Here's a link to my presentation, http://goo.gl/WTlj9. Source code will be posted here shortly. Or you can search to see some outdated code from DrupalCon SF and DesignCamp Boston.

I'm loving the new Flash Builder and 4.5 SDK. I don't know if everyone came to the same realization that I did... but "states" are awesome now with the 4+ SDK! You can change ANY property on the fly. Take for example a two stage button:

<s:Button icon.viewing="{Icons.PENCIL}" 
	      icon.editing="{Icons.DRIVE}"
	      label.viewing="Edit"
	      label.editing="Save"
	      click.viewing="{currentState='editing'}" 
	      click.editing="{currentState='viewing'}"
	      />

One button, two actions, two states. Note: the Icons class is just a static class with some icons embedded in it. Makes for quickly iconing stuff. Now I'm not saying you CAN or SHOULD do your buttons this way... you might simply make two buttons:

<s:Button icon="{Icons.DRIVE}"
	      label="Save" 
	      click="{currentState='viewing'}"
          includeIn="editing"
	    />
<s:Button icon="{Icons.PENCIL}" 
	      label="Edit"
	      click="{currentState='editing'}" 
          includeIn="viewing"
	    />

In theory, the former should take less memory but I haven't actually gone to look at what the states management is doing behind the scenes.

Of course, all the previous code assumes you've got the states defined:

<s:states>
   <s:State name="viewing"/>
   <s:State name="editing"/>
</s:states>

I pay quite a bit to have fast internet, and for the most part, I'm pretty satisfied. Over the last few years, however, I've found that on a rare occasion FIOS inexplicably has problems loading pages. When I try a "SpeedTest" I still see speeds north of 35mpbs! So why can't I load a YouTube video? The answer is simple, because FIOS and many other ISPs by default assign you to terrible DNS servers. They're terrible for two reasons: 1) if you incorrectly type a URL, you get an search result/advertisement and 2) they're often slow and cause pages to not load at all.

There are two ways to fix it, but I'll give you the easiest way first:

1. Find your network connections in "Control Panel" on Windows, "Network" in system Preferences for Mac OSX.
2. Go to OpenDNS.com, scroll to the bottom of the page
3. Select the option to choose DNS manually and enter the IP addresses from the OpenDNS page. Here are some instructions on Mac and and on PC (this is pretty similar in Windows 7 and XP)

The other way is by setting the DNS on your router. The advantage here is that you don't have to do it for every computer on your network.

Explanation of DNS

A DNS service is the way that your computer can turn a website domain into a number called an "IP Address". If your computer can not figure out the number for every website you visit, the site won't load! When you go to a website, the DNS server first looks up the number, and then sends you to the website all behind the scenes. ISP's DNS services are terrible. They focus more on serving you ads for typos than providing decent service. The reason that some websites work, and others don't is because your computer stores its most frequent lookups in a database called a "cache." If your cache were empty and your DNS was not working, then nothing would work at all.

Benefits of using alternative DNS

• Faster load times
• Increased security (many providers such as OpenDNS provider protection by blocking harmful websites
• More reliability (depending on which DNS provider you use, I've had perfect uptime with OpenDNS)

It's been a few months since I blogged. I've been busy. In addition to working on a few new websites, I've also been writing a new app.

In the next few weeks, I should have some alphas up for testing on Drupal.org. It's not a module... it's a desktop application that brings the power of Drush to the Window's, Mac, or Linux environments with a graphical user interface.

The challenge has been Windows, so that's what I tackled first. And that means that the first releases will actually be Windows only, but support for Linux and Mac will be trivial. So what are the features?

• Easy to install, just run the setup file
• Easy to configure, just type in your remote connection's settings
• Supports and saves multiple connections, no need for tricky "Drush Alias" files
• Local Drush installation is NOT required
• Works with Drush 3.3 and any version of Drupal
• Run Cron, re-index your search, check status, download/enable modules, update your site, export your database, run bootstrapped PHP scripts, and more coming soon!
• 100% open source based on Flex 4.1 SDK

I apologize for all the bolding in this post, I'm just excited. Screen shots should be up within a few days. Once this thing is on Drupal.org, I hope I can get some contributors to add features.