I have a customer who wants some charts in a PDF report they already get from an application. One of the charts is a Pie Chart and displays the dollar breakdown.  I ran into an issue with the value labels overlapping each other so I did some research and found this in the update docs. 

I made the changes to the default_pie.xml file and the other standard pie styles as indicated in the update documentation.  However I am still running into this problem with the label overlap.  I have also tried sorting these values in different ways to try and make the overlap disappear, but I have been unsuccessful. 

I have attached a sample pie chart, if anyone has a solution or an idea how to fix this let me know please (note the data overlays).

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Well about a week ago I updated to 10.5.2 on my iMac, all was good and I continued to believe my Apple walked on water.  For some reason I simply forgot about Murphy's law, you know what can go wrong will go wrong? (or something like that) 

So at any rate back to my story, last night I was having internet connectivity issues when playing one of my all time favorite games (World of Warcraft -- aka WarCrack).  When this happened, I would run down stairs and look at my modem, check my router, reset both and then run back upstairs to check out my connection.  I forgot to mention, I have Win XP Pro installed on a partition, which is where I do most of my development work and occassional game play. 

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I was in a meeting at work last week and sometimes they show cool videos, it's usually something about the products we make.  This time however it was very different and I was really surprised and impressed that they showed this video.  It's something I have been pretty passionate about at my company, I feel I am constantly trying to emphasize how powerful todays information network is and I feel my team could really utilize this more effectively when communicating internally and externally.  Anyway, check out this video -- it is pretty powerful just imagine what we will be able to do now with AIR and future technologies!  Let your imagination go, there are really no limits at what we can accomplish. 

In a previous post - "Dont be a Financial Moron" I talked about an article regarding how you can improve your financial plan using five easy steps.  During my execution of these steps I found out some useful information that I thought I would share with you.   First off, if you owe money on your vehicle and you are paying over 5% on that car loan -- PAY IT OFF -- Chances are you wont be able to beat that in the market place so whatever money you do make via a money market, CD, etc... it gets cancelled out because of your car loan.  Second thing to mention, and its basically implies the same logic, if you have a credit card and your paying more than 5% on that debt -- PAY IT OFF -- again a wash to any money you make in your other accounts. 

My wife and I have two car loans and fortunately for us we have $0 credit card debt.  After talking with a financial consultant, we decided to pay off both car loans ASAP, so we can free up that money and invest it in things that dont depreciate, break down, and of course rust ;) There are lots of ways to help speed up a car loan payoff, for one your tax return, two a tax rebate -- even though I dont totally agree with it, I will use it to pay off my debts, third making extra payments (when you can swing it) and fourth making some simple life style changes.  What type of changes?  Well for one eating out, you can save a TON of money if you simply cook at home, its cheaper, healthier and it can also be a ton of fun and rewarding if you're married.  Another way to save is to car pool to work if you can swing it.  Most Americans (at least in the mid-west) drive BIG SUV's/Trucks and have one person sitting in them.  If you can get in a carpool your not only saving some cash on gas every week, but you're also helping our planet out a bit as well (aka the Environment). 

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So I am a little behind on all the Flex 3 Features, I attended a User Group meeting in St Louis last night where James Ward showed off many of the new features of Flex 3, AIR, BlazeDS to name a few.  Some of these were not new to me, however one of the items that I found interesting was the new CSS Design View that comes with Flex Builder 3.  I honestly had no idea that this existed... sort of embarrassed to admit that since I have been using Flex Builder 3 now for like 3 months >.< (time to wake up and look at the IDE -- geez).  James also showed off the Advanced Datagrid (With OLAP support!!!), the new Charting capability, and the Performance Memory Monitoring tool (way cool).  Another neat thing James showed us was this tool he built that shows off the speed difference between XML, JSON, AMF.  Go check it out, pretty amazing how AMF mops up.

If you haven't checked all the new features shipping (hopefully soon) with Flex 3, go check it out!  One last addition James mentioned they took out the Enhanced constraints section in Flex Builder 3 due to ALOT of bugs and that it really didnt work like it was supposed to.  Just thought I would mention that since its still showing up on the Wiki.