Rich Rodecker’s blog on flash, flex, actionscript, javascript, and php, with a dash of randomness
Archive for January, 2009
Asking for help voting for my wife’s business at StartupNation.com
Jan 22nd
StartupNation.com is running their 2009 Leading Moms in Business competition, which ranks the 200 best mom-owned startups of 2009. My wife Nina has her business, Tasty Clouds Cotton Candy Company, entered in it. Ranking is done by popular vote, and it’s a tight race, so I’m asking anyone who has a spare second to help us out and cast a vote. You can actually vote once a day.
You can vote and read a little about Tasty Clouds Cotton Candy Company here: http://www.startupnation.com/leading-moms-2009/contestant/3464/index.php?mode=castvote
Thanks!
swffit – The smart swf resizer
Jan 21st
I’m not sure where I came across this, but it’s very cool. If you embed your swf using 100% width and height, you won’t get scrollbars if your flash content is larger than the window. Enter swffit, with allows you to define a minimum width and height for your swf. If the browser window is less than your defined sizes, it will add scrollbars. If the browser window is bigger, it will fill the swf to 100% width and height. This means you don’t have to worry about things like browser size and monitor resolution when doing full browser flash (aesthetic issues aside). There’s a few other handy methods in the api to work with it, making it even more handy.
Pandora AIR app
Jan 16th
I love Pandora, but their AIR app…I’m not sure what’s goin on there, but it consumes a ton of memory. So after searching around for a bit I found pandoraboy, a native mac os x app that brings pandora.com to the desktop. Some cool features of the app are that you can control the app with global hotkeys, and it supports growl notifications to let you know what song is playing.
Propel DATETIME errors
Jan 11th
If you use the PHP ORM framework Propel, you may have hit the error “DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (CURRENT_TIMESTAMP)” when generating your php classes if a column in your table schema uses DATETIME. Im previous version it seemed like the generator would ignore the error and continue to generate the rest of the classes, but I recently updated my installation and now it breaks it.
I did some searching at first and saw someone saying that it was because the date.timezone setting for php was not set. So I added date.timezone=UTC to php.ini, and changed the PHP_COMMAND in the phing script to include the ini file, since running php from the command line does not automatically include it:
PHP_COMMAND="/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php -c /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini"
None of that worked, however, and after digging around a bit more I found there is a new undocumented attribute you can use in your schema.xml file called defaultExpr, which will insert the result of the expression directly into the database. So I just set defaultExpr="now()" and everything was good to go.
PatternTap
Jan 11th
Just stumbled across a pretty cool “design inspiration” site: PatternTap. There are loads of design inspiration sites out there, but the angle with this site is that they focus on showcasing particular design elements as opposed to overall design, with categories such as backgrounds, borders, comments, audio, tabs, web application, 404 pages, and much more. For somebody like me, who has the design skills of an intoxicated chimpanzee, this site should come in very handy.
WordPress 2.7 kinda kicks butt
Jan 7th
I’ve been upgrading some sites to wordpress 2.7, and I gotta say I’m pretty impressed with the admin area overhaul, definitely feels like a major step forward. There’s a better overall flow to the UI, it’s like somehow they added more stuff but made it simpler. I think I’m going to see how it goes using it a general cms for a while.
