Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Actionscript 2 DateDiff function

Published on April 28, 2008. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Mostly a note to self for future reference. Not quite an implementation of the much loved datediff function, but close enough to get what I want:

// yearValue, monthValue, dayValue are assumed to be populated by the UI somewhere
startDate:Date = new Date(yearValue, monthValue, dayValue)
seconds:Number = ((new Date()).getTime() - startDate.getTime())/1000;
differenceInYears:Number = seconds / 60 / 525948.766; // google says a year is 525,948.766 minutes
The caveat here of course is that the date’s have to be after 1970, else the getTime() call won’t work.

Every language should have a date difference function and the ability to handle timespans as native types.

New header image, updated wordpress and cleaned theme

Published on April 27, 2008. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .

So I updated the header image on the blog. Took me a while to relearn my GIMP foo to get the grey-scale mask and desaturate the colour portions.

I also took some time to clean up the theme, ngatini 1.1, which had some malformed html in the footer. It’s been a long time since I hacked in PHP. I’m going to try and find some time to clean up the stylesheet in the coming days/weeks as the css seems a bit heavy for what it’s doing, in particular it seems to have some float overuse .

While I was at it I updated to WordPress 2.5.1 and hacked on the output from the About-Me sidebar widget. It now has an extra option to turn the heading for the sidebar into a link to an about me page (to expand on the one paragraph intro). I’ll look to fill in that page some more in the coming days/weeks also.

Consolas: Awesome free developers font from Microsoft

Published on April 23, 2008. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Found this info about a new free developers (fixed width) font over on the IEBlog. The great thing about this is that it has ClearType support, so is a fixed width font that looks sexy, and they get the developer friendly versions of 0, O, 1, L and I.

Yay for developers. Hurry over and download it now.

Consolas free developers font

Predator Rap

Published on April 21, 2008. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

It’s a day for you-tube videos.

Got sent this link today for a six-and-a-half minute rap that explains the storyline to the entire Predator move.

Impressive, if not for the fact that it explains the whole plot in such a short period of time, then for the fact that it’s done lyrically. And it contains that legendary quote, “If it bleeds, we can kill it”.

Seven Sunny Days clip

Published on April 21, 2008. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Oh – my – god!

Silverlight 1.0 and Firefox 3, anyone?

Published on April 18, 2008. 4 Comments Tags: , .

Dear Lazy web,

Anyone out there actually know how to get Silverlight 1.0 to work with the Firefox 3.0 betas? I’m just starting the search for information and will update this post if I find the solution.

MySQL Enterprise to get exclusive features

Published on April 17, 2008. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

So not quite as dramatic as slashdot put it, but annoying none the less. Sun has decided to add some new features to MySQL Enterprise only. Jeremy gives a very concise explanation of why this is a bad thing both for the MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise users.

In the comments to Jeremy’s post, Marten Mickos tries to clarify that it is more specifically high-end enterprise type add-ons to the core MySQL system that will be only available to MySQL Enterprise and that the license for this is as yet undecided.

There’s no real way to effectively close source an open-sourced application, but developing new features in a closed source edition is very doable. It remains to be seen whether it will be a successful attempt as MySQL has gained much from it’s Community use in terms of both release testing (the shear number of MySQL users out there) and goodwill.

XKCD techno gold

Published on April 17, 2008. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

This xkcd comic on techno in the iTunes age is pure gold:

xkcd techno in the iTunes age comic

Rejected by Don Hertzfeldt

Published on April 16, 2008. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Shyams from work sent me this short film by Don Hertzfeldt. It’s funny in a weird sort of disturbed way.

Check it out when you have a spare 10 minutes:

When Flash just aint flash – Part 1

Published on April 14, 2008. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

So I’ve been working with the Flash guys in the design team at work now for a few months, trying to help them become more effective collaborative Flash developers. It’s not necessarily been the easiest process in the world as there have been a number of concepts that would be straight forward to most regular devs, but not necessarily Flash devs.

Some of the things we’ve gone through are concepts like:

  • Using SCM systems to store the code in a central location
  • Design Patterns (in particular the MVC and Command Factory seem to get allot of use)
  • Multiple simultaneous checkouts of text source files (or “how to develop without individual checkouts”)
  • Visually diffing two versions of a source file

And so on. Along the way I’ve actually had to learn a hell of a lot more Action Script than I would have thought I needed to and seen my fair share of Flash ugliness. I’ll probably do a whole series of these little rants, but this week in particular we kept coming across and trying to work around the same infuriating issue.

This has to do with Flash 8 (Action Script 2) and using the FileReference object to perform a multipart form POST to a server, that is, when you try to do a form submission that has a file upload in it and you care about the status of the submit. On most web systems this is probably a common occurrence; “Send us your picture and 25 words why you think you should win the …”. Sounds like a relatively straight forward thing to do in Flash, and in fact it’s not that difficult to code up.

The problem comes when your server tries to process the form upload/submission and send back some information to the Flash client about whether or not the submission succceeded (think form field validation). In theory a file upload is just another http request and the Flash client should have the ability to read the text in the response body. No such luck. It seems that in Flash 8, the FileReference object doesn’t expose the http response body upon completion, I don’t think the Flash architects thought it was useful. What the?

Why go to all the trouble to build a multipart form submission capability inside Flash and then decide not to pass on the response to the Flash client? What possible reason could they have for such a glaring omission of useful information in a standard web-type request/response scenario.

And just for clarity, we have a constant pressure to try and use the minimum version of Flash required to perform our particular task, so while this problem has been fixed in Flash 9, it’s rather annoying to have to change our system to use a whole later version of Flash for functionality that should have been there in the beginning.