This latest release updates our support for the Java-based Ruby implementation, JRuby, which is now a very good, mature product with a decent Windows installer. The Ruby In Steel editor and integrated console supports multiple versions of Ruby: 1.8.x, 1.9.1 and JRuby 1.4. In addition, we have two debuggers - one for Ruby 1.8 and another for JRuby 1.4.

Ruby In Steel 1.5 supports named Build Configurations so you can quickly swap Ruby interpreters for running or debugging by selecting a configuration name from a drop-down list (as shown above).

More on the SapphireSteel Software web site: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-1-5-Released

As far as I can figure out, it all began after I installed the latest version of Flash 10. The error message pops up when I view Flash movies in Internet Explorer, Opera or Firefox. When I Googled for information, most of the hits referred to problems with something called the Google Desktop rather than Adobe Flash.

I didn’t think I had the Google Desktop installed. But when I checked via Control Panel, there it was. I must have installed it ages ago in a moment of recklessness and have never used it ever since. I couldn’t see what on earth it had to do with the Flash movie problem but, just on the off-chance, I uninstalled it anyway.

And, much to my surprise, that did the trick. Getting rid of the Google Desktop has had the effect of letting me view Flash movies without any errors.

My company, SapphireSteel Software, has just released a preview (beta ’edge’) edition of Amethyst - our Flash Platform IDE for Visual Studio - which includes new tools to let you share Flash IDE (CS4 or CS3) applications with Amethyst.

That means you can continue designing and animating using the Flash IDE and do the programming (editing, debugging, refactoring, IntelliSense) in Visual Studio. More info here:

 http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Flash-In-Visual-Studio-Amethyst.

Merry Christmas one and all!

The New Yorker claimed that Essjay was “A tenured professor of religion at a private university.” This assertion was subsequently corrected by the addition of an ‘Editor’s Note’ stating that Essjay had been recommended to the author of the New Yorker article “by a member of Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community.” But, in fact, it had subsequently been discovered that “his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, ‘I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.’”

Now, I am not one of those people who dismiss Wikipedia as a source of all the inaccurate information known to man (though I should say that my colleague, Dermot Hogan, has never been so forgiving - see his article from 2005, Lies, Damned Lies and Wikipedia). I use Wikipedia a lot - far more than I use any printed work of reference - and, in fairness, I have learnt a great deal from it. But, even so, I don’t trust it. I would never quote a Wikipedia article as a definitive reference. This is partly because I don’t know who the people who wrote those articles are and whether they are authorities on the subject or just self-opinionated hotheads.

I read another interesting article today in Canada’s National Post. The writer of this article claims that numerous Wikipedia articles, many of them relating to climate change, have been rewritten by a U.K. scientist and Green Party activist named William Connolley: “He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period.”

The National Post article says that Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles and, when he became a Wikipedia administrator, he deleted more than 500 articles: “The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.”

Of course, as I am sceptical of the information in Wikipedia, so am I sceptical of information in newspapers such as the National Post and I should mention that the author of the above article, Lawrence Solomon, might be said to have his own agenda - he is, amongst other things, author of “The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.”

But Solomon is open about who he is and the views he holds. So I can make up my own mind about how much credibility I give to what he writes. It is harder, much harder, to unpick the tangled threads of additions, deletions, corrections and counter-corrections which go into an article in Wikipedia. And, for that reason, I take Wikipedia articles with an even bigger pinch of salt than I the ones I reserve for articles in the conventional press and printed books.

The plain fact of the matter is that the manner in which Wikipedia articles are constructed by multiple authors over time ensures that the information which Wikipedia contains is broad-reaching and regularly updated. But the downside is that it can never really be trusted.

As you may know, most of my time recently has been involved in the development of Amethyst, my company’s Flash Platform IDE for Visual Studio. This is a huge project. Bigger and more complex even than our other IDE, Ruby In Steel, for programming the Ruby language.

Not only does it have a huge range of editing features - including IntelliSense, code refactoring, code colouring and collapsing, plus an integrated ’drill-down debugger’ - but it also has (and this is the killer) a fully integrated drag-and-drop design environment.

OK, so what? (you may be thinking) - don’t all Visual Studio languages have a designer? Well, yes, most do. But then most use one of the designers created by Microsoft. We didn’t have that option. The Flash Platform isn’t .NET and it isn’t Win32. It’s a mix of Adobe technologies including the Flash Player, the ActionScript language and the Flex framework. In order to build a drag-and-drop designer we have had to use these technologies to create the design environment and then embed it right in the middle of Visual Studio so that, as far as the end user can see, it should look like a natural and native part of Visual Studio itself.

The Amethyst Designer integrates with the Visual Studio Toolbox and the toolbars, it uses the Properties and Events panels. You can even double-click a control such as a Button to create a button-click event-handler in the ActionScript code.

Sounds easy? Nope, it isn’t!

Anyhow, we’ve just released the latest beta of Amethyst so if you want to have a play around with it over Christmas, why not go over to our site and download a copy?

This American mini-series involves characters exploring a variety of locations in which to find ‘objects’ with interesting powers. The people who look for these objects are called ‘collectors’ and the principal place in which objects are located is a mysterious ‘room’ whose doors connect to a variety of different places at different times. This provides a handy means of transporting a character around the world of the show without having to waste valuable plot-hours sending him on complicated journeys.

I hadn’t been watching many minutes before I realised where I’d come across this type of world before - in an adventure game. The lead character is the game player. The room and its various exits are just like the multi-connected rooms, mazes, time-machines and transporters that feature in so many classic text adventures. The ‘objects’ are the treasures and, just like adventure game objects, the most mundane things (a clock, a comb, a glass eye!) can turn out to have the most extraordinary powers. You can even save and restore the game. The ‘lost room’ in the title has a ‘reset’ mechanism which restores it to an earlier state.

In fact, so much did The Lost Room remind me of an adventure game (I mean, even referring the magic items as ‘the objects’ must be an oblique reference to ‘object orientation’, mustn’t it?) that I assumed the special feature documentary on the DVD would reveal that the authors of The Lost Room had misspent their youths playing Zork and Colossal Cave and that they would spill the beans about the influence of those games on their show.

So when the documentary didn’t even mention adventure games I was more than a little disappointed.

Oh well, I guess it is just about possible that ideas that permeate The Lost Room came about completely independently and the exploring/connected-room/puzzle-solving/objects-with-magical-powers/room-that-saves-and-restore themes are all entirely coincidental. If so, all I can say is that I have hitherto underestimated the power of coincidence.

Anyway, suffice to say, I enjoyed The Lost Room and would have been happy to see it developed into a longer series. However, since the show was made in 2006 and I can’t see any signs of a follow-up, I guess this may not happen.

If any other TV exec’ fancies the idea of adapting an adventure game into a drama series, I’ll be happy to discuss my own contribution to the genre, The Golden Wombat Of Destiny.

Apart from that, a game that I genuinely believe could be made into a very fine TV series is Brian Moriarty’s Trinity. This was, in my opinion, one of the very best games ever produced by Infocom (the company best known for Zork). Trinity begins, rather whimsically, in London’s Kensington Gardens, a little haven of Victorian England populated by nannies - and it ends at the Trinity atomic bomb test site in New Mexico. As with all good text adventures, it had a great story and interesting locations.

Now that film and TV producers have ransacked all the comic book characters, maybe it’s time they turned their attentions to adventure games. The Lost Room may be just the beginning...

“A study for the journal Science randomly sampled 928 published peer-reviewed scientific papers that used the words "climate change". It found that 100 per cent – every single one – agreed it is being fuelled by human activity. There is no debate among climate scientists.”

So that’s it then: There is no debate among climate scientists.

A few minutes later I read an article in The Wall Street Journal in which the writer says:

“Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA [globally averaged temperature anomaly] has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction.

... the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe...is the grossest of ‘bait and switch’ scams.”

To put these views in context, I should perhaps mention that the Independent article was written by a journalist, Johann Hari, who generally writes about politics, while the Wall Street Journal piece was written by Richard S Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So which do I believe? If I were an expert on climatology, I might be in a position to come to a well-informed opinion on the matter. Since I am not, I think the correct response is scepticism. Which is why I remain sceptical of the arguments presented on both sides of this debate.

Until recently I had assumed that most educated people would regard ‘scepticism’ as a perfectly respectable position to take to any subject open to debate. The exception to this rule seems to be when the word ‘sceptic’ is combined with the word ‘climate’. A large body of people (many of whom are politicians, journalists and members of campaigning groups but rather few of whom appear to be scientists with no dependent interest in the matter) have adopted the global warming ‘religion’ with an evangelical fervour. They would have you believe that there is not the slightest room for doubt that man’s activities are causing an unprecedented surge in CO2 and that this has set in train a catastrophic sequence of events which is the biggest problem facing the world today. They are so passionate in this belief that anyone who dares to ask questions - that is, any ‘sceptic’ - is regarded as something akin to a flat-earther.

David Bellamy, the well-known writer and broadcaster (and a perfectly reputable scientist in his own right) has complained that his sceptical views on global waerming have caused him to be treated ‘like a Holocaust denier’. In his opinion, “there is absolutely no proof that CO2 has anything to do with any impending catastrophe. The science has, quite simply, gone awry. In fact, it’s not even science any more; it’s anti-science.”

Curiously, I note that Johann Hari, the ‘Independent’ journalist, is just as keen to be acknowledged a sceptic as I am. However, he is so convinced that there is an absolute scientific consensus about man-made climate change that he rebrands ‘climate sceptics’ as ‘climate deniers’ which puts me back into the flat earth category while giving Mr Hari the ‘opt out’ of being a sceptic of all things except global warming.

There may be a great many scientists who believe in this so-called ‘consensus’ view. But not all scientists do and, in my view, scepticism remains an entirely reasonable position to take. The problem with the oft-repeated assertion that there is a complete pro-man-made-global-warming ‘consensus’ among scientists is that there quite clearly isn’t. People can make this claim as often as they like but anyone with access to Google can quickly verify that it isn’t true.

Even those scientists who accept the proposition that man-made CO2 increases global warming do not unanimously accept the predictions of a consequent catastrophe. Scientists don’t come much more eminent than Freeman Dyson who has expressed the view that: “Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.”

The recent furore over leaked emails from climate scientists at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (the so-called ‘climategate’) is one rather colourful episode which illustrates the fact (which should hardly come as a surprise!) that climate scientists are no more detached and unbiased than anyone else. How could they be? For many of them, their careers depend upon the arguments for global warming being correct. If those arguments are not correct, why should anyone continue funding their research?

What is more interesting - and potentially more damaging - than the email leaks are the programming documents - the so-called ‘Harry ReadMe’ - which were leaked at the same time. These give insights into the ambiguity of the climate data and the poor quality of the programs used to manipulate it. I may not be a climatologist but I am a programmer and when I read comments revealing that a programmer working on the climate prediction programs “discovered that a sum-of-squared variable is becoming very, very negative!” I know something is profoundly wrong.

In short, I am not a climate ‘denier’ but I am a sceptic. And proud to be so!

Every time it tried to get my emails it prompted me to enter my password. I entered my password and clicked a little box to tell Outlook to save it and away it went and got my emails. And then the next time it tried to get my emails it made me go through the whole palaver all over again. As I have several email addresses, this soon got to be pretty damn’ annoying.

I took a look at my Outlook account details (Tools, Account Settings), double-clicked each listed email address and reset the passwords but to no avail. Each time it tried to get my emails, I was prompted to enter my passwords all over again.

I don’t know what caused this problem but, having done a fair bit of Googling to try to find the solution, I can tell you that I am not alone in having suffered from it. The good news is that I eventually found the solution. Suffice to say it involves finding a registry key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Protected Storage System), deleting its subkey (not the key itself) and rebooting the PC. As I am using Vista, giving myself all the permissions to do this took longer than doing the act itself. In essence, I ran regedit as an Administrator, then right-clicked the registry key and set every permission known to man and a few that probably aren’t - and, eventually, after much experimentation, I hit upon the correct combination of options (I’m sorry, I really can’t recall what these were - I’m afraid you’ll have to go through the same rigmarole for yourself) and managed to delete the damn’ thing.

I won’t go through all the details here as Microsoft has a page of instructions on the subject: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290684&Product=ol2002. There are three methods listed and I went for method number 3. Somewhat cryptically, this begins with the warning: “Note: the steps listed in this section should not be used on a computer running Windows Vista” and then fails to give any advice on what you should do on a computer running Vista.

Well, suffice to say, I ignored the warning and went ahead anyway and it worked just fine.

Apparently Firefox’s plugins are a major route by which gremlins gain access to the browser. This is a bit of a blow to all those happy Firefox users who have, for so long, been jeering at the ’insecurity’ of Microsoft’s browser. Such as the fruits of success, I guess....

 Read more on Internet News

Embarking on a project of this scale inevitably leads you down some twisty little programming pathways of whose very existence you had been ignorant at the outset. Every so often you stumble into a dark corner and get eaten by slavering grues. Well, at least, that was how it used to happen in the old adventure game, Zork.

In the world of Flex, the grues are called DataGridColumns and they slaver every bit as ferociously as their Zork relations. At least they do if you happen to be developing a drag and drop design environment. As far as I am aware the only people designing drag-and-drop design environments for Flex are hordes of programmers in the basement of Adobe Mansions - and me...

DataGridColumns are, unsurprisingly, columns that live inside DataGrids. In our Designer, Flex components are shown in the Visual Studio Toolbox and when you drag them into the design area, they magically pop into existence. Buttons do it, Canvases do it - even RichText Editors do it. DataGrids do it too - but not DataGrid columns. In the current beta of Amethyst if you try to create DataGrid columns in the visual designer a horde of slavering grues will suddenly appear and gobble them all up.

It took me a while to figure out why that should be the case. Eventually I saw the light (and once I’d lit my light, the grues, as is their wont, fled screaming). Whereas all other (well, most other) UI Components descend, quite logically, from the UIComponent class, DataGrid columns don’t - they descend from (and if you don’t already know, I think it’s a safe bet that you’d never guess) a class called CSSStyleDeclaration. Don’t ask me to explain the logic of this. I have no idea what inspired whim caused the Flex designers to make this decision. In my view, it would have been very nice if DataGridColumn had descended from UIComponent but I rather doubt whether Adobe would take kindly to the idea of rewriting their class library just to please me.

Anyway, if you happen to be interested in Flex or if you just want to gloat over someone else’s problems, you may be interested in an article which I’ve just published on my company’s blog. It’s called Flex UI Components That Aren’t UIComponents and it explains why my hair has suddenly gone grey...