next Web

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Functional Design 2.0

Wietse Veenstra — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 15:30:29 +0000

We are already working on the functional design for 2 weeks now. I’m really bored with making sketches in Photoshop and describing them in Word. For the CMS, this will result in a document of about 80 pages. In my opinion this is dull, totally not functional (who will read the functional design during the building process) and a waste of time. A better way to make a functional design is by building some real mock-ups of the final product and adding a little text to describe in detail. This way, the design will show possible problems which would otherwise occur during the building-fase. Plus it looks better when you can present a working mock-up version instead of some static sketches. Today we received an email of our group member Lisette. She informed us that last week, she decided to discontinue her pursuit of a multimedia career with us. She quits the study on our school. Now I’m going further with my preparation for next Fridays assessments. Ciao!

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Capt. Photoshop

Wietse Veenstra — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:08:34 +0000

Today I started with some hard work (yeah I was sweating!) in the garden. It needed to be done after some time of neglect. After that I started working on the graphical mock-up of the CMS we have to build for Mjuks. It’s becoming really nice I think. Happy so far. Last Friday my laptop again broke down with exactly the same problem as before. It has been up and running for a whole week! Damnit! So today I called the company that fixed it again and they will fix it again and test it more intensively this time. But I’ll be laptopless again for about 3-4 weeks now… It sux.

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booting WEBrick…

Wietse Veenstra — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:08:03 +0000

Yesterday I installed Ruby On Rails (ROR). On our CMDwiki someone said we should install InstantRails, which has an Apache Webserver and MySQL DB support embedded. But as I already have Apache, MySQL and PHP running on my pc and laptop, I decided to install it according to the tutorial video’s about ROR I downloaded. After installing this successfully, I had my first encounter with Ruby today during a lesson on this subject. I am amazed to see that after only typing 3 lines (or so…), I already had a working GUI on screen. I’m very eager to continue learning Ruby On Rails. Meanwhile I found a nice article on the internet about Web 2.0. It can be found here: Article (note: the article is in Dutch…) I’m currently helping my fellow group members with the installation of AMP. Back to that! Ciao…

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Presenting our concept

Wietse Veenstra — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:46:52 +0000

Today we had to present our concept to Mjuks. I had finished the presentable mock-up yesterday. After the presentation (which could have been better I think), the people from Mjuks asked some questions about things that were not mentioned during the presentation but which we already discussed as a group. The people of Mjuks were satisfied with the way things are progressing and all liked my design (of course there were some points which could be improved). A very important note from one of the teachers helping the Mjuks students was that we had to find out whether it’s possible to play video’s in the Flash player other than FLV’s. I believe this isn’t possible so we have to find a solution for that problem. In the meantime I’m working on the graphical design and working out the functionalities for the CMS we also have to build. I took the liberty of doing this because I have already been working on a CMS during the last half year in PHP and I think that I have the most experience with this. We agreed to work @ home tomorrow and thursday. We have to start with Ruby I think. I’m really looking forward to starting with this:) Also I’m expecting my laptop back Thursday, fixed and well so I can reinstall it and finally work on my own machine again @ school. hurray!:) that’s it for now, take care!

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