Posted on July 3, 2008 by Jennifer Epting

From Faceless to Family

We released our first product--the lovely Kindling--to public Beta early last week. Preparing Kindling for public consumption (even the Beta phase) was a test of our imaginations. We were constantly evaluating who would use the application, what they would want answers to in the FAQ section, how they would react to a video explaining the app itself.

Once Kindling was ready to be released, my most immediate responsibility was to extend a few exclusive invitations and then take control of the tidal wave of invite requests that came pouring in. One by one, they crowded into my inbox, and on that first day, one by one, I responded back.

I'm not entirely sure what people think happens once they submit their name for a Beta invite. I suppose they assume their information is sent to an almighty database, which then electronically generates an invite code and sends them a confirmation email. Lest you believe otherwise, here at Arc90, all Kindling requests are processed by human hands--and lovingly cared for by yours truly.

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Posted on July 2, 2008 by Javier Julio

Fixing the Can't move '.svn/tmp/entries' to '.svn/entries' error

I'd been having trouble deploying the latest version of a Flex Module due to an SVN error I had never come across before. I was trying to update the svn:externals property with a new URL but once I saved my change I would get the following error in Terminal:

Can't move '.svn/tmp/entries' to '.svn/entries': Operation not permitted

I tried running an svn cleanup command but no luck. After digging through Google I came across an excellent post (it's in Spanish) with a command to run that prevents the above error. Basically on the directory I was trying to run the svn propedit svn:externals . command, all I had to was run the following command first: chflags -R nouchg ./

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Posted on June 30, 2008 by Avi Flax

Netflix Demonstrates Customer Relationship Mastery

Everyone makes mistakes. It's what you learn from them, and how you deal with them, that matters.

Two weeks ago, Netflix decided to discontinue one of their features: Profiles. I was annoyed by this, but not enough to make any noise about it, or even tell Netflix. Truth is, I assumed that the decision was final, and that nothing I could say would matter. Well, Netflix proved me wrong, and has once again demonstrated their dedication to customer satisfaction, by reversing their decision in response to customer feedback.

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Posted on June 26, 2008 by Javier Julio

Enabling A Drop Shadow On A Flex Container

To set a drop shadow on say a VBox or HBox component you simply set the boolean property dropShadowEnabled to "true" -- but this is not enough to make the drop shadow appear. An example:

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Posted on June 25, 2008 by Joel Potischman

In praise of System.Object

In this Quick Tip, I show you how to make a method that deals with System.Object parameters more type-safe by converting it to use generics. Last year I had written a wrapper class to talk to the ASP.NET caching system for me. It returned cached objects as System.Object for maximum flexibility. The client would cast to the desired type, but it always bugged me, because it wasn't very type-safe. Consider the following chunk of code:

It will compile just fine, but it will blow up when I run it, because silly me, WhenDidIDoThis contains a DateTime, not an integer. It's far safer to rewrite my code to use generics:

Hmm. Actually, that same logic error still compiles just fine, but hey, at least my code now signals its intent more clearly. The bigger problem is now I'm getting a compiler error elsewhere. Let's see why.

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