I'm heading to Southern California in two weeks to do a miniature User Group tour. I'll be talking about development for the BlackBerry PlayBook using Adobe tools. I'll also cover ColdFusion as a Mobile Backend. If you're in Southern California, and close to one of these meetings I invite you to stop in.

Tuesday February 1st
San Diego
Hosted by SDADUG and SdFug
Time:
6:00PM to 8:00 PM
Location: 
The Art Institute of California // San Diego
7650 Mission Valley Rd.
San Diego, CA

Wednesday February 2nd
Los Angeles
Hosted by LACFUG
Time:
6:00pm - 8:30pm
Location:
TollFreeForwarding.com
5959 W. Century Blvd
Suite 1108
Los Angeles, CA

Thursday February 3rd
Pomona
Hosted by IECFUG
Time:
6:15pm - 9:00pm
Location:
5-16 of building 98C
(the C/L/A building)
Cal Poly Pomona
Pomona, CA

Saw a great post, Today's Noise, Tomorrow's Dinosaur on General Musing.

One of the points I make in Driving Technical Change is that expertise constantly decays. Every piece of technology out there today is evolving and changing. If you stop paying attention to areas of your knowledge, then you will lose expert status.

The author disagrees with me. He states:

I think this is a sweeping generalization which I believe is wrong, and I know is wrong for me. I regularly go on sabbatical for 3-6 months where I don't or hardy use a computer, with hardly I mean I checked my mail once after 3 months. In this time due to the fact that I'm traveling I don't read computer books or magazines. Coming back after this time I notice one important thing, nothing has changed except the version numbers. New features have been added to old software, new design patterns have been thought up and new frameworks have been created, whole sections of the linux kernel have been rewritten. And with in a week I am at my expertise level, and a week later I have covered most of the important things I've missed.

Impressive that he is able to do so. I, of course, think he is an outlier. However, I agree that 3-6 months off won't kill your expertise, assuming the rest of the time you are working on it.

What I do agree with him about is the idea that there is a lot of noise out there, and following it doesn't add to expertise. He's right that following every single release note, or bleeding edge build of your tools won't help your expertise.

But I still believe you need to keep up to date on expertise maintenance information. I also believe tuning it out for long periods will cause your expertise to atrophy.

The hard part is to judge what is noise and what is signal.

For me, it, like many things, is like pornography, "I know it when I see it." If I had to categorize what fits that bill for me, it usually comes down to source. Certain sources--bloggers, publications, companies--seem to always put things out that expand my thinking, illuminate choices, and convey tough concepts in easy to understand metaphor.

So, sorry no easy answer, but I can at least tell you it's not in the release notes.

I'm working on a Remember the Milk application for the BlackBerry PlayBook, and am trying to get familiar with building against the RTM API. One of the security measures they take in order to use their API is requiring all applications to authenticate against a page on their site, and give permission to the calling application. It's a pretty common pattern these days.

To do this in an AIR application, you can use StageWebView, which allows you to open a browser display within your applications. It has limitations, but works perfectly for this use case.

So you load up the page you want in the StageWebView, listen for the locationChange event, see if permission was granted, and go about your way. Simple? Right?

It failed for RTM. Why?

The location didn't change. It was doing one of those "Let's be cool and not reload the page" things.

At first glance the work around was to add a close button that the user would hit when the RTM page was done. But that's inelegant, and frankly lazy.

So, I poked around some more, and found out, that despite not firing a locationChange event, it was firing a complete event when it was done. And luckily, RTM changes the title to reflect that the user gave permission.

So, all I had to do was add a check for the title to the processor for complete as displayed below:

Simple, easy, straightforward - hopefully I save someone else an afternoon of trial and error with this post.